One of the bitterest fruits of human conflict is the resort to massacre. From the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, combatants have regularly attempted to defeat their enemies through acts of indiscriminate killing. The history of early modern European colonial expansion is replete with such incidents. The remembering and recounting of them has become the stuff of historical and political controversy. The aim of this article is not to review these painful episodes, but to examine the sixteenth-century context in which these resorts to massacre occurred; to focus on one particular atrocity that achieved some notoriety in Ireland in the early modern period; and to suggest that a now largely forgotten episode, at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578, was part of a pattern of conquest which implicated not only the soldiers and settlers who served in the Gaelic localities, but also the upper echelons of the English administration in Ireland. This pattern was accompanied by an apologetic ideology of civility and savagery best reflected in a central text, John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland. Indeed, Derricke’s text adds weight to the conclusion that the atrocity at Mullaghmast in 1578 implicates no less a figure than Sir Henry Sidney, the quintessential renaissance English official in Ireland. Mullaghmast is important not only because it demonstrates the officially sanctioned brutality of the conquest, but also because it raises the question of how memory and history are constructed.

At least twice during the first half of the eighteenth century criminal prosecutions were undertaken in Ireland which gripped the public imagination. The first of these celebrated cases, involving the trial for rape, conviction and subsequent execution of the Cork Jacobite James Cotter in 1720, has also come to hold an extraordinary fascination for historians of eighteenth-century Ireland. Few writers concerned with early Georgian Ireland have been able to avoid its allure. For the most part, however, the incident has been referred to only fleetingly, employed variously as a motif of religious or political conflict or ethnic alienation. For Kevin Whelan, it is illustrative of the ‘conflict between old and new families’ in Munster, and indicative of a ‘partisan popish paranoia’ on the part of the province’s Protestant rulers. For Louis Cullen, it was ‘part of the legacy of the 1690s’, yet an event which would provide ‘the spark which set alight the sectarian tensions in Munster in the 1760s’. Other commentators have seen the case as one in which ‘a trumped-up charge’ was laid, for political purposes, against a man ‘generally believed’ to be innocent. A few have offered more guarded conclusions. Thomas Bartlett ventures only that this was ‘certainly a sensational event’. James Kelly both recognises the unique circumstances of Cotter’s case and suggests that it is ‘unlikely that he was the victim of judicial assassination’. S. J. Connolly goes further, stressing that Cotter had ‘quite clearly been guilty of rape’. However, the fullest and most recent examination of the case, in an essay written by Breandán Ó Buachalla in an ‘attempt to correlate a specific literary text to the career of a specific political activist’, returns us firmly to the recurrent context of Catholic Jacobite resistance and Protestant collusion.

When members of the Irish Volunteers shot dead a policeman and burst into the yard of Dublin Castle on 24 April 1916, Sir Matthew Nathan, the under-secretary, and Major Ivon H. Price, the head of military intelligence in Ireland, were upstairs in Nathan’s office discussing whether or not known agitators should be deported under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This somewhat ironic scenario, which raises questions about the state of British intelligence in Ireland, has proved very attractive to historians working on this period. Some, such as Leon Ó Broin in his classics Dublin Castle and the 1916 rising: the story of Sir Matthew Nathan (1966) and The chief secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969), have attempted to defend the actions of the civil government. Eunan O’Halpin, a more recent historian of political and military intelligence in Ireland, chooses to take the idea of British intelligence in Ireland as something of an oxymoron. Focusing on the fact that the Easter Rising was ‘permitted’ to occur, he lays the blame for such poor intelligence work on four factors: the political danger faced by British officials who risked alienating parliamentarians if they struck at advanced nationalists; legal difficulties in getting Irish juries to convict people for political crimes; failure of the intelligence branches of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police to collect effective information from suspects; and finally, the personality of Augustine Birrell, who, as his wife slowly went insane and began to die of a brain tumour between 1912 and 1915, rather understandably lost interest in his official duties as chief secretary.

In 1924 James Larkin agreed with British and Soviet communists to undertake the leadership of communism in Ireland. The triangular relationship soon became poisoned with dissension, insubordination and deceit. Not only did Larkin refuse to form a communist party, he went to great lengths to ensure that no one else did either. By 1925 British communists, contrary to Moscow’s directives, were attempting to work in Ireland independently of Larkin, and by 1927 Moscow too was plotting to clip his wings.

Larkin’s communist career is treated in some detail in two publications. Emmet Larkin’s biography offers the kindest interpetation, taking his subject’s politics at face value, and concluding that Ireland, and the weak and divided condition of its labour movement after 1923, were simply too hostile an environment for communism. Mike Milotte’s Communism in modern Ireland deals more directly with organisational politics and cites repeated examples of Larkin’s failure. Both studies are based on sources available in the west, which offer a superficial picture of events, and the story still holds obvious puzzles. Why did Larkin accept the leadership of the communist movement and then deliberately prevent its development? Why did Moscow tolerate his leadership for so long? Did Larkin have a political strategy, or were his political thinking and actions purely impulsive and reactive? And how do we explain his eccentric behaviour during these years, when he seemed to quarrel with everyone?

With the liberalisation of access to the former Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, now the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Modern History (Rossijskij Tsentr Khraneniya i Izutshenija Dokumentov Novejshej Istorij, cited as R.Ts.Kh.I.D.N.I. throughout this article), it is possible to answer these questions.

When the prince of Wales formally opened the new Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings at Stormont on 16 November 1932, it brought to an end over ten years of controversy, delay, confusion, and wrangling over both finance and design. Although approval to build a new parliament house and administrative offices was given in the autumn of 1922, and preliminary work began on the site in 1923, the above-ground foundation stone was not laid until 1928, and the departmental offices were not occupied until April 1931. There is an extensive literature which stresses the political significance of the architecture of civic and public buildings such as parliament houses, law-courts, government offices and even theatres. Other writers have noted the linkages between architecture, empire, nationalism and state formation. Thomas Metcalf commented that distinctive architectural forms ‘sought to manifest the ideals of imperialism’ and were designed to enhance ‘the hold of Empire over ruler and ruled alike’. For architects such as Herbert Baker, classical design, with its monumentality and ideals of law, order and government, was the only architectural form appropriate for the representation of empire. This was an architecture which gave a ‘visible shape to the new imperialism of the turn of the twentieth century’.

Dorothy Macardle’s vast The Irish Republic first appeared in 1937, the year in which her inspiration and her patron de Valera unveiled Bunreacht na hÉireann, his own monument to pragmatic republicanism. Macardle, in Joseph Lee’s phrase the ‘hagiographer royal to the Irish Republic’, is rather out of fashion as a narrator of and commentator on the emergence of independent Ireland; it appears to be largely committed republicans and those who study them who now acknowledge and draw on her ‘classic’ work. The book itself is long out of print. Yet in its construction, its breadth of treatment, its declared ambition and its obvious subtexts, it stands apart both from militant republican writing of the period and from more formally dispassionate academic works. It is also a monument to the emergence of the ‘slightly constitutional’ politics of the first generation of Fianna Fáil, the party created by de Valera to bring the majority of republicans across the Rubicon from revolutionary to democratic politics. Finally, in its faithful and adoring exegesis of most of de Valera’s twists and turns during his tortuous progress from armed opponent to consolidator of the twenty-six-county state, it provides a possible historical template for laying aside the armed struggle which has contemporary resonances for a republican movement attempting to talk its way into a new form of non-violent politics in Northern Ireland without passing under the yoke of unequivocal decommissioning: in that context, a senior Irish official recently pointed somewhat wistfully to de Valera’s statement of 23 July 1923 (as reproduced by Macardle) that ‘the war, so far as we are concerned, is finished’ (p. 787).

Few Irish men and women can have escaped the mighty wave of anniversary fever which broke over the island in the spring of 1998. As if atoning for the failed rebellion itself, the bicentenary of 1798 was neither ill-coordinated nor localised, but a genuinely national phenomenon produced by years of planning and organisation. Emissaries were dispatched from Dublin and Belfast to remote rural communities, and the resonant names of Bartlett, Whelan, Keogh and Graham were heard throughout the land; indeed, the commemoration possessed an international dimension which stretched to Boston, New York, Toronto, Liverpool, London and Glasgow. In bicentenary Wexford — complete with ’98 Heritage Trail and ’98 Village — the values of democracy and pluralism were triumphantly proclaimed. When the time came, the north did not hesitate, but participated enthusiastically. Even the French arrived on cue, this time on bicycle. Just as the 1898 centenary, which contributed to the revitalisation of physical-force nationalism, has now become an established subject in its own right, future historians will surely scrutinise this mother of all anniversaries for evidence concerning the national pulse in the era of the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. In the meantime a survey of some of the many essay collections and monographs published during the bicentenary will permit us to hazard a few generalisations about the current direction of what might now be termed ‘Ninety-Eight Studies’.

Ireland’s uses of knowledge of the diaspora, much matured since the 1950s, now provide two master images from which to approach it: diversity and cohesion. On 2 February 1995 President Mary Robinson pinpointed its diversity as embodying the multifaceted nature of native Irish identities, and as a makeweight in domestic argument and experiment as to the recognition and acceptance of those identities. In March 1998 President Mary McAleese spoke of ‘our global Irish family’; she accepted such diversity, but sought its reintegration in a master image of cohesion, one obtaining both at home and abroad. The new Article 2 of the Irish constitution states that ‘The Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.’

In each case, desired standards are merged with claimed realities as to the diaspora. But any such emphasis whether on cohesion or diversity among the overseas Irish matches a growing body of work on the diaspora itself, much of it by the scholars within those communities. Critical work on this scale has not appeared before now. In the past collective work of this kind typically consisted of reprints and dissertations. One might question whether this scholarship answers the external burdens placed upon it.

The manpower alone here involved would suggest so. Over two hundred writers produce the Irish diaspora subjects in the four works here reviewed. And two of the editors, O’Sullivan, born in Kilmallock in 1944, a youthful migrant to Britain, and Glazier, an adult migrant to America, both epitomise the curiosity and enterprise of the newer emigrant scholars.