The significant contribution of the mendicant orders, and especially the Franciscans, to medieval European and English literature has for long been a subject of much detailed examination by scholars. It has been argued that the spiritual ethos and style of communication to society of the Franciscans, articulated by St Francis himself, brought about a greater use of vernacular languages throughout Europe in lyrical poetry and preaching and in catechetical and devotional texts. While earlier religious communities had fostered certain types of texts, such as exegetical works and saints’ lives, the new orders of friars had a greater impact on a wider section of society.

The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland involved a substantial transfer of property from Catholics to Protestants, and the transplantation of dispossessed Catholic landowners to the western province of Connacht. The latter scheme proved controversial, receiving considerable attention from contemporary Protestant authors, and outright condemnation from all Catholics. Nonetheless, it was little commented upon by historians over the following two centuries.

So wrote William Hamilton Drummond in 1811 in reference to an extraordinary grass known by the old Irish name of fiorin (fiorthann), whose properties had been discovered by a fellow cleric, William Richardson (1740–1820). Richardson claimed fiorin could produce abundant winter hay and help reclaim bogland. Though Donaldson’s Agricultural biography of 1854 dismissed Richardson’s work as ephemeral and careless, in 1806 the leading British scientist Humphry Davy visited Richardson and was impressed enough to recommend him to the Board of Agriculture and include fiorin in his famous lecture series translated into every major European language.

Although Michael Tierney became famous as a controversial, reforming president of U.C.D., he had been a ubiquitous figure in Irish national politics for over twenty years before. A radical member of Cumann na nGaedheal and a key intellectual influence on the early Fine Gael party, he reinvented himself as a political independent, and campaigned for a vocational model of government in Ireland in line with papal teaching. He was that rarity in Irish politics – a political conservative who was also a public intellectual, and who tried to build a political career based on the quality of his ideas rather than tribal loyalties.

On 23 May 2006 the Irish Supreme Court declared that the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1935 was inconsistent with the 1937 Constitution. It found that section 1 (1) of the act deprived a man charged with unlawful carnal knowledge of the defence of having made a reasonable mistake as to the age of the girl in question, and therefore of his constitutional right to a trial in due course of law. In his judgment, Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman stated that ‘the Section contains no balance: it wholly removes the mental element and expressly criminalises the mentally innocent. It need not necessarily have done so.’

Nationalism remains arguably the most important framework within which to explore, explain and understand modern Irish history. The object of this article is, first, to reflect on some impressive recent scholarship on the Irish nationalist past and, second, to propose a related set of suggestions intended to deepen and enrich our approach to the subject. It therefore offers both a respectful assessment of how we have thought about history and Irish nationalism, and also an agenda-conscious programme regarding how we should do so in future.