Relief was the dominant response of northern loyalists and Orangemen to the tripartite agreement of December 1925, which confirmed the border as defined in 1920. A year later, when the Prime Minister visited Newry to preside over the Grand Orange Lodge of County Down, he and ‘Lady Craig were made the recipients of very handsome presents from the Loyalists and Orangemen of Newry and District in recognition of valuable services in connection with the settlement of the Boundary question’. The agreement promised to end fourteen years of uncertainty, during which the frontier of loyal Ireland had contracted to a point where it seemed barely defensible. Under relentless pressure from successive governments as well as nationalists, the opponents of Irish self-government had effectively abandoned hope for the three southern provinces in 1911, and for the three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities in 1916. The survival of the Irish Free State remained in doubt until 1923, and the incredibly vague terms for the proposed boundary commission created justifiable fear among loyalists that further attempts would be made to cripple the northern state by massive territorial transfers. Craig’s great success, apart from stifling the northern civil war in June 1922, was to hold the line of the six counties until Cosgrave’s government acknowledged the fait accompli.

John White was appointed chief surgeon to the First Fleet on 24 October 1786 and sailed with that fleet, aboard the Charlotte, on 13 May 1787 for Botany Bay on the eastern seaboard of New Holland (Australia) where a penal colony was to be established. Between 18 and 20 January 1788 the entire fleet arrived at its destination and thus began the settlement of Australia by Europeans. White served as surgeon-general of the new colony, New South Wales, for almost six years until 17 December 1794 when he sailed on the Daedalus for Europe, never to return to Australia.

There goes the man who killed the home rule bill.’ Few will question the truth of this comment on Joseph Chamberlain. Yet the man who so vigorously opposed the home rule bill had from the very beginning of the second Gladstone administration, in which he held the comparatively junior office of president of the board of trade, been one of the members of the cabinet most anxious to consider Irish needs and opinion. He had criticized Forster’s coercion policy and had pressed for remedial legislation. He had acted as the link between the cabinet and the negotiators of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. For a brief period he had been conspicuous for the relative closeness of his relations with Parnell and other leading Irish nationalists. ‘ I have spoken freely and openly to him [Parnell] and to many other Irish members, since Mr Forster ceased to be Irish secretary,’ he wrote to Gladstone on 7 June 1882, after his attention had been called to newspaper comments on the fact that he had been observed in conversation with Parnell in a lobby of the house of commons the day previously. At the end of 1884 and in 1885 he had engaged in negotiations with Parnell with a view to the establishment in Ireland of what later came to be known as a ‘national council’, but at the time was usually termed a ‘central board’.

On 7 August 1837, the first day of voting in an election for two county seats, there was an altercation on the steps of the courthouse in Carlow town. This was not a typical Irish election riot, however, although large numbers of excited supporters of the rival candidates were milling around in the streets adjacent to the building. The altercation, which involved shouted abuse and a physical struggle, took place between two men only: one was the town’s sub-inspector of constabulary, and the other was its resident magistrate (R.M.) — in other words, Carlow’s two principal government-appointed upholders of law and order. The resulting scandal was to have significant implications. It led to a great deal of heated correspondence with Dublin Castle, more than one constabulary inquiry, several court cases, and many questions before a subsequent select committee, to say nothing of numerous petitions, newspaper articles and pamphlets; but, most important, it ultimately precipitated the resignation of Colonel James Shaw Kennedy, the first inspector-general of the Irish Constabulary. This article will attempt to explain why an apparently minor scuffle in Carlow town created a crisis in Irish policing in the late 1830s.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, cycling in Ireland progressed from being a relatively exclusive pursuit, confined mainly to young, middleclass men, to a popular sport and pastime which appealed alike to young, middleaged and elderly members of the middle class, including large numbers of women. At the beginning of the 1880s, most Irish cyclists were young men who rode the high-wheeled ‘Ordinary’ or ‘Penny-farthing’ machine. The introduction of the more cumbersome, but easily mountable, tricycle meant that in the early to mid-1880s cycling became accessible to older or more timid men than those who braved the Ordinary machine, and many women also took to the roads on the tricycle. The pastime also received a boost later in the decade, with the invention of the chain-driven ‘safety’ bicycle in the mid-1880s. The safety bicycle did not render the Ordinary obsolete until after the development of the pneumatic tyre, by John Boyd Dunlop, in 1888. Once it became apparent in a number of cycling races in Ireland and England in 1889 and 1890 that the chain-driven and pneumatic-tyred safety bicycle was both quicker and easier to ride than the Ordinary bicycle, the latter's days were numbered. From 1890 onwards, bicycle dealers in both countries were inundated with requests for pneumatic-tyred safety bicycles, and in the course of the 1890s cycling was transformed into a popular, albeit still mainly middle-class activity, that appealed to both sexes.

This article investigates the antiquarian response to the opportunity for Irish Catholic relief during the Anglo–American crisis and views Sylvester O’Halloran’s General history as an innovative attempt to initiate Irish Catholic participation in the British empire predicated on a historic and current fittingness. The London publication of the General history indicated that this work was directed at an audience outside of, as well as within, Ireland. An investigation of the subscription-list confirms that that audience consisted of members of Britain’s political élite and successful émigré Irishmen in the service of European Catholic powers. The narrative analysis, when compared with its principal sources, Keating’s seventeenth-century Foras feasa ar Éirinn and the twelfth-century Lebor gabála Érenn, shows that O’Halloran altered his source materials to construct an historical picture of a Milesian maritime empire. O’Halloran’s argument for Catholic inclusion in the British empire was twofold. He altered his source material to suggest an ancient parity with the contemporary British empire to demonstrate an Irish historical fittingness for an imperial role, while his subscription-list confirmed a current aptitude. This argument was directed at and partly endorsed by another section of the subscription-list, London’s political élite.

In 1963 the Second Vatican Council voted overwhelmingly to introduce the vernacular into Roman Catholic worship. The Irish hierarchy decided that both Irish and English speakers should be catered for in the reformed liturgy. Within a few years John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin, had gained a widespread reputation as having gone further than his fellow bishops in the provision of masses in Irish. At the same time he was criticised for his lack of enthusiasm towards other areas of liturgical reform. This dichotomy stemmed from McQuaid’s deep dismay at the church’s new ecumenical direction and the possibility that it would lead to shared worship between Catholics and Protestants. Yet, as a senior prelate in the Catholic Church, he was obliged to implement each of the Council’s decrees, including those concerning the liturgy. McQuaid’s response was to introduce Vatican-approved changes to the mass, while simultaneously protecting the traditional liturgy he cherished. So he tried to re-establish the Latin rite on the same terms as those he had arranged for the Irish mass. Had he succeeded, the result would have been a reduction in the use of an English vernacular which he found offensive to his Catholic sensibilities.

The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. However, there has been strikingly little attempt to contextualise, rather than appraise, the lineage of the moral and ideological assumptions embedded in the executive council's public professions of political conviction, or to understand Treatyite policy-making on its own terms. In particular, historians have tended to weigh and measure the performance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government against anachronistic and moralising definitions of what the Irish revolution stood for at the expense of any systematic attempt to reconstruct the manner in which relevant historical actors understood this relationship. Focusing on the heterodox intellectual firmament of the Irish-Ireland movement, this paper demonstrates that the Cumann na nGaedheal government never abandoned the political languages of the revolution; rather, they constructed an ideology to support the new state rooted in their own interpretation of what they considered revolutionary ideals of Irish-Ireland nationalism.

Drawing on the recent scholarly interest in ‘generationism’ and the revolutionary period, this article examines the life chances of the 247 children born to the last cohort of Irish Parliamentary Party M.P.s elected to Westminster between 1910 and 1918. It employs a prosopographical approach to reconstruct their lives at specific points (1910 and 1948) in order to assess the impact that independence had on their fortunes longitudinally. While it problematises the idea that the Edwardian children of nationalist M.P.s formed part of a privileged elite in waiting, it does conclude that they enjoyed a degree of cultural and political capital that positioned them advantageously in advance of home rule. The analysis advanced here suggests that despite experiencing some political disorientation, those scions of the old I.P.P. who lived through the revolutionary years reoriented themselves relatively quickly, regrouped, and experienced considerable political and professional success during the following decades. As for those children who were born or achieved adulthood after 1922, there is little evidence to suggest that they were socially or politically ostracised, or that, in turn, they felt a sense of fundamental alienation from the new state. Ultimately, unlike those who had fought for the republic but ended up feeling as if they were among the losers, what the children of the I.P.P lost after 1918 should not obscure the fact that many of them were among the winners in the new Ireland.

In November 1660 the newly restored king published a declaration for the settlement of Ireland. The substance of this document was that the ‘adventurers’ of the 1640s and the Cromwellian soldiers were to keep what they had got; the Irish Protestants who had actively supported the royalist cause (especially between 1648 and 1650) and who had not yet obtained compensation for this service were to receive their arrears of pay; Irish Catholics who had been deprived of their lands merely on the grounds of their religion were to be restored to what they had lost. From the clash of these interest groups came the moulding forces behind what is known as the ‘Restoration settlement’. (That settlement was based on two acts: the Act of Settlement, 1663, and the Act of Explanation, 1666. The former set out who were to receive lands and where; the latter explained and clarified the many conflicting clauses in the former.)

The eulogy on King William I of England in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes the interesting assertion that William would have conquered Ireland without weapons had he lived another year or two. Some commentators, such as Sir Frank Stenton, considered it to be merely a testimony to the victorious reputation of the Conqueror. Others have suggested that the chronicler had erred with regard to direction, and Denis Bethell speculated that there was slightly more reason to believe William was contemplating an expedition to Galicia during the last years of his life. Marjorie Chibnall pointed out, however, that there must have been some reason for such a statement. A possible explanation does appear when examining the relations between England and Ireland during the reign of William, and a suggestion can be made that political affairs in Ireland influenced, to some extent, the planning of the Conqueror. There are reasons for believing that, in order to diminish the peril from the west, William deliberately promoted good relations with one particular Irish prince — Toirrdelbach ua Briain, king of Munster and claimant to the high-kingship of Ireland.

Traditional accounts of the establishment of the 36th (Ulster) Division in October 1914 suggest that this unit was formed purely from the pre-war U.V.F. Writing in 1922, Cyril Falls (himself an officer in both the U.V.F. and the 36th Division) declared:

Modern historians have echoed this view. Tom Johnstone, for example, has noted that ‘the battalions of the (36th) Division, based on the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) order of battle, had been in existence since before the war’. Meanwhile Philip Orr has even suggested that the 36th Division was a ‘covenanting army’, all its members supposedly having signed the Ulster Covenant opposing home rule. In this article the validity of these claims will be considered, particularly with regard to the continuity in personnel and equipment between the U.V.F. and the 36th Division and the military efficiency that the formation had achieved by the time it arrived on the Western Front.

This article responds to ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ by highlighting the explanatory potential of the Presbyterian archive in extending and reshaping our understanding of women, gender and the family in Ireland. Discussed here as the ‘Presbyterian archive’, the records of the Presbyterian church offer a tantalising insight into the intimate worlds of women and men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Although Presbyterians were a minority religious community in Ireland, their records provide much more than a marginalised picture. Instead, the Presbyterian archive casts fresh light on the wider Irish evidence, enriching our knowledge of the everyday lives of women and men in Ireland. The article begins by introducing the Presbyterian archive and the community responsible for its creation. Next, it considers how the Presbyterian archive both meets and advances the aims of the ‘Agenda’ and reveals what it can tell us about the lives of women and men as gendered subjects. Overall, the article underlines the importance of the Presbyterian archive as a source for Irish historians because it underscores why all history is gender history.

On 4 September 1607 the two Ulster earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and the lord of Fermanagh, Cuconnaught Maguire, accompanied by their respective kinsmen, embarked from Lough Swilly for continental Europe. They never again returned to the lands they had striven so hard to hold. Their departure was a tragedy for Gaelic Ireland; their former dependants were left leaderless and unprotected, and what remained of the Gaelic way of life was soon undermined by the plantation in Ulster. The ‘ flight of the earls ’ is one of the black pages of Irish history and the event marks the end of an age.

What occasioned this sudden and mysterious departure? Of the many answers suggested almost all have been coloured by prejudice and the picture, consequently, remains clouded. Professional historians, with few exceptions, have shied away from the subject, and have contented themselves with qualified versions of the explanations offered by such writers as Fr Meehan, T. M. Healy, and Seán O'Faoláin. An essay in revision is certainly long overdue.

During the Irish war for independence from 1916 to 1921, there were three important groups involved on the Irish side against Britain. These were Sinn Féin, the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) and the I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood).

Sinn Féin became in 1917 the political arm of the republicar movement for an independent Ireland. In the December 1918 general, election, Sinn Féin candidates won seventy-three of the 103 Irish constituencies and formed Dáil Eireann in January 1919. The dáil stood apart from the military side of the national struggle until March 1921, when it accepted responsibility for the activities of the I.R.A.

Thus ended Lord Salisbury’s first administration. The division was followed by an impromptu supper of about a hundred M.P.s at the Carlton Club. I sat beside Lord Randolph who was in high spirits. He told me that there had been a similar gathering on the night Gladstone was defeated in the previous June and he hoped we should soon have another.

The house adjourned to enable the new ministers to be re-elected; and I spent the interval in Ireland. As I did not share Lord Randolph’s sanguine view of the situation, I thought it prudent to be prepared for years spent in the cool shade of opposition. & We gave up our horses and coachman, and put an end to all unnecessary personal expenditure.

Between the Reformation and catholic emancipation a succession of statutory and other provisions was framed by the authorities in Dublin and London with the intention of enforcing religious conformity Persons who refused to conform were rendered liable to various disabilities and penalties of a severe nature. Discrimination became widespread in the first half of the eighteenth century with what were collectively known as the penal laws. These contained general provisions which touched all citizens in relation to many aspects of their lives, especially the holding of land. But from 1537 there were also specific measures aimed at particular groups, including the legal profession. These measures ensured that appointments to the bench could continue to be manipulated on the basis of loyalty to the established church. Long after the first relaxation of the penal laws, catholic lawyers who refused to conform were still excluded from the higher ranks of the legal profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which statutory and other requirements, introduced from 1537 onwards, were effective in excluding Roman Catholics from legal practice and in achieving outward religious conformity among lawyers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Twenty-four years ago, Terence Brown raised very few eyebrows when he portrayed the Irish Free State in the 1930s as an insular society obsessed with self-sufficiency. The theme of insularity has dominated most narratives of the period, with emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Economic War, the Censorship Board and the 1937 Constitution. The de Valera government’s intention in the Economic War, after all, was to create native industries behind high-tariff barriers and to favour agricultural labourers by shifting the tillage/pasture ratio in Ireland in favour of crop production. This protectionist programme was insularity writ large. Likewise, the government’s censorship of domestic and imported literature ‘concelebrated’, according to J. J. Lee, ‘the intellectual poverty of the period’.

In 1783 Henry Grattan complimented Charles James Fox by describing his views as ‘liberal to Ireland and just to those lately concerned in her redemption’. He also claimed that ‘Fox wished sincerely for the liberty of Ireland without reserve.’ Sir James Mackintosh’s draft inscription for Westmacott’s statue of Fox in Westminster Abbey stated that he had ‘contended for the rights of the people of America and Ireland’. Whiggish historians subsequently built upon this notion of Fox and his followers as great friends of Ireland. For the most part, modern scholars have avoided passing judgement on Fox’s views on Ireland, but a few authors have challenged early assumptions, depicting Fox as unprincipled in his use of Irish politics as a stick to beat the North and Pitt ministries. Christopher Hobhouse, commenting on Fox’s commitment to Catholic relief, claims that he ‘gave himself away’ and that ‘the House could distinguish by this time between Fox the religious liberator and Fox the artful dodger’. John Derry asserts that Fox ‘ruthlessly and irresponsibly exploited anti-Irish prejudice in England’ during the controversy over Pitt’s trade proposals of 1785. L.G. Mitchell notes that ‘his sympathy for American patriots had had real limits, and so had his concern for Ireland’, and that ‘Irish patriots were never sure of Fox, and their doubt was entirely justified.’ There is a good deal of substance in these comments, and in this article I also intend to argue that Fox was first and foremost a British parliamentarian. However, his conduct towards Ireland was not solely ruled by this stance. Free from the shackles of government, Fox was disposed to be generous to Irish patriotism and his friends and relatives in the Irish opposition.