The period 1906–14 is often regarded as one of continual disagreement and turmoil in British politics. This may be true; but it is important to understand why. In fact, British politics between 1906 and 1914 were marked by a strong desire to avoid extremes. Developments on the fringe of politics, socialism, syndicalism and suffragism, made a deep impression upon the moderate elements of both major parties and their desire to contain such signs of disturbance was epitomised in the constitutional conference held in 1910. Yet the Irish question frustrated attempts at moderation, embittered politics and hindered the development of a more representative, democratic and social stage in the United Kingdom.

The catholic church in Ireland never, as a church, defined for itself an attitude towards emigration. Priests and bishops, when they spoke of emigration, usually spoke as individuals, not as members of their order. The relatively small number who have left any opinions on record were not necessarily the most influential. We cannot be certain that their views represented the feelings of the clergy as a whole. The day to day conversations and advice of ordinary priests, of which we can know little, mere far more influential in this matter than the pastorals or public letters which survive. In the place of a single voice speaking with authority or the steady murmur of unanimity, we can hear only the heterogeneous confusion of a score of voices, some perhaps seriously distorted by the public controversy in which they were raised.

‘Compared with present work in British and American economic history’, observes Dr L. A. Clarkson, ‘current Irish writing looks a trifle old-fashioned, with the bewitching voices of the social sciences muted and statistical wizardry missing’. While historically-minded sociologists might consider that this judgement of a meagre contribution from the social sciences needs qualification, there is no doubt that studies embodying sophisticated quantitative techniques are only beginning to trickle into the mainstream of Irish historiography. Yet there have been a number of important contributions, particularly in econometric history. While these constitute a small current in the flood of historical writings in the last decade or so, their qualitative and strategic significance is such as to merit detailed analysis.

The warfare in Ireland from 1593 to 1601 involved vital issues for both English and Irish. In many respects it was a unique conflict; certainly the opposing forces of the two countries were never so nearly balanced, and Kinsale is the major battle, all the potentialities and consequences of the occasion considered, in our history.

The tide of Irish immigration to the United States, which reached its crest during and following the famine years of the eighteen-forties, was second only to that of the Germans in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the Irish immigrants who arrived by the hundreds of thousands and the succeeding generations of Irish-Americans became one of the most important national groups in the American population, at the same time maintaining a keen interest in their native land.

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.

This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

This paper is concerned with the secret service vote provided by parliament expressly for the purchase of secret information at home and abroad ‘with a view to defeating the machinations of the enemies of the crown and country’, and with the proportion of that money spent by the Irish authorities up to 1922. Figures are available which disclose the actual expenditure by Dublin Castle of money from this source for the last fifty-four years of British rule in Ireland, from 1868–9 to 1921–2. It must be stressed that these amounts represent only a part of the spending in any one year on intelligence concerning Ireland: other departments were also involved in Irish affairs from time to time, and there is little doubt that on occasion funds from other votes were used for secret service purposes —which was certainly the case in wartime. It should be noted too that distinctions between criminal, agrarian and subversive activity in Ireland were frequently difficult to make, and that money from the secret service vote was probably used to obtain information on matters not political or seditious in themselves. Thus the figures when considered in isolation are not an accurate index of official activity against potentially subversive organisations. Nevertheless as concrete data on an aspect of government for which documentary evidence is hard to come by, they are of some interest.

How small in fact were the differences between and within the Irish communities overseas, and between their cultures and work achievements and those of their host societies? The past decade has seen the arrival of fairly complete bibliographies of the Irish diaspora in the United States and in Britain, and substantial bibliographical essays on the Irish in Canada and in Australia. The pioneer volume of Hartigan and Hickman, compiled outside the academic grid and its resources, is welcome, intelligent and full of small surprises, despite some odd omissions (e.g. all but one of Denis Gwynn’s relevant titles). Yet, unlike Patrick Blessing, they could not rely on and collate existent bibliographies, as he could do with those of J. T. Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history (1982), Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes on Irish-American fiction (1979), and W. C. Miller (1975) and Séamus Metress (1981) on the bibliography of Irish-America overall.

At the time of the Norman invasion the Irish church under its primate, Gilla Mac Liag or Gelasius, had welcomed the advent of Henry II and accepted his claim to be an ecclesiastical reformer. As a result the invaders, while ensuring that English or French clerics controlled the church in the areas they themselves had colonised, did not interfere with the primacy of all Ireland at Armagh. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the coarbship of Patrick was held in turn by ten primates of native Irish stock, a German, an Italian and only one Anglo-Norman, Luke Netterville, freely elected in 1217.

On 26 May 1315 a Scottish army commanded by Edward Bruce, recently created earl of Carrick, landed near Larne in County Antrim. From this date until his death at Faughart on 14 October 1318 there was a Scottish presence in Ireland. We are told that Edward was crowned king of Ireland near the scene of his eventual defeat soon after 1 May 1316; his supporters certainly regarded him as king, and he himself used the title. In reality, however, his control never extended beyond the lands of the earldom of Ulster, which he used as a base from which to launch destructive expeditions to other parts of the country. Yet at least until the retreat of the Bruces from Limerick in April 1317 a Scottish conquest of Ireland must have appeared to be within the bounds of possibility; it is hardly too much to say that during this brief period the future political shape of the British Isles depended on the outcome of an often obscure series of campaigns and alliances in Ireland.

The Ministry of Education was, and remains, the most important government department for the Catholic church in Northern Ireland. As Cormack, Gallagher and Osborne note,

The devolved government appeared to recognise Catholic educational interests by usually appointing as Minister of Education one of the more liberal figures within the Ulster Unionist Party such as Lord Londonderry, Lord Charlemont and Samuel Hall-Thompson. However, in the first week of 1950 Sir Basil Brooke ‘surprised everyone, and appalled Catholics’ by appointing Harry Midgley, an avowed opponent of the Catholic clergy and autonomous Catholic schools, as Northern Ireland’s sixth Minister of Education.

During the latter part of the reign of James II, the Church of Ireland was in a position of considerable delicacy. On the one hand, there was a real fear that the church would face annihilation at the hands of the ruling administration; if the threats of the catholic population had come to fruition, if the statutes passed by the Jacobite parliament of 1689 had been put into effect or if the Tyrconnell administration had remained in power any longer than it did, this fear would almost certainly have been realized. On the other hand, by the spring of 1689, Anglican churchmen could see that a Williamite victory might spell for them—as it did for the Church of Scotland—summary disestablishment. Most Irish Anglicans had already fled to England, thereby lending support to the Williamites; the northern presbyterians had actually taken up arms on the Williamite side. Only the remnant of the Church of Ireland left in Dublin seemed to be disloyal to the protestant king: and this remnant, to save its skin, had to continue outwardly loyal to its de jure and de facto monarch, James II. Whatever the outcome of the war which they all foresaw, the leaders of the remnant of the Church of Ireland can have held little hope for the future. A Jacobite victory would almost certainly mean the triumph of the catholic church and the despoiling of the Church of Ireland: a Williamite victory might well mean the triumph of the presbyterians and a partial disestablishment. In either case the Church of Ireland, dependent for its very existence on a firm establishment, would founder.

The restoration settlement has long been the subject of controversy Petty in his Political anatomy calculated that by 1672 catholics had recovered a little less than a third of the ‘good land‘ of Ireland. Several alternative estimates were made at the time, such as that of Richard Lawrence, whose Interest of Ireland, published in 1682, put the catholic share at a little more than a fifth of the whole. But Petty remained the generally accepted authority until he was challenged by Butler, who estimated that ‘ at the accession of James II only at the outside one-seventh or one-eighth of the total area of the island remained in the possession of catholics ’

Sir Thomas Phillips is not to be found among the worthies of the Dictionary of National Biography, nor is he mentioned in Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography or Crone's Concise Dictionary. He was one of those known in early-seventeenth Ireland as ‘ servitors ’—military men who had fought for the crown during Tyrone's rebellion and established claims on the royal generosity which they expected to have satisfied after the peace. In the Ulster plantation, servitors constituted a separate group among the planters, and some of them thus became the founders of great landed families. In his successful pursuit of forfeited land in Ulster, Phillips is a fair example of the servitor class. Very likely he would have left no more mark on Irish history than many another fellow-adventurer, had he not staked his claim in a part of Ulster that presently became a sphere of interest of the city of London. Within a few years of the Londoner's advent, Phillips engaged them in a controversy which he maintained with almost incredible pertinacity for a quarter of a century, and which, on the eve of his death, ended in a crushing defeat for his opponents.