The Wood’s Halfpence affair has long been recognised as one of the most serious disputes to have occurred between the Irish and British political establishments during the eighteenth century. There is no doubt that the conflict — caused by Irish resentment over the patent granted to William Wood to coin copper halfpence for Ireland — was one of the most serious ruptures in Anglo-Irish relations between the Williamite war and the ‘patriot’ campaign of the 1750s. The simple fact is that in 1723–4 the British administration was unable to implement its policy in Ireland. The Irish parliamentary managers declined to co-operate in the implementation of Wood’s patent, the Irish privy council failed to offer advice about how the conflict might be resolved, and the Irish lords justices refused to obey the positive orders of the British government.

In the past historians have argued that, shocked by the demonstrable unreliability of its Irish servants during this episode, the British government adopted a systematic policy of appointing English officials to the highest offices of Irish state and church. The appointment of Hugh Boulter as primate of the Church of Ireland in 1724 and of Richard West as lord chancellor in 1725 seemed to support such an interpretation.

The issue of citizenship played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; but that point was overshadowed by the tendency of those who negotiated the treaty (and the authors who have written about it) to see the issue of ‘common citizenship’ as only one point under the heading of allegiance to the crown and membership of the British Empire. That it was a central issue is clear, however, for at one point in the 1921 negotiations Lloyd George asked, ‘to put it bluntly will you be British subjects or foreigners? You must be either one or the other.’ Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish delegation, answered: ‘in our proposal we have agreed to “reciprocity of civic rights”. We should be Irish and you would be British and each would have equal rights as citizens in the country of the other.’ That exchange caused the British to ask the Irish for a direct answer to the question, would they ‘acknowledge this common citizenship?’. The Irish, however, only responded with the words, ‘Ireland would undertake such obligations as are compatible with the status of a free partner’ in ‘the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. Those words did not satisfy the English negotiators, but in the end the Irish accepted an agreement in which the words ‘common citizenship’ appeared in the oath to the king which all members of Dáil Éireann would have to take. That satisfied the British demands on allegiance to the crown.

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.

Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.

In any account of the liberal party’s dealings with Ireland, Gladstone must occupy a dominant and dynamic position. Yet perhaps his most significant legacy was a negative one. His dramatic and, from the party point of view, destructive failures with home rule in 1886 and 1893 demonstrated to two generations of liberal leaders, Morley and Lloyd George no less than Rosebery and Crewe, and even to his own son Herbert, that so long as the house of lords retained a legislative veto, home rule for Ireland could not be a practical part of the liberal programme. A recent article has shown that ‘ disengagement ‘ from home rule was evolved during the period from 1894 to 1905 as a matter of deliberate policy, and was not simply the result of a huge independent majority won by the party in 1906. It was a policy dictated by necessity, but it evolved, nonetheless, only gradually, through a series of compromises between two warring factions of the party. Where Rosebery and the extreme liberal imperialists worked to exclude home rule from the party programme altogether in 1900-1, Gladstonians wanted only to put it into cold storage. Again, when liberal imperialists and even uncommitted liberals called for a self-denying ordinance on home rule for the 1906 election, Gladstonians wanted the party simply to steer clear of any firm commitment. What averted a split on the earlier occasion was Asquith’s enunciation of a ‘ step by step ‘ principle on home rule in such a way as to differentiate it clearly from Rosebery’s ‘ clean slate’, while in the autumn of 1905 party unity was restored by Campbell-Bannerman’s promise to translate this principle into a legislative proposal.

The political career of Sir Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris, is well known to historians. A first-generation settler, he held plantation lands in Ulster and Munster; as vice-treasurer of Ireland he became a rival of the Boyle faction in the Dublin administration in the early 1630s; and after a spectacular fall from grace in 1635 he became one of Lord Deputy Wentworth’s bitterest enemies and spoke against him at his trial in 1641. Yet, unlike his rival, the first earl of Cork, there is little information about Mountnorris’s personal attitudes, his religious views or his family life, other than what can be gleaned from official sources, and from the (mainly hostile) comments of contemporaries. The discovery, therefore, of a cache of family papers in the Public Record Office at Kew provides a unique opportunity to flesh out the bones of his political career. It also allows a comparison between the Annesleys and the Boyles, whose extensive archive has moulded our view of the New English in general. Perhaps the most interesting of these documents is Mountnorris’s letter to his daughter, Beatrice Zouche, dated 5 February 1641[/2], in which he outlines how he expects her to order her day with prayer and meditation and domestic concerns appropriate for a godly matron. This letter reveals a great deal about Mountnorris’s own religious beliefs and his attitudes to his children, and provides some important clues about the mindset of the New English in Ireland.

Since the English Reformation, occasional days of thanksgiving, prayer and fasting were appointed by royal authority in response to an array of exceptional circumstances varying from outbreaks of disease to bad weather, and popish conspiracies to military successes. Details of these days of religious observance, their inspiration and purpose were communicated to the public by printed proclamation and reinforced by the publication of specially prepared forms of prayer for use in Anglican services on these occasions. The reign of William III (1689–1702) saw these days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving take place with unprecedented frequency. For the most part, this intensification of state-appointed public worship corresponded with the king's struggle against Louis XIV during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). Such days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving provided an opportunity for the Williamite court to promote the legitimacy of the new regime as part of a larger strategy of ‘courtly reformation’.

A seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany, which once belonged to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, contains a short treatise on the origins of government by Sir George Radcliffe. Radcliffe was legal assistant to Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland (from January 1640 earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant). The treatise insisted on the divine origin of all human political power and implied that the best form of government was absolute monarchy, in which the monarch was free of all human law and subject to divine restraint alone. It will be suggested below that the composition of this treatise can be dated to the summer of 1639. This introduction will offer an outline of Radcliffe’s education and political career, explain the genesis of his treatise on government, point out some pertinent aspects of its argument, and finally assess the document’s significance.

Richard O'Ferrall's claim of 5 March 1658 that the Stuart monarchy had no right to rule Ireland was made almost in passing. The real purpose of the report made by this Capuchin friar and courtier at the congregation of Propaganda Fide, the committee of cardinals whose jurisdiction included nearly all those missions and churches under non-Catholic governments, was to exclude all Irish Catholics of English descent from high ecclesiastical office. At the centre of his argument was the confederate Catholic association of the 1640s and the place within it of the Old English community. The Capuchin argued that the confederates had remained too closely bound to the Stuart monarchy, and that the Old English had betrayed the confederate cause to Charles I's lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, earl, marquis and later duke of Ormond. Many of O'Ferrall's Catholic contemporaries saw him as a dangerous member of a radical tradition: a clerical assembly at Dublin in June 1666 burned his report along with a copy of Conor O'Mahony's Disputatio apologetica of 1645, which had argued that all Ireland's Protestants should be killed or expelled and a native king elected. The Commentarius Rinuccinianus, begun by O'Ferrall, developed the argument of the 1658 report on a grand scale.

The relationship between the Reagan administration and the Northern Ireland conflict is a neglected area of transatlantic history. This article addresses the extent of Ronald Reagan’s interest in the Northern Irish conflict and the manner in which other protagonists sought to secure or prevent his involvement. It will examine the president’s approach in the context of different views within his administration, the State Department’s wish to maintain American neutrality on the issue of Northern Ireland, and the desire of leading Irish-American politicians for the American government to be much more interventionist. These debates coincided with significant developments in Northern Ireland. Therefore, Reagan’s contribution to the Anglo–Irish process encapsulates a variety of issues: the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1980s, the 1985 Anglo–Irish Agreement and the internationalisation of the conflict before the election of President Bill Clinton in 1993.

During the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ’47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focusing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western port of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain's Irish population faced in the 1850s.

This article critically re-assesses Conor Cruise O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1977. It argues that O'Brien's most significant contribution to public life was the ability to deconstruct many aspects of Irish nationalism, specifically his rejection of the Irish state's irredentist claim over Northern Ireland. In doing so, it contends that O'Brien was one of the most important, and outspoken, champions of so-called ‘revisionist nationalism’ of his generation. The article examines three themes in relation to O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland: his attack on the Irish state's anti-partitionism; his rejection of Irish republican terrorism; and his support for the ‘principle of consent’ argument. The article illustrates that O'Brien was criticised in nationalist circles and accused of committing political heresy. Indeed, his willingness to challenge the attitude of most mainstream Irish politicians on Northern Ireland invariably left him an isolated figure, even among his own Labour Party comrades. Writing in his Memoir, O'Brien neatly summed up the difficult position in which he found himself: ‘I was altogether out of tune with my colleagues over Northern Ireland’.

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.

The second World War was to find Germany and Italy as allies in a conflict in which their initial opponents were Britain, France and Poland. Italy did not immediately enter the war, but by the terms of the ‘pact of steel’ of 22 May 1939 she was to become a belligerent. The war broke out over the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The circumstances under which it arose were peculiar in one particular point, namely in that Great Britain entered the conflict directly and immediately as an ally of a power in eastern Europe. She had entered the wars of 1914 and of 1793 in a secondary manner—as an ally of powers already at war and over commitments which related primarily to western and central Europe. It was novel therefore that she should have become involved directly in a conflict relating to eastern Europe.

If one had tried to predict, in 1919, the circumstances under which Britain would fight another war with Germany, few would have hazarded the opinion that she would choose the crossing of the Polish frontier as a casus belli. In addition, if one had, in 1938, tried also to predict Britain’s ally in an eventual conflict, Poland would have come towards the end of the list. Since 1934, Poland had generally been regarded as a power which was endeavouring to keep out of conflicts between Germany and the western powers—at least in the early stages of such a war. The relations between Berlin and Warsaw were, as from their agreement of 26 January 1934, surprisingly cautious; and the personal relations between leading Germans and Poles reflected—or so it appeared—the existence of such friendly relations. However, within a very short period after the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, Britain was to become deeply involved in the defence of a frontier which British public opinion had previously regarded as the most open to criticism and revision of all the arrangements concluded at Versailles.

Protestant working-class loyalists have been found not only in Belfast, behind the painted kerbs and muralled gables of the Shankill Road and Ballysillan. Recent research has found working-class loyalism in the Ulster hinterland of mid-Armagh. However, most of what has been written on southern Protestantism, beyond Belfast and Ulster, has been on the gentry class. Yet Dublin was once the centre of organised Protestant opinion in Ireland and had, in the early nineteenth century, an assertive and exuberantly sectarian Protestant working class. This paper is based on a study of the Protestant working class of Dublin, and examines its organisation and activism as revealed in the City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club (henceforth C.W.C.). The club owned a substantial Georgian house on York Street, off St Stephen’s Green where the modern extension to the Royal College of Surgeons now stands. The club was sustained by a core of activists numbering around three hundred, the usual print-run for the ballot papers at the annual general meeting. The Protestant working class numbered 5,688 in the city in 1881. The county area numbered 4,096, making a total of 9,784 Protestant workingclass men. The city and county total of about 10,000 remained stable up to the census of 1911. Combined with the Protestant lower middle class of clerks and shopkeepers, the potential to be mobilised by the C.W.C. numbered over 20,000. The club records are used to relate the experience of the Dublin Protestant working class firstly to the more familiar working-class loyalism of Ulster, and secondly to working-class Toryism and the concept of the labour aristocracy.

The history of modern political parties is rich in examples of the law that a sharp change in the party line involves a tightening in party discipline, often including a structural re-organization. The Parnellite movement did not escape the operation of this law. The Kilmainham treaty, which marked the transmutation of Parnellism from a quasi-revolutionary movement into a completely constitutional one, could not have been implemented without a drastic subordination of the various branches of the movement to central control, i.e. the control of the parliamentary party itself. As the party had been reduced by secessions until it contained, for all practical purposes, no opponents of Parnell, this meant that the whole great movement of the ‘New Departure’, or what was left of it, was now to be steered, by the little group of Parnell’s lieutenants, out of land-agitation into the more or less peaceful ways of electioneering. It was not immediately necessary to tighten the internal organization of the party itself, partly because of the secessions and partly because its make-up was such that it was inclined to welcome rather than oppose shifts to the right. What was needed was to discipline the ‘peripheral organizations’, as they would now be called, one or two of which had in the past not merely acted independently of the parliamentarians but had exercised some control over them. Before going further with the description of how the party machine was perfected in the years following the Kilmainham treaty, it might be well, for the sake of clarity, to list these organizations and indicate briefly their relation to the parliamentary party in the immediate pre-Kilmainham era.

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

For the purpose of the extensive transfer of land to which the commonwealth government was committed, Benjamin Worsley, shortly after the date of his appointment in 1652 as surveyor general in Ireland, began to make a rough estimate of the land available. The slowness and inaccuracy of this survey caused a clamour among the soldiers and the adventurers. Large arrears of pay were due to the former, while many of the latter had, as early as 1642, advanced considerable sums of money for the purposes of the war in Ireland. Both classes wanted their estates with as little delay as possible. William Petty, then recently appointed as physician general to the forces in Ireland, became the severest critic of Worsley's proceedings. The upshot of the agitation was that the plan of survey was modified and Petty appointed on 11 December 1654 to map the forfeited lands set apart for the soldiers in 22 counties.

There were three good reasons why Edward II hastened to secure papal help within the first year of the pontificate of John XXII (1316-17). A number of important bishoprics were vacant to which the king hoped to secure his candidate, he needed fiscal help for defence purposes, and the weight of papal condemnation to fall on his enemies. Within the year he had secured a satisfactory degree of papal support in each of these three desiderabilia, and the cooperation of pope and king touched Irish affairs at some important points.

The general reasons why the king should wish to arrange episcopal succession to his liking are well known. There was particular reason for securing politically reliable bishops in Ireland. As Edward himself was to explain to John, the ‘fraudulent machinations and malicious and false collusion’ of some Irish prelates against royal power had been a major factor in the risings connected with Edward Bruce’s invasion. At this time both Dublin and Cashel were vacant, and Edward took all measures to ensure their filling by men acceptable to him. There were two candidates in the field at Cashel, nominees of a split in the chapter. In August of 1316, Edward wrote to eight cardinals impressing on them the necessity of having an English archbishop, and urging the candidature of a Franciscan, Geoffrey of Aylsham.

John Kells Ingram was born in County Donegal in 1823. His ancestry was Scottish Presbyterian, but his grandparents had converted to Anglicanism. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, the most prestigious academic institution in nineteenth-century Ireland. In a brilliant academic career spanning over fifty years he proceeded to occupy a succession of chairs at the college. His published work included an important History of political economy (1888), and he delivered a significant presidential address to the economics and statistics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1878). Ingram influenced, and was respected by, many contemporary social and economic thinkers in the British Isles and elsewhere. In an obituary one of Ingram’s friends exaggerated only slightly in describing him as ‘probably the best educated man in the world’.

Yet contemporary perspectives on Ingram’s career were warped by one act of his youth which was to create a curious disjunction in his life. In 1843, when only nineteen years old, Ingram was a sympathiser with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. One night, stirred by the lack of regard shown for the Irish rebels of 1798 by the contemporary O’Connellite nationalist movement, he wrote a poem entitled ‘The memory of the dead’, eulogising these ‘patriots’. Apparently without much thought, Ingram submitted the poem anonymously to the Nation newspaper. It appeared in print on 1 April 1843 and, better known by its first line, ‘Who fears to speak of ’Ninety-Eight?’, became a popular Irish nationalist anthem.