The thesis defended in this contribution to Viking studies in the British Isles is simple and straightforward. It is argued that the Viking warrior Ragnarr Loðbrók was an historical personage. Tradition associates him with the area about the Kattegat and in particular with south Norway and Zealand where Ragnarr and his sons were the leaders of a large force of vikings. These were sea-kings rather than rulers of territories. Ragnarr flourished in the first half of the ninth century and died some time after 851. Amongst his many sons, three were famous: Ívarr inn beinlausi, Hálfdan and Ubbe. Ragnarr was the leader (or one of the leaders) of the Danish attack on the Irish Vikings, probably Norwegians, in 851 and his son Ívarr established himself as king of Dublin which he ruled jointly from 853 with one Óláfr, identical with the Vestfold king, Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr, who after years of campaigning in Ireland with Ívarr returned to Norway in or about 871.

Dr Lyons’s admirable study of the downfall of Parnell, recently published, has raised once again the question of the relations between Joseph Chamberlain and the Irish leader and more particularly of the part alleged to have been played by Chamberlain in bringing about the latter’s ruin. Like the late Henry Harrison, who devoted so many eloquent pages to this subject, Dr Lyons had to write without access to Chamberlain’s own papers, which, however, do not contain, so far as I am aware, anything that is at variance with his main conclusions. Nevertheless, they do containcertain letters, which are not mentioned in J.L. Garvin’s Life of Joseph Chamberlain and which supplement Dr Lyons’s account.

This paper will attempt to shed some additional light on the background and motives of those who were to play a leading part in the scheme for the Irish adventurers. The focus will be upon those Englishmen, and Londoners in particular, who invested from 1642 onwards in the reconquest of Ireland in return for grants of Irish land once the island had been secured again. It will be argued that militants who regarded themselves as belonging to the chosen ranks of the godly — that is the minority of mankind singled out for salvation by God, and thus constituting his elect or saints — played a leading part in the scheme and were among its most committed participants, and that they later helped to shape English policy towards Ireland. These militants were also ardent advocates of reformation in church and state in England in the 1640s, and they viewed Ireland and the successful Catholic rising in 1641 from a perspective highly coloured by antipopery. They tended to see the struggle taking place in the mid-seventeenth century in Britain, Ireland and Europe generally in black-and-white terms, as a struggle between true religion (by which was meant a thoroughly reformed Protestant church) and the Antichrist as represented by the pope and the forces believed to be ranged under him in the Catholic church.

In the words of one veteran communist, the Irish republican movement has experienced throughout its existence ‘a constant searching’ on social issues. In 1934 the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) was fractured when a group of members who believed in socialism seceded to establish the Republican Congress movement. This article will examine a programme for government published early in 1934 by the I.R.A., consider the schism that occurred in March 1934, giving rise to the Republican Congress, and describe the aims, character and early activities of the new movement. It will be argued that there existed among republicans in 1934 two significant interpretations of the relationship between social radicalism and republican philosophy. The first involved a multi-class, Gaelic communalism. Public and private ownership were to be blended in post-revolutionary Ireland and emphasis was placed on class harmony rather than class struggle. Advocates of this approach employed radical rhetoric but tended to avoid any tangible involvement in immediate social struggle. Socio-economic radicalism was effectively obscured by nationalism. The second interpretation was socialist. This held that class conflict and the national struggle were necessarily complementary. Any attempt to restrain the social advance until independence had been achieved was ill-advised, since the republic could only be won through a struggle that was deeply imbued with class struggle.

The final Henrician policy towards Ireland, involving ‘surrender and regrant’ and overtones of conciliation and redress is a familiar part of Irish history. What actually happened to that policy in its early phase is not so familiar. In a paper setting forth the importance of Henry’s Irish policy Robert Dunlop felt obliged to say something concerning its fate and the reasons for its failure. Having rejected a religious explanation, or any ‘conflict between tribal and feudal ideas’, he placed the blame on the Irish chiefs themselves. While admitting that a weak central government was ‘unable to enforce its decrees without constantly appealing to the sword’, he stressed most that ‘the easy indifference with which the Irish accepted Henry’s plan was fatal to its success’. Had their chiefs been more willing to surrender some of their authority the policy, so well devised, would have succeeded. ‘Their inability or unwillingness to do so compelled the use of more drastic measures, and was the cause of all their subsequent misfortunes.’ Dunlop’s conclusions have an air of vagueness, and there were actually very concrete reasons, besides the general character of the Irish, why the policy did not achieve more immediate success. Those reasons are to be sought in Edward VI’s reign as it manifested itself in Ireland.

In an influential article, William Lowe and Elizabeth Malcolm have argued that the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) became ‘domesticated’ between its formation in 1836 and its disbandment in 1922:

The Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions. The first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked, and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure of the Tudor conquest.

In the decade of the 1650's many of the Irish confederate leaders, lay and ecclesiastical, found themselves exiles in Europe. In exile, they naturally turned again to the disputes which had disrupted the confederation and had helped to make Cromwell's campaign easier than it might otherwise have been. These disputes grew more and more bitter in the disappointment of defeat; and no matter what point they started from, they had a way of returning to the censures which the papal nuncio, Rinuccini, had pronounced on 27 May 1648. These censures had divided the confederation beyond hope of reunion; even after ten years, they were still regarded by one party as having been justly inflicted, necessary for the preservation of the Catholic religion, while the other considered them to have been unjust and invalid, and the real cause of the subsequent overthrow of the confederation.

Éire was economically and militarily impotent, strategically significant, and the only European neutral behind allied lines in World War II. Although the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, refused to co-operate openly with his protectors in Britain and his friends in America or even to distinguish publicly between them and Nazi Germany, he wanted Anglo-American aid, and he wanted it without conditions. He wanted what the American minister at Dublin, David Gray, called a ‘free ride’

On St Patrick’s Day, 1941, de Valera announced that he would send a special agent to purchase American food and weapons and expressed the hope that Ireland’s friends would help the mission. Acknowledging that the war was causing shortages, he repeated earlier claims that the belligerents, blockading each other, were blockading Éire, a land determined to avoid involvement in any ‘imperial adventure’

In 1252 Geoffrey de Geneville married Matilda de Lacy, the elder coheiress of Meath and Weobley, thereby becoming lord of Trim in Ireland and Ludlow in the Welsh March. By birth, however, this second son of Simon, lord of Joinville, was the lord of Vaucouleurs in Champagne and was thus an ‘exotic’ figure to find involved in late thirteenth-century Ireland. While Geoffrey was not alone in being a landowner in Ireland with continental origins, since he was part of what Robert Bartlett calls the ‘aristocratic diaspora’ — the movement of western European aristocrats from their homelands into new areas where they settled in order to augment their fortunes — he was exceptional in that he was the most successful figure to emerge in Ireland as a result of Henry III’s tendency to invest foreigners from the court circle with lands in outlying areas. This pattern has been described as a policy by H. W. Ridgeway, who saw an intention to secure potentially troublesome border regions as one reason behind Henry’s distribution of peripheral patronage to ‘aliens’; and, indeed, Geoffrey numbered himself among the upright men of different nationalities placed in Ireland by the descendants of Henry II in order to bring the island to the obedience of the English king and to conserve the peace. The success that Geoffrey made of his grant of Trim related to the ‘secure nature’ of that particular lordship. However, that cannot be the whole story. There is no firm evidence that either William de Valence or Geoffrey de Lusignan, Henry III’s half-brothers, or the Savoyard knight Otto de Grandison, members of the Poitevin and Savoyard entourages of Henry III and the Lord Edward and the recipients of grants in the securely held areas of Wexford, Louth and Tipperary respectively, ever visited the lordship of Ireland in spite of their receipt of valuable lands there.

What follows is a list — covering items published between 1900 and 1986 — of serious accounts of the history of important architectural projects undertaken in Ireland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. It is intended to be comprehensive in respect of monographs, collective works and articles in non-Irish periodicals, but in respect of Irish periodicals it is a supplement to Richard J. Hayes, Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: articles in Irish periodicals (9 vols, Boston, 1970).

None of the above definitions is rigidly adhered to: much is included which falls outside their limits, but an attempt has been made to include everything that falls within them. The following have not been comprehensively included:

(1) Monographs on non-resident architects whose careers, notwithstanding Irish commissions, were mainly abroad, e.g. Robert Adam, G.E. Street, Edwin Lutyens. This is partly because such architects are so numerous (there is evidence of over a hundred British architects having professional contacts with Ireland between 1750 and 1850) and partly because they are already well served bibliographically, e.g. by Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600–1840 (London, 1978);

(2) studies of the foreign careers of Irish architects, e.g. James Hoban, Eileen Gray;

(3) studies of vernacular architecture (but see entry under this heading in the index);

(4) contemporary reviews or criticism of buildings;

(5) reviews of books;

(6) printed primary sources, such as J.T. Gilbert, Calendar of ancient records of Dublin… (19 vols, Dublin, 1889–1944).

This selected document was forwarded to Sir William Cecil in March 1571, but it was probably composed some years previously, and almost certainly before the Irish parliament of 1569–71 had assembled. It is transcribed from a copy, bearing the name of Secretary Thomas Wilson, which survives among the State Papers, Ireland in the Public Record Office, London (S.P 63, vol. 31, no. 32, ff 73–117). The piece is considered worthy of presentation because it is the most comprehensive analysis of the social and political condition of sixteenth century Ireland made by an Irish-born contemporary; because it indicates how the author’s perception of the world differed from that of the majority of Englishmen who commented on Ireland; and because it can be established that White’s opinions were shared by other articulate people within the Pale. The document, which is disposed of in nine lines in the Calendar of state papers Ireland, 1509–73, also serves to illustrate how grossly inadequate is that series for the sixteenth century.

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.

In 4 October 1842, Richard Mant, the Church of Ireland bishop of Down and Connor, presided over the first meeting of the Down and Connor Church Architecture Society in the Clerical Rooms in central Belfast. The scholarly Mant doubtless was in his element as he introduced this initiative dedicated to promoting discussion about historical and contemporary aspects of Anglican church architecture. The Ulster Times, the city’s self-proclaimed newspaper of the Church of Ireland, welcomed the new society, arguing that it was good to have ‘correct views’ on these matters and hoping that features like arched roofs, Gothic windows and lengthened aisles could be maintained so that Anglican churches could be distinguished from their Dissenting counterparts.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British government made a vigorous effort to ameliorate poverty in the west of Ireland. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board (C.D.B.) was established, with an array of special powers to promote economic development in the west. It recognised that land could only play a limited role in development due to its generally poor quality, but that sea fishing had significant potential. Nowhere was this more obvious than west Galway, where the majority of people were farmer-fishermen, living either on the islands or along a coastal belt on the mainland because fishing offered some compensation for inadequate land. Sea fishing in west Galway was, however, for the most part primitive.

This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

The ‘ Tigernach ’ Annals—the name is preferable to the current term ‘ Annals of Tigernach ’, which has grown out of a misunderstanding of an anonymous gloss—is one of the many varieties of a document which needs some such specific name as ‘ The Irish Annals ’ All the books of annals—‘ Ulster ’, ‘ Boyle ’, ‘ Inisfallen ’, ‘ Clonmacnois ’, ‘ Chronicum Scotorum ’, and the rest—are merely diversified forms of one fundamental text; this would be obvious if they were printed in parallel columns. The differences between them are due chiefly to interpolations, made not so much by compilers or scribes as by an endless succession of glossators.

The history of eighteenth-century Ireland prior to the Volunteer movement is remarkably uneventful, but two episodes ruffled its political calm. They were the Wood's halfpence dispute of 1723–5, and the conflict between the Irish administration and parliament, 1753–6.

It was the extent and vehemence of the opposition experienced by the administration in 1723–5 that led to the evolution of the undertakers—powerful members of parliament who undertook to conduct government business through the house of commons in return for a share in the disposal of patronage.

Why did a minority succeed in defeating the League of Nations? The failure of the United States senate to ratify President Woodrow Wilson’s peace treaty has invited explanation for half a century and more. Historians argue that the intraisigence of Wilson and of his outright opponents, the ‘Irreconcilables’, forced a sufficient number of senators to drop their support. They attribute significance to the sensitivities of Republicans and congressmen smarting under the wartime powers of a Democratic president. They have also, rather reluctantly, turned their attention to the senators’ constituents. In dealing with the latter, historians have emphasised the influence of Irish-Americans. The Irish contingent, Link argues, ‘were up in arms because Wilson had refused to press the cause of Irish independence in Paris and because the treaty allegedly benefited the hated English’. According to Adler, even those who considered that ‘American-Irishmen were asses’ conceded their influence: ‘each jackass had one vote and there were lots of them’. Stone agrees that the ‘Irish vote, always important in American politics, had added significance for the league fight’.