The Belfast Boycott was a protest designed to dislodge loyalism in Northern Ireland, punish its adherents for perceived intolerance toward Catholics and end Irish partition. The boycott was set off by the expulsion of several thousand Catholic workers from employment in Belfast in July 1920. A total boycott of all goods coming from Belfast was implemented by the Dáil in September 1920. Boycotting provided Irish nationalists with an alternative to violent retaliation that allowed for the participation of a wider segment of the Irish population and diaspora in the revolutionary movement. However, such mass mobilisation meant that nationalists had to entrust their plan for an independent Ireland to a segment of the population that they overwhelmingly viewed as politically and economically uninformed: Irish women. The boycott offers a new vantage point from which to view the actions of and attitudes towards women and the role of mass mobilisation during the revolution. This article explores nationalists’ conceptions of Irish identity, the intersection between consumerism and patriotism, and the role that women played as both political and economic actors throughout the Irish revolutionary period.

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.

When the British government declared war against Germany in August 1914, a great drive to gain popular support by presenting the conflict to the public as a morally righteous endeavour began in earnest. Stories of German violence against French and Belgian civilians, largely based in fact, were central to this process of ‘cultural mobilisation’. The German serviceman thus came to be widely regarded in Britain as inherently cruel and malevolent while his British counterpart was revered as the embodiment of honour, chivalry and courage. Yet by the autumn of 1920, less than two years after the Armistice, the conduct of members of the crown forces in Ireland was being publicly drawn into question by British commentators in a manner that would have been unthinkable during the war against Germany. Drawing on contemporary press reports, parliamentary debates and personal narrative sources, this article explores and analyses the moral climate in Britain in 1920 and 1921 and comments on the degree to which memories of atrocities committed by German servicemen during the Great War informed popular and official responses to events in Ireland.

Down to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

This article examines the Church of Ireland’s relationship with Scots Presbyterians after the Restoration, focusing on the churchmen’s regular complaints against the ‘disorderly’ practices of the Presbyterian communities in Ireland. The established church leaders spoke of the threat of political and social disorder from the Presbyterians, and they repeatedly targeted the spontaneous ex tempore prayer and preaching practised by Scottish ministers in order to illustrate their concerns. This article uncovers the theological roots of these apparently civic complaints to explain their ubiquity and vehemence. It argues that the churchmen feared that such uncontrolled, unscripted prayer could lead to blasphemy and provoke the wrath of God on the nation, thereby triggering war and unrest such as they had experienced in the preceding decades. In their view, there was little difference between holding to an improperly ordered church hierarchy and worship practice, and forcing this disorder on the state. By illustrating the links between theology, ecclesiology and the potential for political sedition as they were understood by Restoration churchmen, this article demonstrates the importance of theological nuance for clarifying the complex relationship between Ireland’s two largest Protestant denominations in the seventeenth century.

On a plane leaving Baidoa refugee camp in Somalia in late 1992, an Arab doctor offered John O'Shea, head of the relief agency Goal, a glimpse of how the Irish were viewed in that civil war-ravaged state. ‘Ah, Ireland’, he remarked on learning of O'Shea's country of origin, ‘the caring nation’. He had reason to be complimentary. In addition to the aid agencies and aid workers involved in the ongoing relief effort, Somalia had recently hosted two highprofile visitors from the Irish state. In August 1992 the minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, spent three days in the country to view at first-hand its escalating civil war. He was followed less than two months later by President Mary Robinson, whose arrival at Baidoa on 2 October marked the beginning of a tour – the first by a Western head of state – of the feeding stations and refugee camps that provided succour to those displaced by the conflict.

In May 1974 the Ulster Workers' Council (U.W.C.), comprising loyalist trade unionists, paramilitaries and politicians, mounted a general strike backed by widespread intimidation. Their target was the Sunningdale Agreement, which produced a power-sharing executive for Northern Ireland and proposed a crossborder institution with the Republic of Ireland. After a fortnight the U.W.C. successfully brought Northern Ireland to a halt and the Executive collapsed, leading to the restoration of direct rule from Westminster. Three years later the United Unionist Action Council (U.U.A.C.) adopted the same strategy, demanding a return to devolution with majority rule and the repression of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (P.I.R.A.). This second strike was defeated. Many contemporary politicians were critical of the Labour government's failure to put down the U.W.C. strike. William Whitelaw, formerly secretary of state for Northern Ireland in Edward Heath's Conservative administration and the minister responsible for the bulk of the negotiations prior to Sunningdale, believed that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, did not have the same attachment to the political settlement and were less willing to support the Northern Ireland Executive in its hour of need. Paddy Devlin of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.) argued that the unwillingness to arrest those involved, ‘more than any other single action by the authorities ... caused thousands of law-abiding people who had earlier given support to the executive to switch loyalties’.

The Irish Race Conference met in Paris at the end of January 1922 to initiate a new world organisation that would link the people of Ireland with their cousins around the globe. The gathering of delegates attracted comment wherever the Irish had settled, and even the Belfast Telegraph noted its opening ceremonies. The South African Irish newspaper, The Republic, heralded the conference as a ‘family reunion on a world wide scale’, but, like many family gatherings, disagreement was to follow in its wake. The idea of a conference was first mooted in February 1921 by the Irish Republican Association of South Africa (I.R.A.S.A.), to support the efforts then being made to win international recognition for an independent Irish republic. However, the I.R.A.S.A. did not see its work stopping there, envisaging the creation of a worldwide organisation that would link the Irish overseas with their compatriots at home. Over the following months the idea was developed into plans for an Irish International that would pursue a programme of social, cultural and economic objectives in Ireland and abroad. As The Republic explained,

Just how such wide-ranging aims were to be realised would prove a matter of dissent among delegates when they assembled twelve months later in Paris. But in February 1921 the proposal inspired only enthusiasm and hope for the future.

The idea of the conference was a product of the belief prevalent at the time that the Irish had ‘yet to give to the world the best which is in them’. The official programme for the new race organisation captured this sentiment, declaring the organisers’ belief that ‘Ireland has much to give to the world’. It was widely expected that this potential would be realised once the Irish were free to govern themselves. It is thus ironic that it was ultimately over the relationship between the new Irish government and the overseas Irish that the conference, and all its worthy ambitions, would founder.

In seventeenth-century Ireland the law increasingly defined and regulated relationships: between government and governed; between landlord and tenant; between master and servant; among the propertied; and even, by the end of the century, between Catholics and Protestants. This situation, similar to that throughout western Europe, signalled — at least superficially — England’s success in assimilating Ireland. The system of courts, centred on Dublin, and, through regular assizes and quarter sessions, borough, sheriffs’, church and manorial courts, reaching deep into the localities, was celebrated as a prime benefit, as well as the principal means, of anglicisation. The English policies which had progressively dismantled indigenous institutions, including the brehon law of Gaelic and gaelicised society, and replaced older Catholic with new Protestant élites, rested on statute, proclamation and judicial decree or process. Sincethe law was essential to England’s rule in Ireland, its opponents countered through the courts and legal argument: as a result, the functioning of the law, especially the quasi-judicial commissions which redistributed land, was politicised. Not only did the law accomplish, it also reflected these changes; for, bit by bit, Catholics were edged from the judicial bench and then disqualified from practising as barristers and attorneys. By the early eighteenth century the courts — publicly at least — were manned by and run for the burgeoning Protestant interest in Ireland.

The phenomenon of European migration during the early modern period — whether to overseas locations or across frontiers within Europe — is a complex one. In general, people migrate of their own volition from places of low opportunity or deprivation to areas of higher opportunity, where they hope to find employment or a better life.2 In the early modern period, however, the reasons why people migrated are less clear. Of course, many thousands migrated to improve their circumstances, usually in the hope of returning to make a permanent home in their place of origin. Yet, according to Nicholas Canny, English migration to transatlantic destinations in the early part of the seventeenth century was ‘high-risk subsistence migration’, since both the Chesapeake and the West Indies proved lethal for Europeans. The precise reasons why migrants continued to leave home, when such were the prospects before them, remain opaque to historians.

This article examines the career of the Irish Presbyterian minister and member of the Westminster parliament, James Little, as a case study of Presbyterian clerical responses to the Second World War in Northern Ireland. Establishing a more detailed narrative of contemporary interpretations of the conflict improves our understanding of the functions of religious institutions during the period. It demonstrates that Presbyterian church leaders were largely enthusiastic supporters of the war, employing theological language while promoting the agenda of unionist politics. By juxtaposing clerical politico-religious support for the war with their commitment to conservative moral standards, the article assesses the strength with which these views were held, thereby adding to our knowledge of Presbyterianism in the 1940s. The article also situates the Northern Ireland Presbyterian view of the war within the context of the United Kingdom.

This article introduces a newly discovered essay by W. E. Gladstone, ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, originally published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1834. The introduction examines the context of the essay’s composition, relating it to the young Gladstone’s commitment to the confessional state, as well as to the contemporary debate over the appropriation of the revenues of the Church of Ireland. It then attempts to explain how – through a combination of political circumstances, Gladstone’s subtle reshaping of the historical record, and editorial confusion – a significant article, published in a major Irish journal, went virtually unnoticed for more than 180 years. ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, the text of which is reproduced here in full, constituted Gladstone’s first attempt to use the quarterly press to influence public opinion, anticipating his first book by four years, and what had previously been considered his first journal article by nine years.