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.

In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified the administrative history of interdepartmental inquiries into the threat posed by venereal diseases, setting concerns over the role of prostitution in propagating disease within the context of the wider public health programme. She properly identifies inquiry references to ‘prophylaxis’ with chemical disinfection following exposure to infection, and rightly separates the report filed by Major Donal Carroll, the army’s chief sanitary officer, from that of Dr Robert Percy McDonnell, Medical Inspector of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.

Arthur Young's judgment on Irish roads is well known; that indefatigable traveller who had many hard words for the highways of his native country, asserted: ‘ For a country so very far behind us as Ireland, to have got suddenly so much the start of us in the article of roads, is a spectacle that cannot fail to strike the English traveller exceedingly ’ A quarter of a century later his views received general corroboration from the statistical surveys of the counties and from other commentaries and travel-journals of the time. Sampson, who found little to criticise in the county Derry roads, remarked: ‘ I have seen no country more intersected by good roads than the neighbourhood of Kilrea and Magherafelt’.

The great Anglo-Irish historian, W.E.H. Lecky, was born in Dublin in 1838. He is best remembered for his volumes on Ireland and England in the eighteenth century (begun in the 1870s and completed in the 1890s). His European reputation had already been made with his History of the rise and inpuence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe (1865), and his History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).

On 16 February 1966 James Camlin Beckett, who by that time had taught in Queen’s University Belfast for twenty-one years, confided to his diary that he found it ‘hard to stay awake for an hour long lecture’ and wondered whether ‘we also go to sleep without knowing it, when we are giving a lecture instead of receiving it’. In this, the first of the lectures commemorating Beckett’s achievement, I propose — one hopes in a passably alert state — to examine three central aspects of his life and convictions: his politics and sense of national identity, his religious life, and finally his philosophy of history. The lecture draws upon Beckett’s writings, and on his papers and diaries (which are at present housed in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland); other Beckett letters, some in private hands, have also been used.

The general outlines of the Norman settlement of Leinster were laid downin the time of Strongbow. At the time of the Norman invasion that part of Leinster which was to become Kildare was divided into four main tribal territories, described as cantreds under the Normans: Offelan in the north; Offaly to the north-west and centre; Omurethy in the south; and Leix to the south-west.

Offelan is now represented by the baronies of North and South Salt, Ikeathy and Oughterany, and Clane (formerly Otymy), which were granted to Adam de Hereford, who shared his grant with his brothers John and Richard; and North and South Naas, which were granted to Maurice Fitz Gerald, whose son, William, also divided his grant with his brother Gerald, the ancestor of the earls of Kildare.

These verses were written by the Irish poet to express his grief at the impact of the Williamite victory at the battle of the Boyne and all that followed for Ireland. They were chosen two hundred years later by the historian Edmund Curtis to make clear his attitude towards Ireland’s past. In 1923, just after home rule was secured for what was officially known as Saorstát Éireann (Irish Free State), he published his history of medieval Ireland, and where a dedication would normally be printed he inserted ‘The Absentee Lordship’ and followed it with these verses. In doing this, Curtis left no doubt that in his view medieval Ireland was a lordship wrongfully attached to the English crown and that it should rightfully have been a kingdom under its own native dynastic ruler. For this he was subsequently denounced as unhistorical, and to this day, especially in the view of the so-called revisionists, he is commonly regarded as not only out of date, but dangerous as well. It was argued that Curtis used the medieval past to justify the emergence of a self-governing state in Ireland. To quote just one example, Steven Ellis, the best of the medieval revisionists, wrote in 1987 that ‘historians like Edmund Curtis concentrated on such topics as friction between the Westminster and Dublin governments, the Gaelic revival, the Great Earl uncrowned king of Ireland, the blended race and the fifteenth-century home rule movement’.

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.

The 1970s was a time of crisis internationally, when governments struggled to cope with rising inflation and public indebtedness in the aftermath of the first oil shock. It was also a period of social change, of demands for divorce and abortion, and second-wave feminism campaigned for greater rights for women. But as many of the contributors to The shock of the global have shown, amidst the political, social and economic turmoil, there was development and transformation. Ireland was not isolated from many of these trends that marked the 1970s. This article is concerned with the Fine Gael–Labour government of 1973 to 1977, in particular with the social reform agenda pursued by a coalition of one party (Fine Gael) that had advocated a ‘Just Society’ in the 1960s, and another (Labour) that had declared that the seventies would be socialist. They presented themselves at the 1973 general election as the socially progressive parties in the political system, attempting to outflank Fianna Fáil, which, in contrast, emphasised the Northern Ireland security question during the campaign. As the National Coalition grappled with fiscal expansion and the effects of stagflation, important changes occurred in the realm of social policy. Legislation affecting the status of women, recognising female heads of household and offering support to families of physically and mentally disabled children were all indicators of change.

It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with Irish gender history’ (p. xiii). Luddy and O'Dowd, both pioneers in the field in their own right, set themselves the not inconsiderable task of producing ‘an extended study of the history of heterosexual marriage on the island of Ireland from 1660–1925’ (p. 1). The result is a rich, colourful, at times playful, but also often depressing, five-hundred-and-fifty-page study of the most popular sexual bond between men and women in history — marriage. Indeed, that complex institution was obviously on the historical mind because Diane Urquhart's erudite study of Irish divorce from 1800 to 1997 and Sonja Tiernan's deftly navigated history of the marriage equality campaign in Ireland were also published in 2020.

Dr Terence Ranger in a stimulating and valuable article on Strafford in Ireland has taken the story of the Byrnes’ country as an example of ‘the combination of cunning, idealism and self-interest which characterised Strafford’s methods …’. He claims that ‘the truth is more complex and more interesting’ than others who have ‘not unravelled the full story’ supposed. Dr Ranger’s version of the truth has been completely endorsed, elegantly summarised and widely circulated by Miss Wedgwood.It will be contended that Dr Ranger has not unravelled the full story of an episode, which in some respects still defies unravelling, and that he has unwittingly misrepresented Strafford’s part in it. A fuller account, however inconclusive, may be of value, if it gives more accurate information about Strafford’s income from Irish land and about one episode in his policy of plantation.

During the winter of 1713-14 the tory ministry in England began to disintegrate. Despite a massive tory victory at the 1713 election, the new parliament which met in the following spring did not furnish the court with a reliable majority in either house. The tory party had fallen into complete disarray Queen Anne’s deteriorating health was the root cause, giving rise to panic among tories. It was clear that there was little hope for them at Hanover, where Prince George, angry at thepeaceofutrecht, wascommitted to thewhigs. Some tories actively considered declaring for the Pretender Others, more afraid of a Jacobite restoration than the accession of a whiggish but protestant king, identified themselves as Hanoverians and voted against the ministry in parliament. The vast majority, whether Jacobite or Hanoverian, were agreed on the necessity of taking some decisive measures to crush the whigs and entrench themselves in power against the fateful day when the queen should die. More than ever they were impatient of the leadership of Lord Treasurer Oxford, the former Robert Harley, the essence of whose political management seemed to be duplicity and procrastination.

In 1845, parliament passed an act establishing the three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland – Belfast, Galway and Cork – with the stipulation that ‘religious’ instruction in the colleges would have to be sponsored by voluntary organisations, not the state. Prior to 1845, parliament’s approach to providing spiritual guidance in state-run institutions had been one of ‘parallel patronage’, assuring that wherever there were individuals representing different denominational backgrounds, religious specialists from each denomination would be appointed to work in the institution. For example, the Prisons (Ireland) Act, 1826 required that Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican chaplains serve their respective portions of the prison population in each gaol that housed any of their co-denominationalists. But in 1845, parliament took an ostensibly different tack, implying that denominations would have to sponsor their young men’s study of theology or any other ‘religious’ subject at university level. However, this article argues that the Irish colleges bill gained assent from the liberal wing of parliamentary opinion precisely because it seemed, to early Victorian liberals, to instantiate the logic of parallel patronage. Using Thomas Wyse, Charles Buller, and T. B. Macaulay as cases in point, this article reveals that the logic behind this vision of state ‘neutrality’ as simultaneous support for each denominational interest was steeped in a working knowledge of colonialism.

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.

When John Bramhall arrived on the shores of Ireland in 1633 to begin his new job as chaplain to the (also newly appointed) lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, he was probably not yet forty years old. He immediately set about his role with the type of energy and ruthless devotion that came to characterise the Laudian regime that sent him. As John Morrill has indicated, nothing in the previous reign had prepared the Irish Protestant establishment ‘for the onslaught on their church to be mounted by William Laud.’ Historically, one of the problems with the Laudians is that while it is clear what they did, it is less clear why they did it. Typically, and shrewdly, they did not tend to be verbose concerning their motives.

In 1930 the Bristol Record Society printed as the first volume of their Publications the complete text of Bristol’s earliest charters from 1155 to 1373. The text was prepared by the city archivist, Miss N. Dermott Harding, who was also responsible for a full translation of each document, and an accurate description of the various ancient records and documents from which the text was taken. But there was no attempt at an adequate historical survey of all this material. A second volume was planned which should carry the story down to the end of the medieval period, and Miss Harding ended her short introduction with the remark : ‘[This] is in no sense an exhaustive book of reference on the documents it contains. It is, literally, a bare text-book, providing, without other comment than the technical work of transcription required, a printed substitute for manuscript material. Research upon it is left for the users of the text, in the hope that they may find it a reliable and accurate basis for their work, saving them the task of difficult and troublesome search through the originals.’