This paper explores the persistence of ecclesiastical influence on higher education in Ireland during an era of far-reaching policy change in the 1960s. The extensive interaction between political and official elites and the Catholic bishops offers a fascinating insight into the complex and contested process of policy formulation during an era of transformation in higher education. This study offers a re-interpretation of Whyte’s thesis that the Irish bishops displayed a ‘new flexibility’ in their response to governmental policy initiatives during this period, especially the initiative for university merger launched by Donogh O’Malley in 1967. Catholic prelates, notably John Charles McQuaid, the influential archbishop of Dublin, were pursuing a traditional Catholic religious and socio-political agenda in higher education, which sought not so much to accommodate new official initiatives as to shape such reforms in the ideological direction favoured by the bishops. McQuaid in particular enjoyed exceptional access to policy-makers and was an indispensable partner in launching the initiative for the university merger. The eventual failure of the merger, which was influenced by the successful resistance of academic elites and the declining significance of religious divisions in higher education, underlined the limits of ecclesiastical power in a rapidly changing society.

Henry Edward Duke, 1st Lord Merrivale, is one of the forgotten men of Anglo-Irish relations. Duke’s chief secretaryship of Ireland has been eclipsed by that of his tragic predecessor, Augustine Birrell; and he has generally been regarded as a mere caretaker, a stop-gap chief secretary, who, in the words of The Times obituarist, showed neither ‘imagination’ nor ‘breadth of view’, and had ‘no appreciation of the Irish psychology’. If he is remembered at all, it is for his lapsus linguae at the opening of the Irish convention on 25 July 1917 when he declared, to an astonished audience, ‘Gentlemen, one thing I have learned in the course of my experience, never despair of the republic’.

The runaway British slave who called himself Patricius tells us in this Confession that on making land after his escape from Ireland the and the ship’s crew had to journey for twenty-eight days before coming across any other human beings. Bury (Life of St Patrick, London, 1905) offered the explanation that they must have found themselves in a part of Gaul which had just been devastated by the Vandals, who burst into the west in the first days of 407. The idea was tempting. The date 407, combined with 431 (the year which is known from Prosper’s contemporary chronicle to have been that in which Pope Celestine sent Palladius as ‘first bishop’ to the Irish Christians), not only gave a fairly firm chronological anchorage to Patrick’s career, but also forged for him an early link with the continent, whence, according to his seventh-century Irish biographers, Muirchú and Tírechán, he ultimately returned to Ireland as successor to Palladius.

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 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 the months following signature of the Anglo-Irish treaty the British government was particularly concerned with the transfer of power to a legally constituted government and parliament in Dublin which would be committed to implementation of the treaty and supported by an electoral majority This goal was, however, subject to an overriding consideration: preservation, at almost any cost, of the agreement embodied in the treaty The Collins-de Valera pact brought these considerations into conflict. It is the purpose of this paper to examine why the British government, and Winston Churchill in particular, objected so strenuously to the pact and why, despite these objections, an election under the terms of the pact was permitted.

Of course the past is dead. But it is kept alive by thinking and talking about it, and, above all, bv making it relevant to the present. The past is invoked variously, be it on a popular or on the academic level. In many areas, the popular view of the past is far removed from, and apparently uninfluenced by. the academic view, and, within limits, there is nothing wrong with that. Not every layman is expected to share the academic's understanding of the past. The matter becomes rather more serious when the reverse holds: that the view of the professional concurs with that of the lay people. If this is so, then indeed can it be said that those aspects of the past to which this applies are dead.

It is an axiom that each generation has to write history anew, partly, it seems, because understanding of the problems of the past becomes more refined, and partly because important aspects of the past may well appear in a different light to a new generation.

Among the abuses experienced by children in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, kidnapping and stripping stand out both for what they reveal of the changing nature of the manner in which children were preyed upon and contemporary attitudes to children and child welfare. Though it is misleadingly presented as evidence of the existence of a vibrant trade in ‘white slaves’, children were not only kidnapped so they could be ‘sold’ in the crown’s Caribbean and American colonies. They were also targeted domestically for a variety of pursuits in which children laboured – among which begging and chimney sweeping stand out. In any event, the diminished visibility of child kidnapping after the 1780s suggests it was not pursued actively thereafter. Children continued to be targeted, but the primary object of those who did so was to strip them of the clothes and jewellery they wore in order to realise the monetary value of these goods. Pursued primarily by female offenders, the fact that a majority of the reported incidents occurred in Dublin, Belfast, Limerick and Cork indicates that it was first and foremost an urban crime. Its identification attests both to the vulnerability of children to exploitation, and to the active engagement of adults in that exploitation.

The Battle of Clontarf was fought in A.D. 1014 by the forces of Brian Boru, over-king of Munster, and his allies against the forces of Viking Dublin, Leinster and their foreign allies. The saga ‘The War of the Irish and the Foreigners’ (Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib) was written about events leading up the conflict and gives a dramatic account of events on the battlefield. It became the archetype for many later legends about Clontarf. This paper explores stylistic contrast in the saga between the terse description of events in the early Viking Age and the florid account of the reign of Brian Boru. This contrast has led some readers to conclude that two separate narratives were conflated in Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib – the first being a summary of annals and the second being a saga. However this paper argues that there is a unity of purpose throughout the work and that its stylistic divisions were deliberately contrived to help glorify Brian’s victory at the Battle of Clontarf.

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.

‘Since our foundation, the S.D.L.P. has been proudly nationalist and is 100 per cent for a United Ireland.’ This description, from the website of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.), advances a claim which might be thought not to sit easy with the party's founding ideals which claimed it as a ‘radical socialist party’ and insisted that, while a united Ireland was one of the party's main aims, it would prioritise the socio-economic above the constitutional question. This article will argue that while the S.D.L.P. was widely recognised as a major advance in nationalist politics in Northern Ireland when it was formed in August 1970, it had lost its avant-garde approach to the constitutional question and become a more organised form of the old Nationalist Party by 1975. Although initially the S.D.L.P. combined socialist rhetoric with a discourse that linked social justice with the reunification of the island – its ideal was a ‘completely new constitution for the whole of Ireland, a constitution which will provide the framework for the emergence of a just, egalitarian and secular society’ – there existed an uneasy tension between nationalist and socialist aims within the party, with the former taking precedence by the time of the powersharing Executive of 1974.

The evangelical revival of 1859 remains a pivotal event in the religious culture of Ulster Protestants owing to its legacy of widespread conversion, church renewal, and its role in shaping the pan-Protestantism of Ulster society that later opposed Irish home rule. Being part of a wider transatlantic movement of religious awakening, the 1859 revival was seen as the culmination of thirty years of evangelical renewal within Irish Presbyterianism. What has often been overlooked, however, is the fact that many aspects of the revival were deeply troubling to orthodox Presbyterians. Although most Ulster Presbyterians were largely supportive of the movement, an intellectually significant minority dissented from what they saw as its spectacular, doctrinal, liturgical, ecclesiological, and moral aberrations. Given 1859’s mythological status among Ulster evangelicals, it is normally assumed that all who opposed the revival were either religious formalists or those of heterodox doctrinal opinions. It will be argued that such an assumption is deeply misguided, and that the Presbyterian opponents of 1859 were motivated by zeal for confessional Reformed theology and Presbyterian church-order. By focusing on theologically conservative opposition to an ostensible evangelical and Calvinistic awakening, this article represents a significant contribution to the existing historiography of not only the Ulster revival but of religious revivalism more generally. It also helps us to understand the long-term evolution of Ulster Presbyterian belief and practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Few Irish men and women can have escaped the mighty wave of anniversary fever which broke over the island in the spring of 1998. As if atoning for the failed rebellion itself, the bicentenary of 1798 was neither ill-coordinated nor localised, but a genuinely national phenomenon produced by years of planning and organisation. Emissaries were dispatched from Dublin and Belfast to remote rural communities, and the resonant names of Bartlett, Whelan, Keogh and Graham were heard throughout the land; indeed, the commemoration possessed an international dimension which stretched to Boston, New York, Toronto, Liverpool, London and Glasgow. In bicentenary Wexford — complete with ’98 Heritage Trail and ’98 Village — the values of democracy and pluralism were triumphantly proclaimed. When the time came, the north did not hesitate, but participated enthusiastically. Even the French arrived on cue, this time on bicycle. Just as the 1898 centenary, which contributed to the revitalisation of physical-force nationalism, has now become an established subject in its own right, future historians will surely scrutinise this mother of all anniversaries for evidence concerning the national pulse in the era of the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. In the meantime a survey of some of the many essay collections and monographs published during the bicentenary will permit us to hazard a few generalisations about the current direction of what might now be termed ‘Ninety-Eight Studies’.