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.

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.

Following some of the themes of the original ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ and others that were not as prominent, this article considers progress since 1992 and highlights opportunities for the further development of Irish early modern women's and gender history. It considers aspects of the life cycle of women and men, especially birth, youth and marriage; the economic roles of women, especially when it came to work and property; and the importance of movement to and from Ireland in both personal biographies and wider contexts. It also reflects on some of the ways in which understandings of early modern politics and of religion and belief for the period c.1550–1720 have been transformed by consideration of the role of women. While the ‘Agenda’ noted the potential of buildings and spaces, there has been a new emphasis on ‘things’ as remnants of lives and labour, expressions of cultural norms and tools in the construction of gender, selfhood and social status. Very early on, the ‘Agenda’ strongly stated that ‘the history of women is also the history of men’, and this article also notes the green shoots of the history of masculinity in early modern Ireland.

In the thirty years since the publication of ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland’, the study of women's and gender history has been transformed. The introduction to this special issue contextualises the ‘Agenda’ within this evolving landscape, underlining the significant role it played in stimulating scholarship by outlining some of the major developments in the field since 1992. The introduction also points to developments that the authors, Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O'Dowd and Maria Luddy, could not have foreseen when writing the ‘Agenda’, such as rapid technological advances and the possibilities they have opened up for scholars of women and gender in Irish history. By tracing these developments, the introduction serves as a gateway into the articles that form the special issue: contributions that demonstrate the wide-reaching and multifaceted impact of the ‘Agenda’ and the three pioneering scholars who authored it, and that provide thought-provoking analysis of existing and future scholarship in the field.

Writers on the Irish land war have long been influenced by such contemporary accounts as Michael Davitt’s The fall of feudalism in Ireland, published in 1904. Given Davitt’s leading position in the Land League, it was only natural that most subsequent histories of the movement borrowed heavily from this publication. The history of the Land League has been viewed from the centre; its local base in the west of Ireland has received less attention. This neglect has resulted in marginalising many of the personalities within the regions, who were important not only to the success of the organisation but also to its origins. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of James Daly and the agrarian movement in Connacht. Only recently has Daly’s contribution begun to receive the attention it merits from historians, with the result that he can no longer be deemed ‘the most forgotten man of Irish history’. However, these studies have failed to trace Daly’s full involvement with the Land League and to note his volte-face, when he changed from being its most ardent supporter to become its bitterest internal critic.

I

James Daly was born in 1838 at Cloonabinna, Boghadoon, County Mayo, the eldest son of a prosperous tenant farmer who rented land from Sir Roger Palmer and had a forty-eight-acre farm on Colonel Charles Cuffe’s property at Coachfield, near Castlebar. Later the family rented land on the earl of Erne’s estate near Castlebar and a farm valued at £45 at Ballyshane in the electoral district of Breaghwy.

Among emigrants, the canny and the politic have often risen to some influence. It is flattering to believe that such people made a difference. But for most, ubi panis, ibi patria — conformity and loyalty were the natural price of daily bread and the essential cost of any real eminence. Even constructive opposition presupposed this. Those who thought otherwise were marginalised, sensibly enough, by their hosts.

It has become a commonplace of Irish history to assume that this country lay outside the full stream of European life until the twelfth century, and to preface an account of the Norman invasion with a brief survey of the very remarkable movement for the reform of the Irish church which we associate principally with the name of St Malachy. Dean Lawlor's short introductory essay to his translation of St Bernard's Life of St Malachy appeared in 1920, and is still the most readable version of this commonly accepted view. It is the purpose of this paper to criticise this view as a whole, and I shall have a good deal to say in criticism, not only of Lawlor's essay, but also of the last chapter of Kenney's otherwise admirable Sources for the early history of Ireland. All the more reason why I should begin by stating clearly my own personal debt to both these scholars. If I criticise their conclusions and their inadequate statement of the evidence, I do so in full consciousness of all that I have learned from their useful publications.

On the intelligence side, the Irish wars in this period were little different from any of the large-scale enterprises overseas of the 1590s. The expedition to Ireland of 1599, as in the case of the Cadiz expedition of 1596 and its successor to the Islands in 1597, is preluded by a crop of ‘projects’ and ‘espialls’ in the state papers, and the preparations traceable there have the distinctive marks of a special service. Among the many eye-witness accounts of oversea operations in the 1590s, however, which take the form of private journals, as distinct from dispatches to the queen or the privy council, Sir John Harington’s journal of Essex’s command in Ireland stands by itself in importance, though its position appears to be challenged by the contemporaneous Treatice of Ireland, by John Dymmok, who like Harington served under Essex there. It was pointed out long ago that these two works, so far as they cover the same events, agree almost word for word with each other. The question of authenticity is not helped by the fact that Harington’s journal has shared the fate of all his letters and papers in that neither the original nor any contemporary copy of it are to be found. Internal evidence, however, shows that the borrower was Dymmok, perhaps acting with the indifference in these matters that was characteristic of the period, though more commonly found among the chroniclers. The wonder perhaps is that Dymmok has allowed himself to repeat a number of Harington’s misplaced verbal ‘conceits’, for the existing differences tell strongly in favour of Dymmok as witness. Where the differences are not due to copyists’ errors Dymmok has invariably improved the sense, and the matter-of-fact ending to his relation of the Munster journey is in noteworthy contrast to an unfair gloss in the corresponding passage in Harington.

For long there has been accepted as genuine a charter, purporting to be issued by Henry III, which follows the text of his first reissue of the Great Charter in favour of his English subjects but which has been to some extent modified to adapt it to Irish conditions. This document, to which the title Magna Carta Hiberniae has been applied, has received an official cachet by its inclusion, with no mark of suspicion, in the first volume of the Early statutes of Ireland, edited by H. F. Berry. In undertaking a careful enquiry into the transmission of the text and its historical background, Dr. Dudley Edwards has performed a valuable service and, as a result, the authenticity of the supposed charter is, at least, very much open to question. He might, indeed, have gone further than he has done and have stated as a positive conclusion his tentative conjecture ‘ that Magna Carta Hiberniae is an adaptation of Henry's first charter, compiled in Ireland ’.

Literary evidence for political and social developments in medieval Ireland comes down to us in a variety of languages: Latin; a rich and — by European standards — early production in the Irish vernacular; Old Norse; Middle English; with sparser reference in Old English, Welsh and other nearby linguistic communities. Some of this evidence, tightly circumscribed in time, is also in Anglo-Norman French, and reflects a very different Ireland from that of Arthurian romance. These Anglo-Norman works, composed in Ireland or in Britain on the basis of eye-witness testimony, constitute a unique body of material, though their value as historical evidence is constricted in two ways: firstly, they are limited to three preserved texts; secondly, they are rigorously selective in their criteria of historiographical relevancy and in their treatment of the native Irish population, culture and political presence.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond were among the élite of Hiberno-Norman society in Ireland. Equalled in status among the nobility of Ireland only by the earls of Kildare and of Ormond, the Desmonds possessed great power, wealth and influence. Their huge earldom, which covered much of Munster, rendered them the virtual masters of the province and of all the Gaelic Irish and Hiberno-Norman lords therein.

Yet by 1584 they were gone, the earl of Desmond killed while in rebellion, the earldom broken up as an entity, the estates and castles in ruins. Apart from a short-lived return at the end of the century, the house of Desmond was defunct.

The dramatic fall of the house of Desmond has intrigued many historians, who seek its cause in the period leading up to the 1580s and in the political context of the time. They cite the breakdown of the earl’s control, the indebtedness of the earldom, the alleged madness and incapacity for rule of Gerald, the fifteenth earl. They refer to the extension of crown control in Elizabethan Ireland, the English fear of foreign intervention in Ireland, and the campaign for conformity to the new Protestant religion.

The magna carta of the Irish system of national education, established in 1831, was what came to be known as ‘ the Stanley letter ’, addressed on 31 October 1831 by the Right Honourable Edward G. Stanley, chief secretary for Ireland, to the duke of Leinster, president of the board of seven commissioners appointed by the government to administer the system.

The act of the Irish parliament of 1494-5, known as Poynings’ Law, was of outstanding importance in the history of that parliament down to its virtual repeal in 1782, but, owing to the brevity of its text, the changing nature of the relations between the English government and the Anglo-Irish administration and the development of the organisation of the Irish parliament, it passed through various stages of interpretation and significance which require to be studied separately.

It is a historical truism that the ‘Irish question’ dominated British parliamentary life during the last third of the nineteenth century. For good reason does Sir Robert Ensor give one of the chapters in England, 1870-1914 the title ‘The ascendancy of Parnell’. Yet it is the custom to treat the Irish nationalist contingent at Westminster as concerned only with Irish questions. It has been observed, to be sure, that the ‘Irish question’ had a highly significant impact upon English affairs. The Irish land acts of 1870 and 1881, for example, have come to be seen as a type of government intervention in economic affairs foreshadowing the twentieth-century welfare state. One aspect of the existence of an Irish third party at Westminster has, however, been curiously neglected, the impact of Irish M.Ps upon essentially English political controversies. It is with one such controversy that this paper is concerned, the notorious Bradlaugh case.