Athough abundant evidence is available for the first few years of the Anglo-Norman invasion, the observance of due proportion in the ordinary textbook of Irish history usually precludes a detailed presentation of the progress of the invasion prior to the arrival of Henry II in 1171. As this has tended to obscure the real significance of the invasion, a careful analysis of the course of events in the years 1167-71 is called for.

The value of the Irish Registry of Deeds as a source, particularly for social and economic historians, has long been underestimated. It first received serious consideration in a lecture delivered to the Conference of Irish Historians in 1943 by Mr Samuel Weir. Mr Weir’s estimate of the usefulness of this source ran as follows : ‘while making no claim that the documents preserved in the Registry of Deeds are primarily of historical value, it is claimed that they can be of immense value as corroborative evidence’. This guarded, almost apologetic statement was typical of the diffident attitude towards the registry which prevailed among historians both then and for some time thereafter.

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party.

The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

In May 1560 a new office was established in the Irish administration, the first to be introduced in almost twenty years. It was that strange creation, the office of secretary of state for Ireland. The chief inspiration behind its foundation was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and it is clear from his writings on the subject that he believed some special office of this kind was needed if the policy of reestablishing English government in Ireland was to be implemented successfully.

A new edition of Professor Curti's History of Medieval Ireland is very welcome. Though essentially the same book, much has been rewritten : there are additions to the text as it appeared in 1923, and a good deal of detail and some footnotes have been omitted, for which the first edition must be consulted. Other changes are the division of the chapters into headed sections, the inclusion of genealogical tables, and appendices on the Ostmen, the towns and the legal treatment of the Irish.

The merits of Dr.Curti's work are very great, and chiefly his determination to write the history of the whole of Ireland, to rest every statement upon evidence, and to give exact references.

The first act of the Irish parliamentary session of 1697 provided for the banishment of all catholic clergy exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction and also of all regular clergy. It was the first act since the treaty of Limerick that directly affected the practice of the catholic religion in Ireland, and it was something of a paradox that it should have coincided with the making of peace between William III and Louis XIV. In its early stages the bill seems to have been confined to the regular clergy, and there is some obscurity about its extension to bishops and other clerical dignitaries.

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.

In June 1569 an English gentleman named Robert Mainwaring was seized on the borders of County Carlow by Irish rebels. They forced a noose around his neck, tightened it, and proceeded to drag him ‘up and down in a halter’, like a man condemned to be hanged. As with many terrorist acts, Mainwaring’s degradation was a carefully calculated publicity stunt, and it quickly achieved its objective. News of his predicament was relayed to London, where the identity of his captors aroused widespread alarm in government circles. He was persecuted on the orders of Sir Edmund Butler of Cloghgrenan, a leading Anglo-Irish lord who was the brother and principal heir of the then childless tenth earl of Ormond, Thomas Butler, and the recent recipient of some generous grants of land and office from the crown. Despite Sir Edmund’s position as deputy governor of the hitherto loyal Ormond lordship in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary, it soon became clearthat his seizure of Mainwaring had signalled the outbreak of a general revolt by several branches of the Butler family.

Since the work of Beer, or at least since the studies of Andrews and Harper, no serious historian has failed to recognize that the British mercantile system did not bear too heavily upon the American colonies before 1763. In the first place, some regulations either directly and intentionally, or indirectly and unintentionally, fostered colonial development. In the second place, enforcement was often so lax and evasion so common that a number of regulations Lvere practically inoperative. Yet though the beneficent effects of ‘salutary neglect’ upon the American colonies have long been accepted, writers on Irish history have continued to assume that the mercantile system was applied to Ireland with devastating effectiveness. Was this indeed true? Or was British mercantilism in Ireland mitigated in the same ways as in the overseas colonies —by compensating advantages and by evasion? The present article concerns itself only with the latter point, the question of enforcement and evasion of British restrictions on Irish trade.

Capital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.

The following digest lists accessions to repositories in Great Britain and Ireland during 2013 relating to Irish history and reported to the National Archives: Historical Manuscripts Commission (T.N.A. H.M.C.). This information is also published on the internet via T.N.A.’s website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk) and is added to the computerised indexes of the National Register of Archives (N.R.A.) which are available for consultation at the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, TW9 4DU. Alternatively, searchers may access the indexes to the N.R.A. and certain linked on-line catalogues via the website. Limited and specific enquiries can be dealt with by post, or email ([email protected]).

During the twentieth century, Ireland, north and south, was infiltrated to varying degrees by a transnational quasi-religious and political movement, Moral Re-Armament (M.R.A.). From its founding in the early 1920s by an American evangelist and former Lutheran pastor, Frank Buchman, through the peak of moral revivalism in the 1930s, its Cold War work after 1945 and its reinvention as a secular, multi-faith, reconciliation organisation in the 1960s, this article examines M.R.A.'s structural and ideological origins and its evolution in Ireland, the U.S. and Britain. Based on primary source materials, it argues that Ireland, characterised by two ideologically narrow cultural and political monoliths, was not immune to external spiritual and quasi-political influences and that M.R.A.'s activities in Ireland confirm these distinctive religious and political cultures while also revealing similarities. Moreover, it reveals that non-governmental M.R.A. adherents were in advance of governments in their desire for peaceful solutions to the Irish partition issue and the Cold War more generally. The article, therefore, examines an international movement which had personal, national and global significance within the context of transnational religious, political and foreign policy studies as well as the national narratives of Northern Ireland and Ireland.