Ireland’s uses of knowledge of the diaspora, much matured since the 1950s, now provide two master images from which to approach it: diversity and cohesion. On 2 February 1995 President Mary Robinson pinpointed its diversity as embodying the multifaceted nature of native Irish identities, and as a makeweight in domestic argument and experiment as to the recognition and acceptance of those identities. In March 1998 President Mary McAleese spoke of ‘our global Irish family’; she accepted such diversity, but sought its reintegration in a master image of cohesion, one obtaining both at home and abroad. The new Article 2 of the Irish constitution states that ‘The Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.’

In each case, desired standards are merged with claimed realities as to the diaspora. But any such emphasis whether on cohesion or diversity among the overseas Irish matches a growing body of work on the diaspora itself, much of it by the scholars within those communities. Critical work on this scale has not appeared before now. In the past collective work of this kind typically consisted of reprints and dissertations. One might question whether this scholarship answers the external burdens placed upon it.

The manpower alone here involved would suggest so. Over two hundred writers produce the Irish diaspora subjects in the four works here reviewed. And two of the editors, O’Sullivan, born in Kilmallock in 1944, a youthful migrant to Britain, and Glazier, an adult migrant to America, both epitomise the curiosity and enterprise of the newer emigrant scholars.

This article examines the actions of the various groups that made up the Ulster Protestant interest from shortly after the end of the First Civil War in England in late 1646 to the defeat of the Engagement in 1648. At the beginning of this period the English parliament took a renewed interest in Ulster, sending men and commanders, which accelerated a process of polarising the hitherto united Ulster British forces along ethnic lines. This culminated in almost unanimous support for the Engagement by the Ulster Scottish élite, while their Ulster English counterparts generally remained loyal to the parliamentary commanders in the province. Within Ulster Scottish society a further division occurred, between the royalist-inclined élite and much of the populace, who followed their Presbyterian ministers in opposing the Engagement. The article attempts to explain why the Ulster Scottish elite made this choice, and seeks to place this series of events within a British/Irish context, exhibiting the interrelated nature of events in each of the three kingdoms from the unique perspective of Protestant Ulster.

The Irish question, in one form or another, became a feature of American public life from the period of the great Irish migration to the United States in the 1840s to the twentieth century. Seemingly each generation saw a version of the Irish struggle for self-government played out in both Ireland and America. By 1920 this struggle, in the shape of the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War, had assumed dramatic proportions.

Many Irish-Americans, anxious to assist and support the nationalist movement in Ireland, resumed their traditional role of raising money for Ireland and attempting to influence the American government to intercede in some way on Ireland’s behalf. In 1919 Eamon de Valera, president of Dáil Íireann, went to the United States to further these objectives. However, serious rifts developed within the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States which caused Irish-Americans to divide into several hostile groups. The result was that during the summer and autumn of 1920, when crown forces in Ireland were escalating their military campaign, the Irish-American nationalist movement was largely ineffectual.

The purpose of this article is to make generally available for the first time a document whose content and context introduce their peculiar leaven to our understanding of a pivotal moment of early modern Irish history, the eve of the collapse of the authority of the ruling peace faction within the Kilkenny-based Confederation of Irish Catholics. The occasion of the document was the official visit to Kilkenny of James Butler, marquis of Ormond, some time near the end of August 1646. This took place at a time when rivalries within the Confederation were running high and the struggle to determine the Confederation’s effective political constituency was coming to a head. While a good case could be made for publication of the document on other grounds — in comprising Ireland’s earliest known surviving example of a speech of civic welcome addressed to a visiting dignitary, it is of special interest to the department of Irish social history concerned with civic performance, pageantry and public display — this is not the aspect chiefly pursued here. Rather, in addition to publishing the speech, this article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its delivery and some of the elements of the larger event in which it centrally participated, before considering the construction that the speech and its circumstances strove to put upon a volatile political situation in the hope — vain, as it proved — of containing it. As an adjunct to its interest in the Confederation’s large-scale public dimensionings of party policy, the article also presents in an appendix another document similarly hitherto unpublished, a set of verses posted upon the gates of Kilkenny at a time when the General Assembly was sitting. The assembly in question, probably the seventh, ran from January to April 1647. The city-gate verses appear with the civic entry speech in the unique manuscript in which it has been preserved.

Political life in Ireland in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was disturbed by three major opposition campaigns. From 1753 to 1756 there was the so-called money bill dispute in which Henry Boyle (later first earl of Shannon) mounted a formidable and largely successful opposition to the designs of the Dublin Castle administration for replacing him as chief undertaker. The years 1769-71 saw a noisy but ineffective opposition to Viscount Townshend’s plans for re-modelling the way Ireland was governed. And from 1778 to 1783 there was the famous patriot opposition led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood which won for Ireland ‘a free trade’ and the ‘constitution of ’82’ The first and last ofthese opposition campaigns have been studied in detail; but the opposition to Townshend has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because the result was so unequivocally a victory for the Castle and hence less ‘heroic’ in its outcome than the other two campaigns. This paper sets out in the first instance to correct this imbalance by examining the reasons for the failure of the Irish opposition to Townshend.

Almost nothing is known of trade between Ireland and the continent during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is true that the existence of direct commercial links can be deduced from isolated references in the state papers and elsewhere, but these give little or no material for constructing a detailed picture. The importance of the wine trade may be inferred from the fact that when customs duties were increased in 1632, wine, along with salt, was the only imported commodity to be affected; from this one may conclude that the administration considered that the quantity of wine imported was sufficiently great for an increased duty to be worthwhile. This is indirect evidence, however. The value of the present document is that it throws some direct light upon the state of an important branch of Irish overseas trade in a particular year. The destruction of all but a few of the Irish port books makes such direct evidence all the more valuable. Mention may here be made of copies of some of the earliest Irish port books which are to be found in the papers of Sir Arthur Ingram who was one of the original farmers for Ireland in 1613. The examination of continental economic arcives may in due course help to fill the gap still futher.

In late 1936, two Irishmen arrived in the Spanish Basque Country. One was General Eoin O'Duffy, signing the terms of agreement for an Irish Brigade to support the military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic. Meanwhile, socialist republican George Gilmore journeyed across the Pyrenees in search of a Basque nationalist priest he had met four years earlier. While O'Duffy was drawn into the conflict by traditionalist monarchists from Navarre, his leftist opponents in Ireland mounted a pro-republic propaganda campaign focused on the war effort of the rival Basque nationalists. In effect, a civil war between Basques became entangled with the legacy of the Irish Civil War, as old rivals such as O'Duffy and Gilmore constructed alliances on opposite sides of the conflict as it played out in this small corner of Spain. This article places a new emphasis on the Basque dimension of Ireland's engagement with the Spanish Civil War and illustrates how it was shaped by earlier Basque-Irish relations.

The point of origin of the ‘Irish historiographical revolution’ initiated by T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards in the 1930s, which issued, among other things, in the foundation of Irish Historical Studies, is customarily located in their experiences together as research students in London University’s Institute of Historical Research. Hitherto, we have known little or nothing of those experiences beyond the recollections of the two principals themselves. This article uses the Institute’s own archive, and other contemporary documentary evidence, including surviving letters from Moody to Edwards, to elucidate the precise influence of the Institute and its staff in moulding their outlook. Rather than asserting some form of ideological indoctrination – for example in propagating an ethos of ‘value-free’ history writing – it argues that what was important was the example of the Institute’s institutional structures (including its Bulletin), which Moody and Edwards determined to replicate in Ireland; and that these structures, emphasising collaboration between historical researchers in pursuit of a common purpose, were themselves of the first importance in influencing the aspiration to create an Irish history free from confessional bias and overt expressions of political prejudice.

In order better to understand the impact of political unrest in Ireland on Irish troops fighting in the First World War, it is necessary to acknowledge that the role of the 1916 Rising has been significantly overestimated, while the influence of the 1914 home rule crisis and the repercussions of the anti-conscription movement have been underestimated. The 1914 home rule crisis significantly impacted on the Germans’ view of the Irish and conditioned the treatment of Irish P.O.W.s from December 1914 onwards. In addition, the post-1916 Rising executions and the conscription crisis had a severe impact on Irish front-line units, while also sapping the morale of other British combatants. The 1916 Rising might have been dismissed as a military operation conceived by a handful of republicans, with little support from the wider population, but the conscription crisis brought about widespread defiance towards British rule throughout the whole of nationalist Ireland. In line with British public opinion, British front-line officers and men strongly resented Ireland’s refusal to support the war effort at such a crucial moment. The consequence was the widespread targeting and stigmatisation of their Irish comrades-in-arms. Some British officers and men resorted to a form of psychological pressure, aimed at the public shaming of Irish troops. This article draws on new primary sources available at The National Archives in London, Dublin City Archives and University of Leeds Library to argue that the 1916 Rising was not the only political event in Ireland to have repercussions for Irish battalions fighting in the First World War.

Between 1879 and 1882, large amounts of relief were dispensed in Ireland by a range of state, private, clerical and political organisations and agencies. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, £800,000 in private charity and up to £2.4 million in government aid was expended in an attempt to alleviate the extreme distress of the period. That expenditure was greater than the £1.2 million in rent reductions secured by the 275,525 tenants who entered the courts of the Land Commission in 1881, factors that are seen as central to the deflation of the Land War. In the historiography of the period, the distribution of this relief is usually only mentioned in passing: R. V. Comerford and R. F. Foster have outlined the high politics of private charities such as the Duchess of Marlborough and Mansion House Funds. The administration of relief at local level has also received limited attention, and much of this scholarship concentrates on structural causes of poverty and the effectiveness of various measures adopted.