Few Irish parliaments were more important than that of 1560. It recognised Elizabeth Tudor’s title to the crown of Ireland and authorised the reform of the Irish church. Yet the sparse documentary record of its proceedings has lent itself to wildly differing interpretations. Controversy has centred upon the manner in which the ecclesiastical legislation reached the statute books, and the disposition of the bishops towards it. Even today, long after the interdenominational debate has ended, there is no consensus among historians on this very difficult subject.

In the most comprehensive treatment to date of the 1560 parliament Robert Dudley Edwards concluded that fraud and deception were employed to force the queen’s ecclesiastical legislation through a recalcitrant House of Commons. However, the opposition of the bishops in the upper house was insurmountable and the parliament was quickly prorogued without its legislative programme being sanctioned.

This study explores how power over primary and post-primary education was contested between a traditional Catholic elite and the Irish state during a period of far-reaching educational reform. The interaction between successive ministers for education and the Catholic bishops was a constant feature of the politics of educational expansion, but it was an uneasy and volatile relationship, which sometimes shaded into hostility. Power was contested between a newlyassertive Department of Education and the clerical managers or religious orders who traditionally controlled the schools. The Catholic Church did not react to policy change as a monolithic entity: divisions emerged within the traditional elite under the strain of adapting to unprecedented policy change, underlined by significant tensions between the bishops and the Catholic managerial authorities. A traditional consensus on the predominance of the Catholic Church in education disappeared, to be replaced by a new balance of power in which the state both contested with traditional stakeholders and collaborated uneasily with them to advance educational reform.

One of the bitterest fruits of human conflict is the resort to massacre. From the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, combatants have regularly attempted to defeat their enemies through acts of indiscriminate killing. The history of early modern European colonial expansion is replete with such incidents. The remembering and recounting of them has become the stuff of historical and political controversy. The aim of this article is not to review these painful episodes, but to examine the sixteenth-century context in which these resorts to massacre occurred; to focus on one particular atrocity that achieved some notoriety in Ireland in the early modern period; and to suggest that a now largely forgotten episode, at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578, was part of a pattern of conquest which implicated not only the soldiers and settlers who served in the Gaelic localities, but also the upper echelons of the English administration in Ireland. This pattern was accompanied by an apologetic ideology of civility and savagery best reflected in a central text, John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland. Indeed, Derricke’s text adds weight to the conclusion that the atrocity at Mullaghmast in 1578 implicates no less a figure than Sir Henry Sidney, the quintessential renaissance English official in Ireland. Mullaghmast is important not only because it demonstrates the officially sanctioned brutality of the conquest, but also because it raises the question of how memory and history are constructed.

The phenomenon of religious revival has attracted considerable attention from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. In the Irish context, this is especially true in the case of Presbyterianism whose origin is often traced to the Six Mile Water revival of 1625 and is closely associated with the spectacular revival of 1859. The term revival is usually understood as describing a situation in which religious concerns and feelings acquire a new urgency and which may result in large numbers of conversions and unusual physical and emotional behaviour. An older tradition of interpretation saw religious revivals in terms of fanaticism or mass hysteria, stimulated by political and economic upheaval.

It is not surprising that Raymond Williams should cite Lady Morgan’s comment in 1818 that Ireland had for long been governed by a ‘bureaucratie or office tyranny’ as an early example of the use of the term. Dublin Castle, ‘the architectural emblem of England’s rule over Ireland’, with its extensive coercive and financial powers, appeared to many as a ‘congested district of impervious officialdom’ This unique apparatus of state was characterised by The Times as a ‘narrow bureaucracy saturated with bad traditions of race and creed’ The term ‘bureaucracy’ formed part of mid-Victorian political rhetoric. It cannot be seen as a sociological distortion of administrative history resulting from a rigid application of Max Weber’s ‘ideal type’, an analytical concept central to his writings on bureaucracy Dublin Castle represented a pure bureaucracy of a type the English press feared and assumed to be a continental aberration. To the nationalists, the Irish form of rule was seen as a ‘nominal parliamentary government really ruled by a bureaucracy’ The political structure within which the bureaucracy operated rendered it unrepresentative and unaccountable to parliament, and a constitutional enigma in growing debates on ministerial and civil service power.

Although Gaelic sports have been played in an organised fashion for over a century in the United States, academic research on the development and role of these sports among the Irish diaspora has been extremely limited. This is hardly surprising, given the more general disregard of the significance of sport in the burgeoning literature examining the Irish experience in America. In its most general aspect, this study seeks to redress this neglect. Drawing predominantly on archival material from the John J. Burns Library at Boston College and from Boston Public Library, the article charts and explores the processes involved in the transfer of Gaelic sports from Ireland to one of the most significant focal points of Irish immigration, Boston. This analysis not only identifies and examines the key agencies and individuals responsible for the early development of Irish sports in Boston, but also seeks to explore the role they played in the promotion and preservation of a distinctively Irish ethnic identity. In particular, the article assesses the extent to which Gaelic games have functioned as an arena in which Irish nationalism was fostered in the greater Boston area during the 1880s. Before turning to these central concerns, it is important to understand the social milieu in which these games developed. Thus the article begins with a brief context-setting discussion that charts Irish emigration to Boston and offers some insights into the socio-economic and political environment encountered by the Irish on completion of their journey.

Modern historical writing on the events of 1688 to 1691 in Ireland has been characterised by a sense that the two sides in that conflict were acting out predetermined roles. There is in the writing no doubt that Protestants would rally to the cause of William III and that Catholics would be the loyal supporters of the deposed James II. Roy Foster has characterised the ‘war of the two kings’ as a clash of two cultures: ‘one Catholic, French-connected, romantically Jacobite … and temperamentally Gaelic’, and the other that of the Protestant ‘Ascendancy’ created by ‘the traumatic events of James’s short reign and its aftermath’. For J. G. Simms political advantage was the key to the events of 1688–90: Catholics naturally supported James since to do so offered ‘an unusually favourable prospect of establishing their predominance’; and in the Protestant mind, since ‘William was lawful king of England, he was automatically king of Ireland … [and] would not abandon the English stake in Ireland’. Put more starkly by J. C. Beckett, ‘the struggle which reached its climax at the Boyne and ended at Limerick ran a clear course from the accession of James II’. Modern historians were not the only ones to make the assumption that Irish Protestants would support William and Catholics James. Many contemporaries outside Ireland made a similar equation. The English Jacobite John Stevens seems to have believed there was a definite link between religion and political loyalty when he arrived in Ireland in 1689 to serve James. On his arrival at Naas he was allocated a billet by the sovereign of the town, but the innkeeper refused to admit him. ‘The man being an Irishman and a Catholic’, Stevens noted, ‘made his ill carriage towards us appear more strange but his religion and country he thought would bear him out’. Arriving at Dublin he approached his prominent Jacobite friends, but ‘friendship was grown so rare in Ireland as loyalty in England’. He was relieved from apparent destitution by ‘the hands I least expected it from’, a New English Protestant who lent him £10.

Despite the extensive scholarly literature on both the Great Famine in Ireland and the Famine immigration to the United States, little is known about precisely which Irish men and women emigrated from Ireland in the Famine era. This article makes use of a new dataset comprised of 18,000 Famine-era emigrants (2 per cent of the total) who landed at the port of New York from 1846 to 1854 and whose ship manifests list their Irish county of origin. The data is used to estimate the number of emigrants from each county in Ireland who arrived in New York during the Famine era. Because three-quarters of all Irish immigrants intending to settle in the United States took ships to New York, this dataset provides the best means available for estimating the origins of the United States’s Famine immigrants. The authors find that while the largest number of Irish immigrants came from some of Ireland’s most populous counties, such as Cork, Galway, and Tipperary, surprisingly large numbers also originated in Counties Cavan, Meath, Dublin, and Queen’s County, places not usually associated with the highest levels of emigration. The data also indicates that the overall level of emigration in the Famine years was significantly higher than scholars have previously understood.

In the general descriptions of Ireland written in Elizabethan and early Stuart times there are constant, although casual, references to the woodlands, Moryson, Perrott, Bagenal, Speede and Boate all allude to areas which were wooded or carried woody scrub on bog. Their descriptions are too general to be of use in assessing the probable extent of the woodland that remained at the end of the sixteenth-century, but they are pointers to the distribution. The same is true of contemporary maps although they are rather more helpful in that, in spite of their distortion of distance and configuration, they may indicate the position of a wood relative to physical features such as hills, rivers or bays.

The period between the Kildare rebellion and the plantation of Ulster marks the final phase of a distinct political system. During these years the English administration in Ireland made strenuous efforts to reform Gaelic society. This paper aims to show that indigenous society was not inevitably doomed to submit before a superior Renaissance state. Indeed it proved flexible in responding to the challenge and was itself in the process of ‘modernisation’. This process was most marked in Ulster which was the strongest Gaelic region and the crown’s most intractable problem. The northern province was differentiated from the other Gaelic regions of Ireland by its political and physical geography. Ulster was an homogeneous cultural zone and contained the powerful polities of Tyrone, ruled by the O’Neills, and Tirconnell, ruled by the O’Donnells. Guarding the southern approaches of the province was a barrier of rough terrain interrupted by lakes and passes.

The story of the Fenian rising in 1867 may be regarded as starting with the expulsion of James Stephens from the headship of one of the two factions of American Fenians in December 1866. Stephens tried to postpone a rising planned to take place before 1 January 1867. At that time there was vocal dissatisfaction within the rank and file at the lack of action. The Dublin organisation itself was divided on the question. According to the report of Superintendent Ryan of the Dublin Metropolitan Police in January 1867:

Thomas J. Kelly, a former captain in the Federal army now bearing a title of colonel in Fenian terminology, and who had been in Ireland in early 1866, could now count on considerable support in Ireland. A bigger problem he faced was that of bringing the Fenians in Britain under his leadership as soon as he returned from America. Those Americans already in England (largely men who had fled from Ireland after the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (29 Vict., c. 4) in February 1866), as well as many of the Irish Fenians there, already entertained doubts about the future purpose of an organisation guided by a remote leadership in America. As a result, the American officers and the Fenians in England decided to launch a rising without waiting for future American help, and for this purpose they formed a Directory in England not later than early February but more probably in January 1867.

During the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s the perception of the Stormont government as fascist was widespread among nationalists—a perception expressed in Nazi salutes and the chant ‘S.S.—R.U.C.’ when confronting the police. The historical reference this perception embodied, however, was less than comprehensive. In particular, it obscured the attraction that fascism and movements inspired by fascism had for many people in Britain and Ireland in the inter-war years; and while fascism did not give rise to a movement of major importance in Northern Ireland, it nevertheless had a more significant presence there than has sometimes been thought. For instance, Robert Fisk's view that the only fascists in the north were Italian émigrés, grouped in Belfast and Derry, is inaccurate. In fact at various times in this period there existed branches of the British Fascists (B.F.), representatives of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (B.U.F.), together with a brief but significant initiative on Northern Ireland by the leader of the Blueshirt movement in the Irish Free State, General Eoin O'Duffy. Unlike the local representatives of Italian fascism, who confined their activities chiefly to greeting visiting Italian dignitaries and maintaining links with the homeland, these groups were very much concerned with domestic politics. Fascism in Northern Ireland, however, has other claims to attention than those occasioned by their activities alone, for it also serves to illuminate the neglected area of B.U.F. attitudes to Ireland in general.

One of the most important influences on Irish life during the past century and a half has been the Roman Catholic church. This is true not only in Ireland, but also in Irish emigrant communities. What I hope to demonstrate is that the emergence of the catholic church in Lancashire as a primary social institution. which fostered the growth of a community identity, gave the immigrant Irish a valuable sense of constancy and continuity and paralleled developments in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. But the church’s influence, which was scarcely diminished, and was perhaps strengthened, by the experience of emigration, must have been founded on a very sound base to be in a position to assume such a dynamic role among the Irish in Ireland and the Irish living elsewhere.

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

‘ … it is most certain that from I Jacobi to this day so long as Ireland hath had any degree of peace there hath been every year as great an importation of Irish cattle as there is now, and this he that will take the pains to examine the customs books shall find … ’

Sir Heneage Finch, in the house of commons, 18 October 1665

The Tudor subjugation of Ireland which was accomplished by the very end of Elizabeth's reign left the Irish economy in a depressed condition. But conquest brought more than economic dislocation. The success of English arms involved the destruction of the old Irish social system and permitted the development of a much more thorough programme of plantation than had been possible during the sixteenth century. The Ulster plantation, which followed the flight of the earls in 1607, was succeeded by smaller plantations in Leinster, Connaught, Wexford and King's County before 1641.

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

The first reliable statutory census of the population of Ireland was taken in 1821 and started the decennial series. An earlier census authorised by statute had been taken between 1813 and 1815. The results, however, were defective and neither printed nor presented to parliament. The causes or this failure air discussed below.

The first decennial census of Great Britain (taken in 1801) was a success, and a bill to take a single census of Ireland was introduced on 31 January 1806 ‘to assimilate the laws and regulations of Ireland to those of this country as far as it is just and expedient’. It was thrown out at the first readiilg. During the commons’ debate on the second census of Great Britain (taken in 1811), several members deprecated that Ireland had again been excluded and attributed this to ‘a species of timidity on the part of certain persons who were afraid even of letting themselves know the real amount of the inhabitants of the sister kingdom’. More probably, however, Ireland was omitted because of the formidable practical difficulties her inclusion would have presented. A second bill for a census of Ireland, which became law on 18 July 1812, made light of these difficulties or suggested how they might be overcome.

The centre stage of early nineteenth-century Irish politics has long been held by Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association. This may be justifiable, as O’Connell created a mass constitutional movement for liberal reform out of a Catholic, peasant population on the fringe of Europe. Less justifiable is the single perspective that sees the struggle for Catholic emancipation as Catholic Ireland’s battle with the British establishment. In 1828 and 1829 there was also a massive Protestant political campaign in Ireland. This centred on the new Brunswick Clubs and Ulster. Yet anti-Catholic and Ulster politics merit few sentences in narratives of these years. Indeed, there is a general neglect of Ulster politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Presbyterianism, the evangelical revival, Catholicism, sectarian conflict, the Orange Order, the Irish Yeomanry, the economy and the growth of Belfast as a city have all received detailed treatment, but the nuances of politics remain vague. The Catholic Association appears to have reduced Ulster’s importance in shaping political developments in the island as a whole from its high-water mark of the 1790s. This does not, however, justify simply leaving Ulster out of the story. This article aims to look at the Ulster anti-emancipation campaign and to correct the skewed picture of Ireland in these years.

As a proportion of their total population in Ireland, the number of protestants who became committed to the home-rule cause was undoubtedly small; and that being so, their role in nationalist politics in this period has usually been either overlooked, minimised, or misrepresented. Indeed one I recent writer has claimed that in Ulster ‘almost nobody — except my grandfather’ was prepared to support Gladstone's first home-rule bill.

The purpose of this paper, though, is not only to describe the extent of protestant support for home rule, but to attempt an assessment of the influence in home-rule politics of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (hereafter I.P.H.R.A.). As a protestant organisation it both exercised an influence on British liberal thinking on home rule and provided a perspective on Irish nationalism that was, in some very important respects, different from that of the overwhelmingly catholic National League.

From 1740–1922, as many as seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. Arguably, if there are any patterns in modern Irish history, a cultural analysis of this vast flow may help to reveal them. For while the Irish question is usually defined in Anglo/Irish terms (those of conflict) it has more universal import as the adjustment of Irish identity and culture, both personal and national, to the demands of the modern industrialising world. Emigration afforded one such response; Irish nationalism another; Irish American nationalism linked the two. More humans were directly and articulately involved in the migratory response than in the nationalist, both cumulatively over time and in the degree of freely active personal involvement. If scholars such as Robert Kennedy, Cormac Ó Gráda and others have studied emigration in terms of Ireland’s economic modernization, we would suggest that it may be studied culturally as a revealing cross-section of Ireland’s attendant psychic modernisation.