Recently Mr Charles Webster has urged a less restrictive view of seventeenth-century scientific development, allotting a more important role to Samuel Hartlib and his circle. An examination of scientific activity in Ireland during the interregnum offers support for Dr Webster’s argument. This article will attempt to add to what is known of Hartlib, his friends and their interests by considering their activities in Ireland. Relating those activities to the gradual diffusion of experimental science in seventeenthcentury Ireland produces a picture rather different from that offered by Dr K. T. Hoppen in his study of the Dublin Philosophical Society’s origin.

In January 1649, after the conclusion of the second peace treaty between James Butler, marquis of Ormond, the king’s intermediary, and representatives of the Confederate Catholics, Ormond addressed the General Assembly in Kilkenny: ‘There is a door, and that a large one, not left, but purposely set open, to give you entrance by your future merits to whatsoever of honour or other advantage you can reasonably wish.’ The treaty was signed on 17 January; thirteen days later, Charles I was executed. The ‘door’ of opportunity for Irish Catholics was firmly shut.

The political leadership of the independent state that emerged after 1920 was formed in the years after the fall of Parnell in 1891. The cultural atmosphere of the period in which the new leaders had grown up was suffused with a nationalist and anti-modernist romanticism, a sense that a civilisation was perhaps dying and a scepticism about the possibility or even desirability of mass democracy As has been argued elsewhere, the young men and women who were to lead the separatist movement were children of their time. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, they sensed that the twentieth century would bring great changes; they anticipated with dread or longing the great wars that so many writers predicted; they tended to rebel against their elders, often in the name of ideals inculcated by those elders; they tended toward a romantic and messianic nationalism.' They tended also to think moralistically rather than scientifically; their social thought was derived from ethics rather than from politics or economics. The culture from which they came was dominated by a catholic world-view, and their real intellectual mentors were the priests of the catholic church.

This paper deals with the obscure adventures of a minor official and petty landowner of unremarkable birth and little influence. The details of these adventures, which have for so long been forgotten, and which were once so assiduously concealed, may seem hardly worth the labour of investigation. And yet many statesmen of the seventeenth century attempted such an investigation, including Wentworth himself. Indeed it is no overstatement to say that this examination was a major pre-occupation of the great deputy in the first two years of his appointment.

By Wentworth’s time, Richard Boyle, the minor official in question, had become earl of Cork and lord treasurer of Ireland. He had been one of the lords justices who ruled Ireland before Wentworth’s arrival and had come close to achieving the deputyship itself. He was also the leader of the planter party and enjoyed a rent-roll of £20,000 a year to give reality to his authority. In short he towered over his rivals and enjoyed an influence, founded on both position and wealth, which permeated every part of Irish society.

The primary aim of this paper is to assess the role of the Roman Catholic clergy in agricultural co-operative development, drawing on evidence from the last decade of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century. It is hardly possible, however, to treat such activity in isolation from the manifold preoccupations of rural society, as in practice no clear demarcation existed between economic and non-economic activity. An attempt is made to place such clerical activity in the cultural context of rural society, while simultaneously paying attention to the specific ideological, pastoral and economic pre-occupations of the clergy, and while treating the latter as a distinctive social category with affiliations both within and beyond the rural community.

In 1967 Fr Walter Forde, an activist in the field of youth welfare work, noted ‘signs of unrest’ amongst Irish youths growing up in the sixties. He identified the ways in which they were ‘being influenced by English teenage culture’:

The scope of this study may be briefly indicated. The central subject is the conditions of labour in the spinning mills and weaving factories of the Belfast linen industry during the period 1850—1900. This involves a consideration of such questions as the number of hours worked, the dangers to health and life associated with the character of the processes, and state and private attempts directed towards the amelioration of conditions. As an account of working conditions would be unreal without some reference to earnings, an attempt has been made to indicate the course of monetary and real wages during the period. As some knowledge of the general development of the industry is essential to an understanding of the problems investigated, the paper begins with an outline of this development.

Though the organisation of the linen industry was affected by the advent of capitalism before the end of the eighteenth century, it was not until 1829 that there was any fundamental change in technique. In that year Mulholland of Belfast, inspired by John Hinds, substituted the manufacture of linen for that of cotton and applied steam power to flax spinning, by the wet process.1 This individual act of enterprise was the prelude to a half century of rapid development. Another decide elapsed before any attempt was made to apply steam power to linen weaving and even then progress was slow.

This article examines how anti-Semitism influenced republican politics in revolutionary Ireland. It looks at Irish republican attitudes toward Jews, including examples of anti-Semitism. Jews were a visible minority in Ireland and one that was sometimes seen as unionist politically. This article illustrates how conspiracy theories about Jewish influence sometimes featured in Irish nationalist tropes, but were far more common in British and unionist discourses regarding events in Ireland. It also shows how individual Jews took part in revolutionary activities, even as some republicans expressed suspicion about them. Outside Ireland, Irish revolutionaries interacted with Jews in several locations, particularly the United States. There was often cooperation in these settings and both groups expressed solidarity towards one another.

The Arroasian order was one of the most important of the twelfth-century congregations of canons regular of St Augustine. The development of the institute of the canons regular may be said to have had two phases. From early christian times it was comparatively common for communities of priests, forming the staff of cathedral or large city churches, to imitate the monastic rule of life. In the general disorder which followed upon the barbarian invasions this practice disappeared. It was revived again under Charlemagne, only to suffer a similar fate on the break-up of his empire. At this stage we find secular priests performing collegiate and parochial work while living a regular life under a rule usually given them by a bishop.

Contemporary printed sources for economic history begin to become numerous from the early eighteenth century. The wealth of this printed material as well as the survival of the rarer specimens of the literature only in scattered and in some instances unexpected locations make the task of the research worker or historian an arduous and time-consuming one. Moreover, except where there are separate chronological catalogues of collections it is difficult, especially in the larger libraries such as the British Museum and the National Library, Dublin, not to overlook many relevant items. A bibliography of this material was first projected by Henry Higgs as one of a series of companion volumes to his Bibliography of economics, 1751-1775, published in 1935. The volume recently edited by Mr Hansonl is a revision and expansion of the galley proof of Higgs’s unpublished volume for the period 1701-1750. Meeting a real need, it will be welcomed. Its aim is to ‘include every new English work on economic affairs’ in the first half of the eighteenth century. Its use will save researchers much laborious consultation of indexes, and will greatly facilitate the location of the rarer items, which are frequently available only in a single collection.

In the harvest of 1845 a disease, hitherto unknown in Ireland, phytophthora infestans, attacked the potato crop. The disease had made its appearance some years previously in north America and shortly afterwards in Europe. There is reason to believe that it already existed in south America, and it is possible that its failure to reach Europe with the early-introduced tubers was due to diseased tubers rotting during the long voyages under ‘ sail ’. The progress of the blight in European countries in the summer and early autumn of 1845 was reported in the Dublin Evening Post, which, without raising any serious alarm, pointed out the danger to the crop in Ireland. The seriousness of a failure of the staple food of the majority of the population must have been clear to every man struck by that possibility.

‘But the Irish have no philosophical historian’ was the taunt of David Hume, and so of course enlightened Irishmen of the eighteenth century were determined to have one. A great European audience awaited any thoughtful, elegant and dignified history like Hume’s of England andRobertson’s of Scotland. An indispensable mark of the ‘philosophical historian’ was that he could rise above religious partisanship, as Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson seemed to do; but for eighteenth-century Irishmen this required an enormous effort of mind and feeling—Irish society was still drastically rent by its religious antagonisms. Protestants wrote histories that were alive with catholic rebellions and massacres; they justified the penal laws as necessary protection against an unforgivably and ineradicably rebellious people. Catholics wrote histories to protest against the penal laws; they laboured to show that the rebellions and massacres were really provoked by protestants and that most past troubles were caused either by the protestants themselves or by the unfortunate division of the country, by law, into two hostile bodies.

Although there has been a continuous Irish presence at the Cape of Good Hope since the late eighteenth century, the chroniclers of the Irish diaspora have until the late 1980s ignored the continent of Africa. This was in part because relatively few Irish migrants ventured to Africa, but it is also the consequence of two other factors. The vast majority of Irish immigrants to Africa in the nineteenth century went to South Africa, a region which, with some exceptions, has been academically isolated for a generation. Then within South Africa there is much still to be learnt about the nature of English-speaking society in the region. While the meticulous analysis of black and Afrikaner history and society, and of related economic history, has dominated South African historiography for some two decades, professional academics have too often left the field of South African English-speaking studies to the amateur historian and the antiquarian. Thus what in Canada or Australia would be regarded as mainline historical research has in South Africa been sidelined in the name of historical relevancy. In fact an analysis of Irish settlement in southern Africa fills an important gap in the general survey of Irish emigration to the empire and reveals a pattern of Irish settlement very different from other regions of Irish migration.

Historians of Ireland continue to place exceptional reliance on the ‘cultural’ explanation of economic, social and political behaviour. In many cases, appeal to supposedly common characteristics of ‘the Irish’ has provided a glib substitute for more rigorous analysis of the interaction between mentality and performance. The nature of Irish ethnicity is postulated rather than explained or demonstrated, so that arguments incorporating such postulates stand or fall according to the plausibility rather than documentation of the writer’s vision of ‘Irishness’. A recent and beguiling example is Joseph Lee’s postulate of the ‘begrudger mentality’, whereby Ireland’s relatively poor economic performance is attributed to this supposedly ‘direct inheritance from . . . traditional Ireland’. Lee sketches an anatomy of ‘traditional Ireland’ which might have generated envy rather than healthy competitiveness, and proceeds to develop with far more elaboration consequences which might have arisen from begrudgery. What he fails to demonstrate is the actual prevalence of this ‘mentality’ in either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ Ireland: this we must accept, either intuitively (if Irish) or on trust (if foreign). The logical crudity of this form of explanation calls to mind the corner-cutting of nationalist myth-makers and folklorists.

The G.A.A. was founded as a consequence of an article, ‘A word about Irish athletics’, that appeared in United Ireland on 11 October 1884. The writer, almost certainly Michael Cusack, a Dublin teacher, bewailed the fact that traditional Irish games had been abandoned because of English rule : ‘the hated and hitherto dominant race drove the Irish people from their trysting places at the cross-roads and hurling-fields back to their cabins’; the Irish had become effete, pursuing fripperies and fashion, or, if they still practised athletics, did so under the control of an alien English Amateur Athletic Association where the main objective was to degrade the Irish by forcing them to compete in, and be defeated at, sports unfamiliar to them. The remedy was for ‘the Irish people to take the management of their games into their own hands’.

The phenomenon of ‘unknown’ infant deaths addressed in this article was first explored in the course of research on fatalities arising from political violence during the Irish revolution of 1916–1921. Our data are derived from the General Register of Death Indices (G.R.D.I.), held in the General Register Office, Dublin, which are organised alphabetically, and which form an official record of deaths registered either by relatives of the deceased or by medical personnel. When infant ‘unknown’ fatalities were extracted to form a discrete database they showed a curious gender disparity. There were 100 male infant fatalities recorded for every seventy-eight females in the thirty-two counties over the five-year period. On extending the study to 1932, the same ratio was prevalent in the overall dataset of 895 ‘unknown infants’ drawn from the G.R.D.I. (a dataset which excludes the six counties of Northern Ireland for the period from1922). Initial research into the gender imbalance opened out wider questions concerning social mores regarding illegitimacy, and the extent of medical and lay knowledge of how newborn infants might be brought to death.

What is exciting about looking at women’s history in nineteenth-century Ireland is the great wealth of material which is available for study and research. Yet very little relevant work has been published. The reasons for this neglect are manifold, and include a basic indifference on the part of most academics to the role played by women in Irish history, which has resulted in the general exclusion of women from historical discourse. The lack of courses recognising the history of women has further relegated their study to the periphery. In Ireland historians, and particularly historians of women, have yet to establish a narrative and an explanatory and interpretative framework which includes Irish women. Through the work of historians in other countries, we have various conceptual frameworks within which to operate and many hypotheses to test with regard to the situation of women in Ireland. The areas for research are extensive. Here I intend to look generally at a number of aspects of women’s lives which have been investigated to some degree and to suggest sources which can be used to extend these investigations. I also wish to look at other issues which have received no attention but which would add considerably to our understanding, not only of women, but of the complex realities which made up nineteenth-century Irish society.

Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.

As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.

The title of this essay draws on a quotation from an article reflecting on the 1919–22 ‘crisis of empire’ written by the late J. A. (Jack) Gallagher (one half of Robinson and Gallagher, the finest double act in British imperial historiography). The complete sentence from which the title is derived reads as follows: ‘But for us the road to Asia lies through the swing doors of the Grafton Hotel in Dublin, one of the cover headquarters of the revolutionary Irish Government’. From time to time, alas, even Gallagher (like Homer) nodded, and it has to be said that his typically arresting image of the route to Asia is somewhat occluded by the fact that there is not, and never has been, a Grafton Hotel in Dublin. (He was evidently thinking of the Gresham Hotel.) Yet the underlying point of his image is sound.