The object of the present essay is to suggest that the mainstream tradition of Irish historical scholarship, as it has developed since the 1930s, has been vitiated by a faulty methodological procedure. The study falls into two parts. The first considers a similar exercise conducted in this journal by Dr Steven Ellis in 1986. The intention here is to suggest that Ellis’s analysis of the problem is misconceived. The second part seeks to explore the problem ‘as it really is’ and ultimately to prescribe a remedy. Continuity between the two parts is provided by the fact that the issue comes down to a consideration of the place of nationalism as a formative influence on modern Irish historical scholarship. In short, Ellis sees nationalism as a proactive force in this connexion and identifies ‘whig-nationalist’ preconceptions as the basic source of confusion. The first part of this study, therefore, is concerned to refute that analysis and to show that the evidence adduced by Ellis does not sustain it. The second part argues that the modern tradition actually developed in self-conscious reaction against an earlier nationalist tradition of historical interpretation and aspired to produce ‘value-free’ history in accordance with the criteria of scientific research elaborated in Herbert Butterfield’s The whig interpretation of history. It will be argued that that is precisely the problem.

In the spring of 1616 observers at James I’s court were somewhat startled to learn that an Irish official holding a post below the rank of great office had been appointed lord deputy of Ireland. In the king’s name, English privy councillors announced that Oliver St John, former master of the ordnance in Ireland, had been chosen to succeed Arthur Chichester, the incumbent Irish governor. Preoccupied with notions of hierarchy, the royal court reacted with contempt and shock to the announcement. Edward Sherburne, agent to Dudley Carleton, England’s ambassador to the Hague, perhaps reflects best the contemporary attitude in his biting comment that such an unusual appointment could have only one possible explanation. St John was a distant kinsman of the rising favourite, George Villiers, and Sherburne noted with undertones of cynicism: ‘Sir Oliver St John made lord deputy of Ireland by Villiers’ influence whose power is so great “as what he will, shall be’”.

Robert Dudley Edwards died on 5 June 1988 in Dublin, where he had been born seventy-nine years and one day before. In later life, at least, he would have approved of that exact, spare sentence, because in later life he resolved the conflict between his undisciplined temperament and the discipline of his profession by reducing his role as historian to the task of record keeping. I said as much in a review of his Ireland under the Tudors in 1978, and some weeks later was alarmed to see him making purposefully towards me through a reception crowd, telltale large Paddy held protectively on high. ‘I liked your review’, he shouted across the heads; ‘you were exactly right’. Reaching me, he added in an undertone, ‘they were hoping that I was going to make a scene’. They were, of course, and it was typical of Dudley that he extracted as much satisfaction from disappointing the expectation as he might have done from fulfilling it. Others have told me that he became cantankerous with age, and the evidence is conclusive, but I never experienced anything but generosity from him from beginning to end.

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.

Why the Reformation failed in Ireland was, until recent years, a matter for little debate. That it failed was beyond question and that its failure was inevitable was a premise seldom challenged. For many Irish historians, the root of its failure lay in the unswerving faith of a gallant people who resisted the attempts of a conquering force to impose upon them a creed at once heretical and foreign. Indeed, it was not until Brendan Bradshaw initiated a whole new approach to the history of the sixteenth century that this kind of view began to be firmly discarded. Others, like Nicholas Canny and, more recently, Steven Ellis and Alan Ford, have joined Bradshaw in questioning some of the old orthodoxies. The result of these endeavours has been, above all, to uncover the fact that the course of the Reformation in Ireland and the reasons for its failure were infinitely more complex than we once believed and, rather unexpectedly, one of the most tantalising issues raised by the debates which Bradshaw’s work has provoked has been the problem of precisely when the Reformation may be said to have failed in Ireland. Bradshaw and Canny have conflicting answers to that question and some of them will be considered here.

Throughout much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries linen textile production made an important contribution, in terms of output, exports, employment and capital accumulation, to the economy of north-east Ireland. However, for a brief period of a few decades, from the 1780s to the 1830s, the dominance of linen was challenged by a mechanised cotton industry centred on the Belfast area producing both mill-spun yarn and hand- and machinewoven piece goods. This period witnessed a shift of local resources of capital and labour from linen into cotton and back into linen in the space of half a century.

The story of Belfast’s brief flirtation with cotton is a difficult one to put together. Both narrative and analysis are constrained by a lack of records, especially by a dearth of statistics on inputs and on output. The traditional view has been that the industry was made up of units of production which, smaller than their British rivals and lacking supplies of local coal, produced at an uncompetitive unit cost. Its relatively brief existence was sustained by a combination of war and protective tariffs and with their removal the cotton industry in Belfast, unable to compete with its rivals in Great Britain, quickly disappeared. The validity of this view has been challenged recently. It has been shown that at least for the 1830s when data are available horse power per establishment was not significantly lower in Belfast than for the United Kingdom as a whole; nor was the absence of local supplies of coal a major disadvantage given local wage costs. These revisions cast doubt on the notion that Belfast cotton spinning establishments were inherently uncompetitive. Not every observer is convinced however. Ollerenshaw in his essay on industry in nineteenth-century Ulster remains certain that the exit from cotton spinning was to a large extent forced and that wet spinning was a timely and fortuitous alternative. Similarly Cullen argues that the local industry was uniquely unable to withstand the depression of 1825 and after.

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.

Sir Piers Crosby, knight and baronet, lived for fifty-six years, but it is not perhaps too much to say that only a single day in that life has brought him to historical notice. That day was 28 November 1634. On the previous afternoon, Lord Deputy Wentworth had informed a joint meeting of the two houses of the Irish parliament that his government was not prepared to honour the promise which King Charles I had given to landed proprietors in Ireland six years earlier and would not permit the passage of acts relinquishing historic royal claims to Irish land. When the commons met on 28 November, a majority of the members vented their anger and disappointment by defeating an entirely uncontroversial government bill. Prominent among that majority, their ringleader if Wentworth is to be believed, was a renegade privy councillor, Sir Piers Crosby. That Wentworth’s account of what happened was seriously misleading is well established, and I have examined it elsewhere as an illustration of the proposition that one of Wentworth’s major achievements was to impose his version of the events of his deputyship upon generations of historians, approving and disapproving alike. His influence similarly colours historical impressions of the people with whom he dealt, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest the interpretative difficulties to which that may give rise by reconstructing the shape of the career of one individual who suffered the dual misfortune of crossing Wentworth’s path and being remembered only by what Wentworth wrote of him.

Though the Volunteers had an enormous impact on Irish politics in the years between their formation in the mid 1770s and their dissolution in 1793, there has been comparatively little historical investigation of this phenomenon. One important and problematical matter in need of resolution is the size of the Volunteer force. Contemporary estimates abound, but they are often more valuable for the insight they give into contemporary thinking on Volunteering than reliable guides to the number of Volunteers in Ireland at any given time. In the absence of registers or other schedules of the hundreds of corps that constituted the Volunteers, it is improbable that we shall ever be able to provide absolute answers to the question of just how numerous they were. We are not wholly bereft of documentation, however, and by combining the more trustworthy of contemporary calculations and such lists as exist it is possible to throw much light on the rise and decline of Volunteering in the 1770s and 1780s. One of the most important and most detailed of these lists is the ‘secret’ and little known ‘Return of the Volunteers with private observations’ which was compiled in the early winter of 1784–5 as Dublin Castle readied itself for an attempt to replace this independent and highly politicised paramilitary body with a compliant and non-political militia.

The election contests of 1900 in St Stephen’s Green and South County Dublin were covered in detail by newspapers throughout the British Isles and have been treated as a political watershed by more recent and scholarly commentators. This interest has had a partly personal and biographical inspiration since one of the unionist candidates for South Dublin was the agrarian reformer and junior minister, Horace Plunkett; but the significance, symbolic and actual, of these contests has been seen as extending beyond the participation of one prominent Edwardian Irishman. The defeat of two unionist M.P.s, Plunkett and Campbell, in a fairly static Irish electoral arena would in itself have been worthy of comment. But the association of these men with a constructive administrative programme for Ireland, combined with the fact of their defeat by dissident unionists, gave the contests a broader notoriety and a significance for policy formulation which they would not otherwise have had. With the benefit of hindsight it has also been suggested that the repudiation of Plunkett and Campbell was a landmark in the gradual decline of southern unionism in Ireland. For, though South Dublin briefly returned to the unionist party between 1906 and 1910, the defeats of 1900 effectively marked the end of unionism as a significant electoral movement outside Ulster. After 1900, as the historian W.E.H. Lecky observed, ‘Ulster unionism is the only form of Irish unionism which is likely to count as a serious political force’.

The issue of citizenship played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; but that point was overshadowed by the tendency of those who negotiated the treaty (and the authors who have written about it) to see the issue of ‘common citizenship’ as only one point under the heading of allegiance to the crown and membership of the British Empire. That it was a central issue is clear, however, for at one point in the 1921 negotiations Lloyd George asked, ‘to put it bluntly will you be British subjects or foreigners? You must be either one or the other.’ Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish delegation, answered: ‘in our proposal we have agreed to “reciprocity of civic rights”. We should be Irish and you would be British and each would have equal rights as citizens in the country of the other.’ That exchange caused the British to ask the Irish for a direct answer to the question, would they ‘acknowledge this common citizenship?’. The Irish, however, only responded with the words, ‘Ireland would undertake such obligations as are compatible with the status of a free partner’ in ‘the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. Those words did not satisfy the English negotiators, but in the end the Irish accepted an agreement in which the words ‘common citizenship’ appeared in the oath to the king which all members of Dáil Éireann would have to take. That satisfied the British demands on allegiance to the crown.

The repeal of much of the penal code in the final decades of the eighteenth century has often been seen as falling neatly into two phases — an initial series of moderate relief acts between 1774 and 1782 and a more radical and controversial phase in the 1790s, halted by the failure of Fitzwilliam’s attempt at a fundamental restructuring of the Irish system of government in 1795. The cautious and limited relief measures of the earlier phase of legislation possess a beguiling symmetry and simplicity when seen as finished pieces of legislation forming part of a series. The provision of an oath of loyalty designed for catholics in 1774 and the removal of the most restrictive parts of the laws preventing catholics from acquiring landed property in 1778 were complemented by the removal, in 1782, of most of the laws restricting catholic worship, education and the clergy. It is easy to establish a division between the removal of obsolete and almost unenforceable economic and religious restrictions in the first phase of relief and the much wider issues involved in challenging the exclusion of catholics from the legal profession, the army, the university, corporations, the franchise and parliament. Yet it would be a mistake to see the first phase of catholic relief as in any way inevitable in the period 1774–82. It is often argued — with considerable justice — that the Irish government’s conversion to catholic relief in the late 1770s was a direct result of decisions taken in Great Britain to reward and encourage the loyalty of English catholics at a time of crisis. An examination of the domestic politics surrounding the relief acts passed between 1774 and 1782 modifies this view considerably. Although the Irish government was decisively influenced by policies formed in London during the first phase of relief legislation, this was not true of the Irish parliament. Irish perspectives on the place of catholics in the state and on the extent of relief were very different from the British government’s viewpoint. This disparity had a considerable effect on the shape of the legislation which finally emerged, and even more on the proposals drawn up by Irish members of parliament actively involved in drafting the legislation affecting catholics.

What follows is a list — covering items published between 1900 and 1986 — of serious accounts of the history of important architectural projects undertaken in Ireland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. It is intended to be comprehensive in respect of monographs, collective works and articles in non-Irish periodicals, but in respect of Irish periodicals it is a supplement to Richard J. Hayes, Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: articles in Irish periodicals (9 vols, Boston, 1970).

None of the above definitions is rigidly adhered to: much is included which falls outside their limits, but an attempt has been made to include everything that falls within them. The following have not been comprehensively included:

(1) Monographs on non-resident architects whose careers, notwithstanding Irish commissions, were mainly abroad, e.g. Robert Adam, G.E. Street, Edwin Lutyens. This is partly because such architects are so numerous (there is evidence of over a hundred British architects having professional contacts with Ireland between 1750 and 1850) and partly because they are already well served bibliographically, e.g. by Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600–1840 (London, 1978);

(2) studies of the foreign careers of Irish architects, e.g. James Hoban, Eileen Gray;

(3) studies of vernacular architecture (but see entry under this heading in the index);

(4) contemporary reviews or criticism of buildings;

(5) reviews of books;

(6) printed primary sources, such as J.T. Gilbert, Calendar of ancient records of Dublin… (19 vols, Dublin, 1889–1944).

The chronic factionalism and dissension which had plagued Irish nationalist politics after the fall of Parnell in 1890 was finally brought to an end with the reunion of the Irish parliamentary party in January 1900. During the 1890s the monolithic parliamentary movement of Parnell’s time had degenerated into three separate and warring factions. One of these factions, led for most of this period by John Dillon, consisted of the majority of those who had opposed Parnell’s continued leadership in 1890. A breakaway group of anti-Parnellites, led by T.M. Healy, had adopted both a clericalist and a localist position in relation to nationalist politics, thus separating themselves from the secular and centralised structure of the majority party. The third faction consisted of the supporters of Parnell, led by John Redmond, but by 1897 these Parnellites had split into two groups as a result of differences between Redmond and Harrington over the issue of reunion with the anti-Parnellites. With the formerly impressive edifice of parliamentary nationalism thus split into four fragments, and with two leaders in particular — Healy and Redmond — openly frustrating any moves towards reunion, most nationalists must have felt further than ever removed from the prospect of an effective, united political movement.