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.

This article offers some reflections on the processes of nation-making and state formation as they affected the oldest ethnic and cultural grouping in the British Isles, that of the Gaedhil, roughly in the period 1450–1650, and examines the ways in which these processes have been portrayed by historians. At the present day the Gaelic language remains the normal medium of communication in small areas of western Ireland and western Scotland; and in respect of political developments in both Scotland and Ireland, Gaelic customs and culture have exercised a much more substantial influence. Despite these similarities, there remain significant differences between British and Irish historians in the ways in which the Gaelic contribution to nation-making and state formation have been presented.

A basic distinction advanced by historians both of Ireland and Scotland has been one between the Gaelic peoples inhabiting Ireland and those resident in Scotland. It can be argued that this may reflect the relative importance of the Gaelic contribution to the making of two separate kingdoms, and ultimately two separate states; but it also means that the wider process of interaction and assimilation between Gaedhil and Gaill is split into separate Irish and Scottish experiences. In theory, these two Gaelic experiences should provide material for a comparative study of a particularly illuminating kind, but in practice other historiographical influences have generally militated against this kind of comparative history. One such is the more marginal position of Gaelic studies within Scottish historiography than is the case in Ireland. Considering that half of Scotland was still Gaelic-speaking in 1700, for instance, it is remarkable how few Scottish historians seem able to make use of Gaelic sources. Another is the practice of establishing separate departments of history in the universities for the teaching of national history. This has meant, for instance, that students are usually taught that portion of the Gaedhil/Gaill interaction process which relates to the ‘nation’ by specialist teachers of national history. Yet, since these national surveys reflect modern nations and modern national boundaries, students are trained to study Irishmen and Scots in the making rather than to consider how the inhabitants of late medieval Gaeldom might have viewed developments in the wider Gaelic world. Arguably, behind these approaches lies the influence of the modern nation-state. Scotland and Northern Ireland remain part of a multi-national British state which is dominated by England.

The system of papal provision (the practice of providing clerks to benefices with or without cure) was one of the most controversial features of papal relations with the European monarchies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Secular rulers naturally wished to have some control in the matter of clerical appointment, particularly when the benefice concerned was a bishopric or a great abbey. During the Western schism of the fourteenth century kings and princes had made gains in certain matters both of jurisdiction and administration at the expense of the central authority of the church. The struggles between the papacy and the councils in the first half of the fifteenth century left the secular rulers favourably placed to consolidate these advantages, obtained in many cases either by concession or by arrogation, until the crisis of the Reformation.

D. A. Binchy stated that ‘the idea of a town, with a corporate personality distinct from that of the ruler, was quite foreign to the Gaelic mind until the Scandinavians set up their “cities” in Dublin, Limerick, Waterford and elsewhere’. Numerous scholars have disagreed with Binchy’s assessment and have claimed instead that Irish monasteries were evolving, whether before Viking settlement in Ireland or somehow as a response to that presence, into what have been variously called ‘protourban’ sites, ‘pre-urban nuclei’, ‘centres of … industrial activity and local trade’, or simply ‘monastic towns’. The term ‘monastic town’ has been in use for many years, and is now part of the standard vocabulary in discussions of early medieval Ireland. From scholarly works to popular publications for tourist consumption, the Irish monastic town has been a known and accepted entity. Armagh, Downpatrick, Kildare and Clonmacnoise are the most commonly cited examples, and Charles Doherty has argued that these monasteries were beginning to function as urban centres by the ninth century. Many scholars would agree that by the tenth and eleventh centuries, possibly in response to Scandinavian urban settlement in Ireland, certain Irish monasteries were urban centres themselves. Brian Graham has raised a number of objections to the concept of the monastic town in Ireland, but his work has remained unacknowledged; others have recently called for a critical reassessment of the theory, but none has as yet been forthcoming.

Thomas Bartlett, in his Ph.D. thesis of 1979 and subsequent articles, highlighted deficiencies in the accepted interpretation of the administration of Lord Townshend. Bartlett challenged the widely held view that the constant residency of the Irish lord lieutenant was imposed by order of the British government. He argued that the decision was taken by Townshend himself and that it was unconnected with the meeting of George Grenville’s cabinet in February 1765, when it was determined that constant residency should be imposed at the earliest possible opportunity. Moreover, Bartlett rejected the existence of a linear approach to policy-making by the British government. He contended that constant residency was the result of opportunism and not evolution of policy.

The significance of the alteration to the lord lieutenant’s period of residence lay in the challenge it posed to the undertaker system. Constant residency promised centralisation of British authority and the erosion of the power wielded by the Irish magnates. The undertaker system was sustained by the effective distribution of patronage to a select few members of the higher echelons of the Irish gentry — men who transformed this patronage along with their own status and power at borough level into control over blocs of M.P.s in the Irish House of Commons. These blocs were transferred to the support of the lord lieutenant in order to facilitate the passing of government legislation. J. L. McCracken argued that this system emerged as the most suitable method of controlling parliament after the Wood’s Halfpence crisis of the early 1720s. However, subsequent research by David Hayton refuted this claim, arguing that a recognisable form of the undertaker system existed in Ireland before this episode.

At least twice during the first half of the eighteenth century criminal prosecutions were undertaken in Ireland which gripped the public imagination. The first of these celebrated cases, involving the trial for rape, conviction and subsequent execution of the Cork Jacobite James Cotter in 1720, has also come to hold an extraordinary fascination for historians of eighteenth-century Ireland. Few writers concerned with early Georgian Ireland have been able to avoid its allure. For the most part, however, the incident has been referred to only fleetingly, employed variously as a motif of religious or political conflict or ethnic alienation. For Kevin Whelan, it is illustrative of the ‘conflict between old and new families’ in Munster, and indicative of a ‘partisan popish paranoia’ on the part of the province’s Protestant rulers. For Louis Cullen, it was ‘part of the legacy of the 1690s’, yet an event which would provide ‘the spark which set alight the sectarian tensions in Munster in the 1760s’. Other commentators have seen the case as one in which ‘a trumped-up charge’ was laid, for political purposes, against a man ‘generally believed’ to be innocent. A few have offered more guarded conclusions. Thomas Bartlett ventures only that this was ‘certainly a sensational event’. James Kelly both recognises the unique circumstances of Cotter’s case and suggests that it is ‘unlikely that he was the victim of judicial assassination’. S. J. Connolly goes further, stressing that Cotter had ‘quite clearly been guilty of rape’. However, the fullest and most recent examination of the case, in an essay written by Breandán Ó Buachalla in an ‘attempt to correlate a specific literary text to the career of a specific political activist’, returns us firmly to the recurrent context of Catholic Jacobite resistance and Protestant collusion.

In the midsummer of 1763 six of the nine counties of Ulster temporarily passed out of the control of the landed élite and into that of the Hearts of Oak. People gathered in their thousands across most of Ulster, with the exclusion of Counties Antrim, Donegal and most of Down, to protest at the levels of the taxes levied by the grand juries, the collection of small dues by the clergy of the established church and the compulsory six days’ labour on the roads. At the time one Dublin newspaper expressed its horror at this outbreak among the ‘loyal Protestants of the North of Ireland’ and warned that ‘our neighbours [might] be glad to make a handle out of this to our great prejudice and scandal, as they did about the Whiteboys last year’. Among many observers the belief was that these embarrassing disturbances by Ulster’s Protestants, particularly by the Presbyterians — who had long been seen as a difficult element — should quickly be put down and the insurrection regarded as an aberration.

The scale of subsequent events in late eighteenth-century Ulster made it easier to forget the Oakboy disturbances. They were neither as long-lasting as the Steelboy outrages, nor as violent as the later clashes between the Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders. In the early nineteenth century the narrators of rural unrest, Richard Musgrave and George Cornewall Lewis, believed the Hearts of Oak disturbances to be of little importance, while historians like Lecky saw all agrarian rioters as largely cut from the same apolitical cloth. This was to remain the perception until the late 1970s and 1980s and a series of groundbreaking articles, several of them resulting from the research of James S. Donnelly. These showed a fresh insight into eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish agrarian troubles, accompanied by a willingness to use theoretical models of unrest in pre-industrial societies and the responses of their legal systems.

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.

This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

For two weeks in late July and early August 1882 newspapers in Ireland and London carried accounts of discontent among members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.), which policed the whole of Ireland except Dublin. The Irish land war of 1879–82 was ending, and the R.I.C. had burnished their reputation for stolid loyalty among British officialdom and the Irish public at large. Problems among Ireland’s police may have been disquieting, particularly at Dublin Castle and in landowner circles, but in the news accounts and other papers that survive there were few expressions of surprise that, at the end of three years of often intense duty during the land war, the men of the R.I.C. were tired, restive and eager to draw attention to their concerns. By mid-1882 the morale and financial resources of individual members of the R.I.C. were drained. The problem of unreimbursed expenses incurred on land war duty, a special problem for married men with families, impinged on policemen’s living standards. Fatigue, frustration and, in individual cases, actual hardship compelled members of the R.I.C. at stations throughout the country to adopt the unusual expedient of public agitation. The excitement among the Irish police during the summer of 1882 resulted in remedial legislation and changes in working conditions that proved to be a defining point in the development of the R.I.C. as a career for young men in Ireland, rather than a stopover on the way to emigration.

When members of the Irish Volunteers shot dead a policeman and burst into the yard of Dublin Castle on 24 April 1916, Sir Matthew Nathan, the under-secretary, and Major Ivon H. Price, the head of military intelligence in Ireland, were upstairs in Nathan’s office discussing whether or not known agitators should be deported under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This somewhat ironic scenario, which raises questions about the state of British intelligence in Ireland, has proved very attractive to historians working on this period. Some, such as Leon Ó Broin in his classics Dublin Castle and the 1916 rising: the story of Sir Matthew Nathan (1966) and The chief secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969), have attempted to defend the actions of the civil government. Eunan O’Halpin, a more recent historian of political and military intelligence in Ireland, chooses to take the idea of British intelligence in Ireland as something of an oxymoron. Focusing on the fact that the Easter Rising was ‘permitted’ to occur, he lays the blame for such poor intelligence work on four factors: the political danger faced by British officials who risked alienating parliamentarians if they struck at advanced nationalists; legal difficulties in getting Irish juries to convict people for political crimes; failure of the intelligence branches of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police to collect effective information from suspects; and finally, the personality of Augustine Birrell, who, as his wife slowly went insane and began to die of a brain tumour between 1912 and 1915, rather understandably lost interest in his official duties as chief secretary.

When questioned by a parliamentary committee after the rebellion of 1798, the United Irish leader Thomas Addis Emmet predicted that ‘if a revolution ever takes place, a very different system of political economy will be established from what has hitherto prevailed here’. Was there any real substance to this claim? Did Emmet’s words indicate that the republican leadership genuinely sought a radical reshaping of society, or was he simply indulging in empty rhetoric that a broken United Irish movement could never make good?

It has always been difficult to pin down the United Irishmen’s socio-economic views: their pronouncements in this area were few and were generally couched in vague terms. This is hardly surprising. Given that the society’s membership was far from socially homogeneous, the leadership no doubt recognised the difficulties involved in trying to produce an agreed programme of social reform. In an organisation one of whose earliest rules had been ‘to attend to those things in which we agree, to exclude from our thoughts those in which we differ’, it was generally judged prudent to steer clear of such a potentially divisive subject. Moreover, the readiness with which the government instigated prosecutions of outspoken radicals, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1793, made advisable a degree of caution in any statements which could be construed as threatening the established social order. Nevertheless, the society did address the issue of social reform from time to time, and individual United Irishmen also espoused a variety of proposals. This article will attempt to examine some of the strands of United Irish social thinking and to determine if the movement had such a thing as a coherent programme of social reform.

In July 1903 Maud Gonne hung a black petticoat from the window of her Dublin home, insulting her unionist neighbours and provoking what became known as ‘the battle of Coulson Avenue’. Aided by nationalist friends, athletes from Cumann na nGaedheal and her sturdy housekeeper, she defended her ‘flag’ against police and irate neighbours. Gonne’s lingerie — allegedly a mark of respect for the recently deceased pope — flew in stark and defiant contrast to the numerous Union Jacks which lined her street in honour of King Edward VII’s visit to Ireland. This episode heralded a month of spectacular protest which polarised nationalist opinion. Like the visit to Dublin of Queen Victoria in 1900, King Edward’s tour provoked both enormous public interest and rivalry between various Irish institutions which vied to express their loyalty to the crown. But the royal tours also instigated fierce debate within the nationalist community and highlighted the ever deepening rifts between constitutional nationalism and ‘advanced’ nationalism.

Few commentators would dispute that, as regards historical records, 1922 was a year of destruction and displacement. Months before the conflagration in the Four Courts annihilated a broad cross-section of official records the departing representatives of the crown régime had turned their attention to those most recently in use. Nobody really knows how much of this material was deliberately burnt in Dublin Castle in the days preceding the takeover by Free State troops on 16 January 1922. It is all but certain that at least some intelligence files were destroyed: these would no doubt have identified informants, double agents, serving intelligence officers (whether English or Irish), and the more discreet crown servants. Certainly the new custodians were greeted by empty cupboards and bare shelves. Legends, which may or may not have been founded in reality, grew of the extent of the destruction and, by implication, of the scale of the guilty secrets thus concealed forever.

But the incoming officials were in no doubt, either, that much had been simply removed, whether to the Irish Office in London or to some other safe place. Assurances were offered to the Free State government by the departing Castle official A. W. Cope ‘that the only papers we are removing from the Castle to London are confidential papers relating to the political movement in this country. The removal of the papers will not hamper the future administration.’ Should any person apply for the return of papers seized in police raids during the conflict, their requests would be considered. Cope was being less than candid. During March an Irish Office official noted in an unmistakably complaining tone that the office was having to accommodate ‘a number of files belonging to the Crimes Special Department of the R.I.C. and an Irish Secret Service organisation. Some of the matter in these files is highly secret.’ The material occupied one hundred deed-boxes, half-a-dozen large packing cases, a couple of six-foot-high cupboards, along with thirty-eight card-index trays (‘twelve of them in cabinets’).

John Kells Ingram was born in County Donegal in 1823. His ancestry was Scottish Presbyterian, but his grandparents had converted to Anglicanism. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, the most prestigious academic institution in nineteenth-century Ireland. In a brilliant academic career spanning over fifty years he proceeded to occupy a succession of chairs at the college. His published work included an important History of political economy (1888), and he delivered a significant presidential address to the economics and statistics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1878). Ingram influenced, and was respected by, many contemporary social and economic thinkers in the British Isles and elsewhere. In an obituary one of Ingram’s friends exaggerated only slightly in describing him as ‘probably the best educated man in the world’.

Yet contemporary perspectives on Ingram’s career were warped by one act of his youth which was to create a curious disjunction in his life. In 1843, when only nineteen years old, Ingram was a sympathiser with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. One night, stirred by the lack of regard shown for the Irish rebels of 1798 by the contemporary O’Connellite nationalist movement, he wrote a poem entitled ‘The memory of the dead’, eulogising these ‘patriots’. Apparently without much thought, Ingram submitted the poem anonymously to the Nation newspaper. It appeared in print on 1 April 1843 and, better known by its first line, ‘Who fears to speak of ’Ninety-Eight?’, became a popular Irish nationalist anthem.

In 1924 James Larkin agreed with British and Soviet communists to undertake the leadership of communism in Ireland. The triangular relationship soon became poisoned with dissension, insubordination and deceit. Not only did Larkin refuse to form a communist party, he went to great lengths to ensure that no one else did either. By 1925 British communists, contrary to Moscow’s directives, were attempting to work in Ireland independently of Larkin, and by 1927 Moscow too was plotting to clip his wings.

Larkin’s communist career is treated in some detail in two publications. Emmet Larkin’s biography offers the kindest interpetation, taking his subject’s politics at face value, and concluding that Ireland, and the weak and divided condition of its labour movement after 1923, were simply too hostile an environment for communism. Mike Milotte’s Communism in modern Ireland deals more directly with organisational politics and cites repeated examples of Larkin’s failure. Both studies are based on sources available in the west, which offer a superficial picture of events, and the story still holds obvious puzzles. Why did Larkin accept the leadership of the communist movement and then deliberately prevent its development? Why did Moscow tolerate his leadership for so long? Did Larkin have a political strategy, or were his political thinking and actions purely impulsive and reactive? And how do we explain his eccentric behaviour during these years, when he seemed to quarrel with everyone?

With the liberalisation of access to the former Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, now the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Modern History (Rossijskij Tsentr Khraneniya i Izutshenija Dokumentov Novejshej Istorij, cited as R.Ts.Kh.I.D.N.I. throughout this article), it is possible to answer these questions.

Historical study of the Irish Civil War of 1922–3 has hitherto concentrated overwhelmingly on internal matters — the actual internecine struggle on the ground for ideological and political control. While the value of this approach is obvious, it has inevitably failed to focus on the continuing role of the British armed services; furthermore, an exclusive concern with land-army affairs, whether Irish or British, must result in a distorted picture. It is thus particularly unfortunate that the activities of the Royal Navy during the revolutionary period have been largely neglected. Here it is hoped to demonstrate that the Royal Navy, beyond its expected role of gun-running prevention, did have an influence on the early course of the Civil War, an influence that was, in part, determined by the wider protection of imperial interests once British troops had withdrawn from the localities in May 1922.

The fragmentation of southern Irish politics and society, in the wake of the treaty settlement of December 1921, came as a genuine surprise to the Admiralty. At the time, it had taken the promise of peace at face value, making it known that, pending negotiations on certain properties and signal stations, it had little future interest in Ireland provided the three southern ‘treaty ports’ (Cóbh/Queenstown, Berehaven and Lough Swilly) were safeguarded and visiting rights upheld. In such circumstances, there was seen to be no need for the standard Irish Patrol of three destroyers, naval forces being ‘ultimately’ reduced to just two fishery protection vessels. Nor, as future area command was to pass to C.-in-C. Plymouth, was there technical need or political advisability in the retention of the two flag officer commands at Buncrana (C.-in-C. Western Approaches) and Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire).

National symbols have long been the subject of political controversy in Ireland and remain so today. Although arguments about symbols are now more common in Northern Ireland than in the Irish Republic, the early years of the Irish Free State saw vigorous discussions about the appropriateness of the new state’s symbols. One such debate broke out in 1929, following a dispute between the Free State government and Trinity College, Dublin, over which anthem should be played for the Governor-General. At the time this dispute was described by one political commentator as ‘one of those political storms in a tea-cup in which we delight’, and now, from a distance of almost seventy years, it is perhaps even harder to understand how such passions were roused over a seemingly minor incident. Even teacup storms can provide valuable insights, however, if historians can learn to read the tea-leaves.

One way of studying national anthems is to analyse their texts and compare them with those of other nations in order to obtain ‘an unique view into the polity, its self-conception or self-image, and ultimately, its deepest political aspirations, experiences, goals, and values’. Such an approach, however, takes an ahistorical and essentialist view of the nation or state and loses sight of political divisions within the nation. National anthems must be seen in their historical context: the circumstances of their creation and adoption must be examined, as must the ways in which the meanings attached to them change over time. They often emerge out of political conflict and can become the focus of conflict once again as new political forces come to the fore. Despite the claims of governments and nationalist ideologues, the selection of a national anthem is not a simple expression of ‘national will’.

In the 1940s and 1950s, irrespective of the government in power, Irish foreign policy faced strong domestic pressure to remain within parameters defined by religious sentiment, anti-communism and anti-colonialism. Yet two contrasting attitudes, corresponding to party allegiances, were nonetheless discernible: that of Fine Gael, which held constantly to a pro-Western line, and that of Fianna Fáil, which was capable of occasionally departing from it. By the 1960s the two approaches had converged, as Fianna Fáil under Seán Lemass repositioned itself more clearly in the American-led camp, a change most strikingly exemplified by Ireland’s response to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Yet before the end of the decade an issue was to arise in which Dublin’s Department of External Affairs was to find itself steering a course independent of forces both within the country and outside it.

The war which erupted in Nigeria in the summer of 1967, when its Eastern Region seceded, was to reverberate across the world, causing a response in Ireland unequalled by the reaction to any foreign civil conflict between that of Spain in the 1930s and that of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It was to bring about the greatest emotional involvement with an African problem since Ireland’s participation in the Congo conflict, leading directly to the foundation of the Africa Concern and Gorta organisations and marking a turning-point in the nature of Irish overseas aid.

Arthur Chanel Clery appears in James Joyce’s Stephen Hero among the students at University College, Dublin, as a platitudinous timeserver called Whelan who criticises Stephen Dedalus’s views on Ibsen and wants to be a county court judge. Clery became a Gaelic Leaguer, defence lawyer for 1916 insurgents, Sinn Féin Supreme Court judge during the War of Independence, Republican envoy to the Vatican during the Civil War, and — briefly — an abstentionist T.D. He was also one of the few nationalists of his generation to advocate partition, not as a matter of political expediency, but because he regarded the Ulster Protestants as a separate nation entitled to self-determination. This article traces the development of his political attitudes from his youthful advocacy of Christian democracy in response to snobbery and anti-Catholic discrimination, to his final years as an extreme Republican who called parliamentary democracy a sham invented by Freemasons to justify exploitation of the poor, and advocated a new Catholic social order which would combine the achievements of Lenin and Mussolini.

When the prince of Wales formally opened the new Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings at Stormont on 16 November 1932, it brought to an end over ten years of controversy, delay, confusion, and wrangling over both finance and design. Although approval to build a new parliament house and administrative offices was given in the autumn of 1922, and preliminary work began on the site in 1923, the above-ground foundation stone was not laid until 1928, and the departmental offices were not occupied until April 1931. There is an extensive literature which stresses the political significance of the architecture of civic and public buildings such as parliament houses, law-courts, government offices and even theatres. Other writers have noted the linkages between architecture, empire, nationalism and state formation. Thomas Metcalf commented that distinctive architectural forms ‘sought to manifest the ideals of imperialism’ and were designed to enhance ‘the hold of Empire over ruler and ruled alike’. For architects such as Herbert Baker, classical design, with its monumentality and ideals of law, order and government, was the only architectural form appropriate for the representation of empire. This was an architecture which gave a ‘visible shape to the new imperialism of the turn of the twentieth century’.