Twentieth-century scholars critically re-examining Ireland's origin myths explained how ‘synthetic pseudo-history’ such as the Lebor Gabála érenn arose. Sports, like nations, have need of origin myths, chess being no exception; moreover, sporting preferences have sometimes become bound up with a nation's sense of its unique identity. In the same ancient manuscripts where Celtic revivalists found legends of the earliest people in Ireland, they often also found references to board games. What may be called the myth of Celtic chess then emerged.

Since the late 1980s crusade historiography has shown increasing interest in the periphery of Europe and the less ‘traditional’ crusading areas of Scotland, Wales, Poland and Scandinavia. Consideration of Ireland has formed part of this spread of interest, but, like many other areas, it remains comparatively unstudied. In part, the paucity of Irish texts relating to all kinds of crusading discourages research, as does the comparatively low number of known Irish crucesignati.

The significant contribution of the mendicant orders, and especially the Franciscans, to medieval European and English literature has for long been a subject of much detailed examination by scholars. It has been argued that the spiritual ethos and style of communication to society of the Franciscans, articulated by St Francis himself, brought about a greater use of vernacular languages throughout Europe in lyrical poetry and preaching and in catechetical and devotional texts. While earlier religious communities had fostered certain types of texts, such as exegetical works and saints’ lives, the new orders of friars had a greater impact on a wider section of society.

While the reigns of England's Angevin kings, Henry II, Richard I and John, have sparked centuries of historical interest, the verdicts rendered have been as diverse as the times that produced them. Increasingly, historians have come to highlight the abrasiveness of Angevin kingship in general when discussing the great calamities of John’s reign (including the loss of Normandy in 1204, Magna Carta, and the civil war of 1215–17), before recounting John’s unique depravity.

The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland involved a substantial transfer of property from Catholics to Protestants, and the transplantation of dispossessed Catholic landowners to the western province of Connacht. The latter scheme proved controversial, receiving considerable attention from contemporary Protestant authors, and outright condemnation from all Catholics. Nonetheless, it was little commented upon by historians over the following two centuries.

At the 2002 Hay Literary Festival, Sir Michael Holroyd, the prolific biographer, delivered a lecture outlining the development of British biographical writing, and indicating what he thought might be the key developments in the future of the genre. Quoting Keats, he condemned ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, and called for a greater acknowledgement and utilisation of the fictional in the enhancing of our understanding of individuals. Such a readiness to shun or qualify empirical evidence when attempting to interpret and understand the past would be an anathema to most historians.

Writing to a ‘Friend in Scotland’, in 1888, the Rev. Hugh Hanna declared: ‘it is the duty of Christian people in these lands to do the best they can for all parts of the United Kingdom’. Having explained why Irish Protestants were opposed to home rule, he then asked how any

Ulster has not yet been invaded systematically, but from the information we have received, many important centres are taking to the fields in the most enthusiastic manner'. Thus wrote Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) founder Michael Cusack in 1885. It was fashionable then to refer to a national sports party ‘invading’ another land to exhibit a sport to the host country, but Cusack was probably parodying unionist depictions of recent nationalist political campaigns in the north-east as ’invasions’ – a term that itself mocked nationalism and its southern promoters as foreign entities in the north.

So wrote William Hamilton Drummond in 1811 in reference to an extraordinary grass known by the old Irish name of fiorin (fiorthann), whose properties had been discovered by a fellow cleric, William Richardson (1740–1820). Richardson claimed fiorin could produce abundant winter hay and help reclaim bogland. Though Donaldson’s Agricultural biography of 1854 dismissed Richardson’s work as ephemeral and careless, in 1806 the leading British scientist Humphry Davy visited Richardson and was impressed enough to recommend him to the Board of Agriculture and include fiorin in his famous lecture series translated into every major European language.

In 1903 the governor of South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, agreed to proposals from the owners of the Transvaal gold mines to alleviate the labour shortage caused by the recent war by recruiting workers from China. The Conservative government of Arthur Balfour gave its approval in May 1904, and had overall responsibility for the scheme until it yielded power to the Liberals in December 1905. The so-called ‘coolies’ were to be indentured on a three-year contract, paid less than the blacks, and quarantined from the local population. Well before the first shipment arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1904, British trade unionists were alarmed that a precedent was being set for the importation of cheap labour closer to home, and Britain’s ‘Non-conformist conscience’ was disturbed at the spectre of ‘nameless practices’ developing in compounds of young men separated from their families. Events seemed to bear out the apprehensions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, land purchase in Ireland conducted in compliance with the land-purchase acts passed by the British government between 1881 and 1896 had ground to a virtual standstill. The numbers within the landlord class who wished to sell had been exhausted, yet tenants were anxious for a comprehensive land-purchase measure. The Wyndham Land Act was introduced in the House of Commons on 25 March 1903. The act – the pinnacle of George Wyndham's term of office as chief secretary of Ireland – was hailed as one of the most important pieces of social legislation since the Act of Union.

The historiography of nineteenth-century Irish newspapers centres on the development of a nationalist press nationally and locally, with expansion of readership and titles connected to the great waves of politicisation under O’Connell and Parnell. Studies of unionist newspapers tend to focus on Ulster or the Irish Times, whose institutional continuity maintains interest in its earlier incarnations, and whose relatively liberal nineteenth-century unionism was directed at the Dublin Protestant middle classes. There was, however, another type of nineteenth-century Southern unionist newspaper addressing a conservative audience of landlords, professionals and Church of Ireland clerics. Such diehard newspapers often clung to older business models involving limited readership, and underpinned their activities by second jobs and patronage from local elites, though the Dublin Tory press developed a somewhat wider audience.

In her vivid account of the Irish theatre movement, Máire Colum described the first evening of Lady Gregory's Gaol Gate at the Abbey Theatre on 20 October 1906. The performance was delayed until Yeats arrived; he was accompanied by a tall woman dressed in black. As soon as they appeared, there was a violent reaction in a section of the audience:

Austere and forbidding, the workhouse occupied a prominent position in the towns of nineteenth-century Ireland. Reformer Laura Stephens, writing in the New Ireland Review in 1900, said of the Irish workhouse that ‘the great gloomy pile of grey stone buildings, surrounded with high walls is unmistakable,’ while Anna Clarke quotes William Field as having observed ‘Foreigners remark … that our constitution seems to produce poverty and lunacy; because, either the immense ugly union or the big regular asylum is generally the leading architectural feature in county towns; instead of the fine church or cathedral, the handsome maison de ville, and the pleasurable, instructive galleries to be found in other countries.’

Irish nationalist politics between 1906 and 1909 revolved around the twin demands of self-government and a resolution of the land issue; as such, the period was demarcated by two pieces of Liberal government legislation: the May 1907 Irish Council Bill and Birrell’s December 1909 land act. The latter was partially a response to western Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.)-inspired ‘agrarian militancy’ on the part of the United Irish League (U.I.L.) and the emerging Sinn Féin movement’s ability to ‘outfank’ the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) on the issue, which effectively forced Irish Party leader John Redmond ‘to adopt a radical agrarian policy in June 1907’. However, outside Connacht, the U.I.L. could not be regarded as ‘the Land League reborn’. In east Tyrone, the demand for self-government dominated the nationalist agenda, a situation reinforced by the fact that local politics had been ‘cast in the denominational mould which has characterised them ever since’. As a result, the Board of Erin section of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) was the motor of popular nationalist mobilisation, leaving the U.I.L.

Although Michael Tierney became famous as a controversial, reforming president of U.C.D., he had been a ubiquitous figure in Irish national politics for over twenty years before. A radical member of Cumann na nGaedheal and a key intellectual influence on the early Fine Gael party, he reinvented himself as a political independent, and campaigned for a vocational model of government in Ireland in line with papal teaching. He was that rarity in Irish politics – a political conservative who was also a public intellectual, and who tried to build a political career based on the quality of his ideas rather than tribal loyalties.

On 23 May 2006 the Irish Supreme Court declared that the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1935 was inconsistent with the 1937 Constitution. It found that section 1 (1) of the act deprived a man charged with unlawful carnal knowledge of the defence of having made a reasonable mistake as to the age of the girl in question, and therefore of his constitutional right to a trial in due course of law. In his judgment, Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman stated that ‘the Section contains no balance: it wholly removes the mental element and expressly criminalises the mentally innocent. It need not necessarily have done so.’

At the beginning of 2001 the First Minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, found himself confronted with more than his fair share of intractable diffculties: having narrowly survived an internal vote of the Ulster Unionist Party on whether to continue in government, Trimble surveyed an unpromising political landscape dominated by the rise of the rival Democratic Unionist Party and the I.R.A.’s continued refusal to decommission all its weapons. Despite all this, in late January 2001 Trimble devoted considerable time to attacking the B.B.C. for having made the Rebel Heart drama series. Claiming to be loosely based on real events, the programmes implied that the Belfast police had killed six members of the McMahon household on 24 March 1922.

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

It is now almost impossible to reflect upon the historical reputations of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins without considering the recent war in Northern Ireland (c. 1969–97) and the challenges to Irish identities it has induced. In the Republic this is evident in the movement away from irredentist nationalism toward official recognition of partition, following a constitutional referendum in 1998. Against a similarly barometric historiography, de Valera and Collins's historical representations have transformed. De Valera, it is clear, long since fell from favour among mainstream nationalists.