In the last twenty years women’s history has emerged as a major field of scholarly inquiry. An extensive literature has accumulated on the history of women in western Europe and North America, and the contribution which women have made to many different aspects of western society has been rediscovered. New areas of study have been developed as the gender differences in men’s and women’s lives have been recognised and researched. The expanding secondary literature has also led to a lively debate about the purpose, methodology and theory of women’s history. A central focus of discussion has been the relationship between women’s history and mainstream history. Initially research on the history of women tended to work within the parameters of traditional history: to be fitted into its ‘empty spaces’. But dissatisfaction with the male-centred and patriarchal nature of the predominant historical discourse has led women historians to seek out new methodologies and to argue that consideration of history from the perspective of women, as well as of men, is a major challenge to the whole nature of historical inquiry. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in the United States, put it, women’s history

Literary evidence for political and social developments in medieval Ireland comes down to us in a variety of languages: Latin; a rich and — by European standards — early production in the Irish vernacular; Old Norse; Middle English; with sparser reference in Old English, Welsh and other nearby linguistic communities. Some of this evidence, tightly circumscribed in time, is also in Anglo-Norman French, and reflects a very different Ireland from that of Arthurian romance. These Anglo-Norman works, composed in Ireland or in Britain on the basis of eye-witness testimony, constitute a unique body of material, though their value as historical evidence is constricted in two ways: firstly, they are limited to three preserved texts; secondly, they are rigorously selective in their criteria of historiographical relevancy and in their treatment of the native Irish population, culture and political presence.

A chronicle of the Franciscan convent at Bridgewater, Somerset, in B.L., Cottonian MS Domitian A.ii, preserves a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century record of the founding of a university in Dublin in 1358. The entry, on f. 5v, notes the founding of the university at Dublin as the second entry for the year 1358:

Since the main scribe of the chronicle — perhaps the astronomer John Somer, O.F.M. (fl. 1380-1409) — appears to have recorded his portion of the entries in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, this is one of the earliest extant recordings of this event. The founding in 1358 is confirmed by an entry in Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium recording, according to Fitzmaurice and Little, ‘the King[’s promise [of] special protection to scholars travelling thither’.

One of the things which has united historians across the generations when writing about the Reformation in its Tudor Irish context is the conviction that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the allegiance of the indigenous population to its religious dictates. Where this agreement has broken down, and continues to break down, is in the significance attached to the Tudor state’s failure, and in determining precisely when it became apparent.

Until the end of the 1960s most examinations of sixteenth-century Ireland identified the Tudor failure as being synonymous with the practical and absolute failure of the Protestant Reformation. These studies were generally characterised by a partipris approach and by their employment of an interlinked and deterministic vision to explain this failure. Echoing the observations of contemporaries like Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, who spoke of the Irish people’s ‘disposition to popery’, writers of all religious persuasions saw the Reformation’s failure as an inevitable consequence of the inherently conservative character of the island’s inhabitants.

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.

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.

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.

In June 1569 an English gentleman named Robert Mainwaring was seized on the borders of County Carlow by Irish rebels. They forced a noose around his neck, tightened it, and proceeded to drag him ‘up and down in a halter’, like a man condemned to be hanged. As with many terrorist acts, Mainwaring’s degradation was a carefully calculated publicity stunt, and it quickly achieved its objective. News of his predicament was relayed to London, where the identity of his captors aroused widespread alarm in government circles. He was persecuted on the orders of Sir Edmund Butler of Cloghgrenan, a leading Anglo-Irish lord who was the brother and principal heir of the then childless tenth earl of Ormond, Thomas Butler, and the recent recipient of some generous grants of land and office from the crown. Despite Sir Edmund’s position as deputy governor of the hitherto loyal Ormond lordship in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary, it soon became clearthat his seizure of Mainwaring had signalled the outbreak of a general revolt by several branches of the Butler family.

The history of the Church of Ireland between 1641 and 1690 has not excited much interest among historians over the past thirty years. It was not always so, and earlier generations of writers found more to describe or investigate in a period which saw effective disestablishment in the 1650s, restoration in the 1660s, and crisis in the later 1680s. Phillips devoted almost one hundred pages to these years: the 1640s and 1650s in the authoritative hands of St John D. Seymour, and the 1660s to 1680s (and beyond) covered by R. H. Murray. Mant’s History, published almost a century before Phillips, still provides a useful narrative and valuable quotations from primary sources. The much shorter treatment of J. T. Ball, first published in 1886, gave only 33 pages out of 305 to the period, but contained some perceptive comments. In other histories of the Church of Ireland the period receives more cursory treatment.

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.

In seventeenth-century Ireland the law increasingly defined and regulated relationships: between government and governed; between landlord and tenant; between master and servant; among the propertied; and even, by the end of the century, between Catholics and Protestants. This situation, similar to that throughout western Europe, signalled — at least superficially — England’s success in assimilating Ireland. The system of courts, centred on Dublin, and, through regular assizes and quarter sessions, borough, sheriffs’, church and manorial courts, reaching deep into the localities, was celebrated as a prime benefit, as well as the principal means, of anglicisation. The English policies which had progressively dismantled indigenous institutions, including the brehon law of Gaelic and gaelicised society, and replaced older Catholic with new Protestant élites, rested on statute, proclamation and judicial decree or process. Sincethe law was essential to England’s rule in Ireland, its opponents countered through the courts and legal argument: as a result, the functioning of the law, especially the quasi-judicial commissions which redistributed land, was politicised. Not only did the law accomplish, it also reflected these changes; for, bit by bit, Catholics were edged from the judicial bench and then disqualified from practising as barristers and attorneys. By the early eighteenth century the courts — publicly at least — were manned by and run for the burgeoning Protestant interest in Ireland.

The population of Ireland in the eighteenth century experienced serious dearth on twelve occasions. Four of these crises resulted in famines and eight in subsistence crises. The four famines all took place in the first half of the century; the second half experienced only subsistence crises. Because of this, it is sometimes argued that the late eighteenth century enjoyed a ‘gap in famines’. The value of this concept has been questioned because it understates the persistence and impact of dearth at a regional level, but it is also vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the nature and impact of all twelve crises.

The main difference between a famine and a subsistence crisis centres on their contrasting demographic effects. Famines invariably produced substantial increases in mortality; the major famines of 1740–11 and 1845–9, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, while smaller famines, such as those of 1727–9, 1800–01 and 1816–18, which were manifestly less costly in human terms, nevertheless resulted in thousands of deaths. Subsistence crises, on the other hand, caused comparatively little loss of life. We are not currently in a position to identify the precise demographic impact of individual episodes of harvest failure in the late eighteenth century, but based on current understanding it is believed that overall associated mortality levels were low. We can, however, enhance our understanding of dearth in this period by tracing the causes, course, impact and response to individual harvest crises. The purpose of this paper is to describe the crisis of 1782–4; it reveals that harvest failure during the so-called ‘gap in famines’ weighed heavily on both urban and rural populations, but that mortality was kept within acceptable bounds by the efficacy of the poor relief deployed to combat distress. Relief was at its most sophisticated and efficient in urban areas.

Between 1879 and 1882 a mass agrarian movement, led by the Irish National Land League, became a strong, all-encompassing force in Irish life for a brief but crucial period. This movement, one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe, has been treated as a nationalist movement, with emphasis of study placed on the role, contributions and aims of the league’s national leaders. These men, seeking their own varieties of self-government, saw the land movement as means to a political end. To them the land agitation provided a stepping-stone to national independence. It was the Irish peasantry, however, motivated primarily by economic considerations, that provided the driving force behind the movement, and at this level Irish peasant women made major contributions to the agrarian revolt. In this study the Land League movement is viewed as an agrarian protest movement; its purpose is to examine in particular the roles played by the Irish peasant women during the Land League period.

These contributions have not been adequately recognised in historical literature. Recently the role of the Irish peasant has been duly acknowledged, but in these discussions a male image usually appears. When the Irish women’s role in the land movement is examined, it is done so in the context of the organisation known as the Ladies’ Land League. These studies concentrate on the activities of the upper- and middle-class urban leaders, particularly the Parnell sisters. But to dwell only on the Ladies’ Land League as the focus of women’s participation in the Land League movement is far too narrow, for it obscures the fact that hundreds of peasant women were fighting the Land War on a daily basis long before the formation of the women’s organisation. The papers of some of the local branches of the Land League provide evidence which shows that Irish rural women participated in the Land War from its beginning. Although the archival sources of the Land League period are biased towards men, enough material regarding the peasant women’s activities, admittedly limited and somewhat sparse, does exist to allow a strong argument to be put forward that peasant women performed effectively in the Land War.

The Irish land act of 1903, commonly known as the Wyndham act, was the most significant achievement of George Wyndham’s term as chief secretary for Ireland. From the time of his appointment in 1900 Wyndham made the formulation of such a bill a first priority for himself and for his principal advisers. His private correspondence, especially that with Arthur Balfour, reveals how determined he was that it should provide, not the stop-gap measure of earlier legislation, but an effective and final solution to the vexed problem of land occupancy in Ireland. In the end, however, the draft legislation owed less to the efforts of Wyndham and his advisers than to his shrewdness in allowing to a conference between landlord and tenant representatives the scope to evolve an agreed solution in line with guiding principles which he had previously enunciated. The resulting act provided the basis for tenant farmers to secure the ownership of their farms, so bringing to an end the land war that had raged in Ireland since the late 1870s.

The history of this period, as currently studied, falls neatly into three phases. The twenty-five years or so after the fall of James II are marked by limited and largely unsuccessful attempts at reform, undertaken against a background of fundamental divisions on matters of religious and political principle. Thereafter the emphasis shifts to consensus, privilege and self-interest, as we turn to the workings of a comfortable ecclesiastical establishment firmly embedded in the patronage networks of the Hanoverian one-party state. In the last years of the eighteenth century this image of complacent stagnation is qualified by the first signs of spiritual revitalisation. Recent work has modified this chronological framework. Whether it will have to be more radically revised remains to be seen.

On the morning of 22 June 1922 Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson left his home in London to unveil a war memorial at Liverpool Street railway station. When he returned at 2.30 that afternoon, two young men, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, were waiting for him. What happened next is best described in Reggie Dunne’s own words:

Dunne and O’Sullivan subsequently shot three pursuers (two policemen and a civilian) in their attempt to escape, but, fatally slowed by Joe O’Sullivan’s wooden leg, they were caught shortly afterwards. They were tried, convicted and, on 10 August, hanged in Wandsworth Prison.

The ‘United Church of England and Ireland’, established by the Act of Union ‘for ever’ as ‘an essential and fundamental part of the Union’, survived less than seventy years. N. D. Emerson, in his 1933 essay on the church in this period, presented the history of the church in the first half of the nineteenth century as ‘the history of many separate interests and movements’; he suggested a thesis of fundamental importance in the historiography of the Church of Ireland:

Recent historical work has begun to trace the ‘many separate interests and movements’ and to explore in detail both the ‘worldly Establishment’ and the increasingly predominant evangelical influence of the Church of Ireland during the post-union period. The main topics investigated have been the structure of the church, the political relationships of the church, the evangelical movement, the mentalities of various social groups (drawing upon literary sources), and local or regional studies. The numerous gaps in the research and in our knowledge which exist seem now all the starker given the high quality of so many recent studies concerning the Church of Ireland in this period.

With the Act of Union and the consequent disappearance of the College Green legislature, the Irish parliamentary tradition was subsumed into the broader Westminster framework. When the tradition re-emerged in an Irish context, it appeared as a curious combined product of the Westminster experience and of events which had little to do with any kind of parliament. In regard to its early political existence and experience, Dáil Éireann’s most obvious historical forerunner was the Jacobite parliament of 1689, which had its being in a state of open warfare with a rival political establishment and whose legitimacy and legality were largely of its own making. The critical difference between the two, from the historical viewpoint, was, of course, the apparent victory of the Dáil’s military supporters in December 1921. With victory came ultimate legitimacy, legality and some public credibility. From a purely administrative angle, this was also the moment when Dáil documents ceased to be merely propaganda material or, in more sensitive instances, evidence sought by Castle intelligence agents. Henceforth they would be important sources of the new state’s constitutional authority, and precedents for future legal and administrative practices.

In 1927 a classic textbook of human genetics made the following remark:

This view was typical of a large constituency of opinion-formers, policy-makers and scientists in the period from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the social effects of bad heredity led to the formation of eugenics societies in a considerable number of countries. These included the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907, the German Society for Race Hygiene in 1905, the American Eugenics Society in 1912, and, in the same year, the French Eugenics Society. By the 1920s eugenics societies could be found in the Soviet Union (a legacy from Tsarist times), Mexico, Scandinavia, Brazil, Japan, and many other countries.