The effectiveness of the government of Ireland throughout the period of its rule by England and then Britain depended on the accuracy of the information provided to Dublin Castle and sent from thence to the political masters, based largely in London. The text reproduced below is one of a large number of manuscripts that were sent periodically in the early modern period and the eighteenth century to inform those not resident in Ireland about conditions in the country. Some of these are calls to action for various monarchs or their ministers, with prescriptions for the ‘reform’ of Ireland.

Preserved amongst the Chancery masters’ exhibits at the National Archives of the U.K., formerly known as the Public Record Office, is a box of documents concerning the Fleming family, Lords Slane, in Ireland. These papers, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, relate primarily to a protracted inheritance dispute between the heirs male and heirs general of Christopher Fleming, Lord Slane, who died in 1458. This case had been brought into the English Chancery because the family were also landowners in Devon and Cornwall, and it had then rumbled on for decades. Within this box, however, there is also a parchment roll containing a number of entries relating to their Irish lands. The eighth item on this roll is especially interesting.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when Ireland and Britain are ‘offshore islands’ of an ostensibly ever-deepening European Union, it is, perhaps, relatively easy to overlook that imperial stage upon which both Irish partition in 1920 and the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921 were enacted. Yet without this wider context, these momentous decisions are impossible to understand fully. Current questions about whether Ireland has essentially been a colony will inevitably continue to be debated, but the imperial circumstances of these events remain inescapable and essential to a full appreciation of the mindset of the leading participants in these affairs.

Despite the unprecedented interest shown by historians in Ireland and empire in recent years, comparatively little research has focused on Northern Ireland’s connections to the British Empire-Commonwealth in the post-partition decades. This article utilises some new sources to throw light on both the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of the imperial relationship. The discussion begins with the imperial significance of visits to Northern Ireland by statesmen such as William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, to his native Ulster in 1923, and that of Gordon Coates, also Prime Minister of New Zealand, three years later. At the end of the period, the visit of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland can add to our knowledge about the changing relationship between Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth.

The Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions. The first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked, and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure of the Tudor conquest.

Many strands of the complex story of Irish migration to Europe in the early modern period are currently the focus of active research by historians both at home and abroad. The traditional emphasis on researching the Catholic Irish who travelled to Europe to further their education is now less pronounced, as researchers move beyond the archives of religious orders and academic institutions into the secular archives of France, Spain and other regions of western Europe. This changing trend is probably dictated more by economic and social considerations than by ideology.

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.