The phenomenon of religious revival has attracted considerable attention from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. In the Irish context, this is especially true in the case of Presbyterianism whose origin is often traced to the Six Mile Water revival of 1625 and is closely associated with the spectacular revival of 1859. The term revival is usually understood as describing a situation in which religious concerns and feelings acquire a new urgency and which may result in large numbers of conversions and unusual physical and emotional behaviour. An older tradition of interpretation saw religious revivals in terms of fanaticism or mass hysteria, stimulated by political and economic upheaval.

The Desmond rebellion was one of the most brutal military conflicts to have taken place in Ireland in the sixteenth century. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, cousin of Gerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond, in July 1579 in order to restore the Catholic faith in Ireland, the rebellion quickly developed from the landing of a small expeditionary force of approximately sixty men into a bloody contest which engulfed Munster for four and a half years. The rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, but such was the ferocity of the conflict that it had a profound and devastating impact on Munster. The social and economic consequences were immense, for it exacted a huge economic cost on the province, both in terms of physical destruction and lost economic activity, and produced a very substantial depopulation of the province. The result was the overthrow and destruction of the traditional social order in Munster, an act that paved the way for the subsequent Munster plantation.

The English marcher lineages, or, perhaps more accurately, those families or kindreds not of Gaelic descent who settled in the area now comprising south County Dublin following the arrival of the English, played an instrumental part in shaping the boundaries of what would by 1500 be known as the English Pale. There was a large number of these families living in this area from the 1170s, but for reasons of space we must limit the focus here to a specific few: of similar strength and drawn from a mixture of Scandinavian, Welsh and English ethnic backgrounds and inhabiting this compact district, the Harolds, Lawlesses, Howels, Archbolds and Walshes (or Walshmen) offer a broad perspective. The raison d’être of these five lineages occupying a border between two very different societies changed through the centuries, just as political and military conditions changed. The original motivation to colonise the district apparently reflected opportunism coupled with the Dublin administration’s desire to have English subjects moulding the adjacent countryside into a secure, profitable English entity. Yet Gaelic hostility — often manifesting itself in raids emanating from the nearby Leinster mountains — arrested the English colony’s southward expansion, and the role of the lineages assumed an increasingly military character.

The name ‘Peep of Day Boys’, or the less common variant ‘Break of Day Men’, has become most closely linked with the Armagh disturbances beginning in the 1780s. In particular, the Peep of Day Boys are known as the group that metamorphosed into the Orange Order after the ‘battle of the Diamond’ in north Armagh in 1795. In recent years David Miller has done much to provide a more subtle interpretation of the link between the Peep of Day Boys and the Orange Order, and more light has been shed on the nature of popular violence in Armagh by Miller, Jim Smyth and Louis Cullen. However, the origins of the term ‘Peep of Day Boys’ are still rather unclear. Many contemporaries believed that it was linked to Protestant searches for weapons in Catholic homes at daybreak.

In January 1649, after the conclusion of the second peace treaty between James Butler, marquis of Ormond, the king’s intermediary, and representatives of the Confederate Catholics, Ormond addressed the General Assembly in Kilkenny: ‘There is a door, and that a large one, not left, but purposely set open, to give you entrance by your future merits to whatsoever of honour or other advantage you can reasonably wish.’ The treaty was signed on 17 January; thirteen days later, Charles I was executed. The ‘door’ of opportunity for Irish Catholics was firmly shut.

The centre stage of early nineteenth-century Irish politics has long been held by Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association. This may be justifiable, as O’Connell created a mass constitutional movement for liberal reform out of a Catholic, peasant population on the fringe of Europe. Less justifiable is the single perspective that sees the struggle for Catholic emancipation as Catholic Ireland’s battle with the British establishment. In 1828 and 1829 there was also a massive Protestant political campaign in Ireland. This centred on the new Brunswick Clubs and Ulster. Yet anti-Catholic and Ulster politics merit few sentences in narratives of these years. Indeed, there is a general neglect of Ulster politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Presbyterianism, the evangelical revival, Catholicism, sectarian conflict, the Orange Order, the Irish Yeomanry, the economy and the growth of Belfast as a city have all received detailed treatment, but the nuances of politics remain vague. The Catholic Association appears to have reduced Ulster’s importance in shaping political developments in the island as a whole from its high-water mark of the 1790s. This does not, however, justify simply leaving Ulster out of the story. This article aims to look at the Ulster anti-emancipation campaign and to correct the skewed picture of Ireland in these years.

On Saturday 12 February 1881 two horses belonging to Andrew Kettle, executive member of the Land League, were auctioned at a sheriff’s sale at his residence, Kilmore Cottage, Artane, County Dublin. Lord Talbot de Malahide, Kettle’s landlord, obtained a decree to have Kettle’s goods seized and sold to obtain the £40 in rent Kettle had refused to pay. Norris Goddard, solicitor of the Property Defence Association, a landlord defence organisation, opened the bidding on the first horse at £5 but was soon outbid by Kettle’s brother at £20. A second draught horse was then auctioned to Kettle’s brother for £30, thus raising enough to cover the debt and costs.

For social reformers in nineteenth-century Ireland, science had an important role to play in national development. Non-denominational or secular education was targeted by the government as a possible panacea for the Irish problem, submerging sectarian and political differences. In order to promote this secular ethos, the government established agencies such as the Board of National Education (B.N.E.) in 1831 and the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway in 1845. Science seemed to be an area of discourse particularly appropriate to the promotion of economic prosperity and social harmony through the common cause of education. The rhetoric of cultural transcendence was long associated with the advancement of science — from the Royal Society of London (1660) to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831) — and took root in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Many historians have noted the symbolic role the veteran Fenian and 1916 proclamation signatory, Thomas J. Clarke, played as a ‘living link’ between the neo-Fenians of Easter 1916 and the previous generation of Irish revolutionaries. However, before 1914 the neo-Fenian claim to the revolutionary nationalist tradition was by no means unchallenged. For constitutional nationalists also claimed the legacy of the ‘men of ’67’. Although this now seems most implausible, at the time it was much more convincing, not least because of the presence of so many former Fenians in the Irish Parliamentary Party. In 1887 the R.I.C. estimated that 23 of the 83 Parnellite M.P.s had been Fenians before entering parliament. Paul Bew has argued that their presence influenced the ‘ideological tone’ of Parnellism, bringing an admiration for armed insurrection which, though emphasising its inexpediency, also stressed its nobility and heroic qualities.

In 1859–60 the Risorgimento culminated in the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Irish public opinion watched the process of unification with intense interest, largely because of the papacy’s involvement. The movement for unification directly threatened Pope Pius IX’s hold over the Papal States, and by 1860 he had lost all his dominions but Rome. As a result, Irish public opinion on the Risorgimento divided along the religious fault-line. Protestant identification with the struggle for unification was mirrored by passionate Catholic support for Pius IX, and Ireland’s longstanding religious animosities were projected onto the struggle between the pope and the Piedmontese. Perugia became Scullabogue, Spoleto Limerick. This sense of identification explains why events in Italy resonated so powerfully in Ireland. For religious ultras on both sides, the Risorgimento was essentially a religious struggle, a strategically important battle in the ongoing war between true religion and the powers of darkness.

In the past historians of the Anglo-Irish union have concentrated largely on the leading political figures. Peel, O’Connell, Gladstone, Parnell, Salisbury, Redmond, Asquith and Lloyd George and their Irish policies have all received detailed attention. For the years following the onset of the great agricultural depression, this tendency has been inevitably reinforced by the turmoil of politics following the Third Reform Act and Gladstone’s attempt to introduce home rule for Ireland.

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

Writing some years after the events he was describing, Michael Cusack, the first secretary of the Gaelic Athletic Association, suggested that in its early years the ‘Association swept the country like a prairie fire’. This is perhaps a little exaggerated, but its success was striking. Eighteen months after its foundation the G.A.A. was reckoned to have 50,000 individual members. Six months later there were around 400 affiliated clubs. The relative success of the G.A.A. is particularly apparent when its progress is compared with that of two of its rival organisations. The Irish Football Association was founded in 1880. Ten years later only 124 clubs had affiliated to it. By the same date the G.A.A., founded in 1884, had 875 member clubs.

The retention by the Fianna Fáil government of the land annuities in 1932 and the consequent trade dispute with Great Britain, the ‘economic war’, is a subject extensively covered in the existing historiography, both in terms of the diplomatic and economic facets of the dispute. Opposition by the opponents of Fianna Fáil to the collection of land annuities has been well documented in the context of the political conflict between supporters and opponents of the treaty. Another trend in the historiography has emphasised, as the central characteristic of the anti-annuity payment campaign, the opposition by farmers to the payment of annuities on economic and social rather than on political grounds. Paul Bew and others have argued that large farmers supported the Blueshirts during the ‘economic war’ for material reasons; Mike Cronin has argued that the crisis of the ‘economic war’ encouraged opposition to de Valera’s policies among farmers, rather than pro-Treaty political considerations; and Andrew Orridge has also argued that the anti-annuity payment campaign included both a political element, in the form of Blueshirt hostility to Fianna Fáil, and a non-political element, on the part of farmers protesting at how their dependence on agricultural exports to Britain was threatened by Fianna Fáil policies.

The importance of the Orange Order to Unionism has long been accepted: J. F. Harbinson referred to ‘the marriage of the Unionist Party and the Orange Institution in the early days of the struggle against Home Rule’, while Alvin Jackson has written: ‘The significance of the Orange Order in terms of the ideological and institutional groundwork for Unionism can hardly be overstated.’ The closeness of this association and its nature can be tested for a crucial period of political mobilisation by examining the relationship of James Craig, a Unionist M.P. from 1906 and effective leader of the Ulster Unionists under Carson from 1910, and the Orange Order. This raises questions such as: What was Craig’s motivation for joining the order? What type of relationship did he have with the order? What role did Craig see the order fulfilling in Unionism?

At the opening of a new Orange hall in September 1906 Craig stated that ‘he was an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards’ and called ‘for the Protestant community to rally round the lodges, strengthen and support them’. Craig’s biographers, on the other hand, do not consider his Orangeism significant. Hugh Shearman wrote that Craig, in common with other Ulster leaders, ‘had let himself become an occasional emphatic utterer of Protestant sentiments, and he had made great use of the Orange Order’, implying that the order was a tool for Craig. To St John Ervine it was an incidental part of Craig’s Westminster career. Writing of 1919, Ervine noted that Craig ‘started an Orange Lodge in the House of Commons, a surprising society to appear in that assembly’. Patrick Buckland saw it as more of a background influence, in that Craig was a typical product of his society, and while he might have seemed more broad-minded than many Ulster Protestants he ‘had almost unthinkingly absorbed all their conventional notions and had come to share their fears and prejudices’.

The land question from the mid-Victorian period to around 1903 looms large in Irish historiography. This is hardly surprising given the fact that, while it was immensely important in its own right, it could not be disentangled from the wider political developments of the time that saw the land and national questions merge. However, with the exception of recent work by Professor David Seth Jones, the land question in post-independence Ireland has been largely overlooked. There seems, in fact, to be a general assumption among political, social and economic historians that there was no land question after 1922, that the land act of the following year defused all potential for future agrarian unrest by completing the transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants.

Ireland’s political and constitutional relationship to England remains a key theme of late medieval and early modern Irish history. Although it was a relationship in which Ireland was undoubtedly the subordinate kingdom, contemporary justifications for this subordination, and assertions of its basis, are often overshadowed by arguments directed against its validity. The text reproduced below is an assertion of that validity. It offers a highly selective analysis of English policy in Ireland from the twelfth century to the end of the seventeenth, based upon the assumption of Ireland’s legal and constitutional subordination to England. More particularly, it seeks to outline attitudes among the Protestant colonial community towards Ireland’s status, and does so at a precise juncture when such attitudes were deemed to be of imminent and crucial importance.

In his pamphlet The independence of Iceland: a parallel for Ireland, published in June 1921, Alexander McGill, a Scotsman of Irish descent, argued that Irish nationalists could learn salutary lessons from the history of the people of Iceland, not least from their pertinacity, since the Icelanders had never wavered in their demands for independence from the kingdom of Denmark. McGill went so far as to say that Icelandic history could be used to justify the strategy of Irish nationalists, who were at the time making a last stand in their bloody and violent war of independence. ‘Iceland is a small land, but a very interesting one, and her people understand Ireland’s demands and rights. She understands the problem of the Irish people, because Iceland as a nation has been evolved from similar beginnings.’

At the end of the 1960s the outbreak of widespread civil unrest in Northern Ireland forced the authorities in London and Dublin into confronting an issue which had seemingly been settled some time before. The emergence of the Civil Rights movement among the minority community and the reaction of unionist opinion to it had set in motion a series of events that were to raise once again the whole topic of partition. Yet for a short time in the period immediately following the Second World War it looked as if this subject was, to the delight of some and the dismay of others, about to re-emerge. One of the elements behind this development was the establishment by northern nationalists in 1945 of an organisation called the Irish Anti-Partition League (I.A.P.L.). The formation of the I.A.P.L. was significant on a number of grounds.

The usefulness of parliamentary lists to historians interested in the biography of individual M.P.s as well as the political and parliamentary process is well established, and valuable listings have been produced to facilitate consultation of the surviving eighteenth-century examples. Only a modest percentage of the total has been published, but even this has proved of considerable assistance to historians interested in the operation and personnel of parliament in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Lord Townshend’s decision, following the rejection of the privy council’s money bill in 1769, to dispense with undertakers and vest the responsibility for constructing a parliamentary majority in Dublin Castle provided the stimulus for the preparation of the majority of known eighteenth-century lists. The abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 and the return thereafter of 100 Irish M.P.s to Westminster largely liberated the Irish executive from this onerous responsibility, and the number of lists of Irish members of parliament fell sharply as a result.