Since the English Reformation, occasional days of thanksgiving, prayer and fasting were appointed by royal authority in response to an array of exceptional circumstances varying from outbreaks of disease to bad weather, and popish conspiracies to military successes. Details of these days of religious observance, their inspiration and purpose were communicated to the public by printed proclamation and reinforced by the publication of specially prepared forms of prayer for use in Anglican services on these occasions. The reign of William III (1689–1702) saw these days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving take place with unprecedented frequency. For the most part, this intensification of state-appointed public worship corresponded with the king's struggle against Louis XIV during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). Such days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving provided an opportunity for the Williamite court to promote the legitimacy of the new regime as part of a larger strategy of ‘courtly reformation’.

Criticism of the lord deputy of Ireland, Sir Anthony St Leger, became vocal during 1544, especially among supporters of James Butler, ninth earl of Ormond, who felt that he was being excluded from a more prominent role in government. To head off this grumbling, St Leger returned to England in the spring for an audience with Henry VIII that resulted in his re-appointment in July with the king's blessing. On 18 May he was installed as a knight of the Garter and his stipend increased by £200 the following summer. Once back in Ireland St Leger (a gentleman of the privy chamber) cleverly maintained royal favour through well-thought gifts, like the two goshawks and ‘caste’ of falcons ‘of the best ayre of this Lande’ he sent the king in the summer of 1545. Most importantly, he kept Henry, the English privy council, and principal courtiers informed of his point of view through carefully crafted letters and frequent messengers, dominating communications between the two kingdoms. His tone was always well-judged: ‘this your Realme remayneth[e] in goode stay thank[e]s be to god and your highnes’.

In 1967 Fr Walter Forde, an activist in the field of youth welfare work, noted ‘signs of unrest’ amongst Irish youths growing up in the sixties. He identified the ways in which they were ‘being influenced by English teenage culture’:

Richard O'Ferrall's claim of 5 March 1658 that the Stuart monarchy had no right to rule Ireland was made almost in passing. The real purpose of the report made by this Capuchin friar and courtier at the congregation of Propaganda Fide, the committee of cardinals whose jurisdiction included nearly all those missions and churches under non-Catholic governments, was to exclude all Irish Catholics of English descent from high ecclesiastical office. At the centre of his argument was the confederate Catholic association of the 1640s and the place within it of the Old English community. The Capuchin argued that the confederates had remained too closely bound to the Stuart monarchy, and that the Old English had betrayed the confederate cause to Charles I's lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, earl, marquis and later duke of Ormond. Many of O'Ferrall's Catholic contemporaries saw him as a dangerous member of a radical tradition: a clerical assembly at Dublin in June 1666 burned his report along with a copy of Conor O'Mahony's Disputatio apologetica of 1645, which had argued that all Ireland's Protestants should be killed or expelled and a native king elected. The Commentarius Rinuccinianus, begun by O'Ferrall, developed the argument of the 1658 report on a grand scale.

The name of Sir William Gregory features in most modern accounts of Ireland in the nineteenth century. It is fair to say, however, that usually he is regarded as a ‘villain’. Gregory is very widely known as the author of a piece of legislation introduced as part of relief measures during the Famine which sought to limit aid to those with a quarter acre or under of land and which became known as the Gregory clause or the quarter acre clause. An article in the New York Times on 16 July 2002 about the dedication of an Irish famine memorial in New York described the 5 million-dollar monument as follows: ‘The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory clause passed by the British parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove destitution and qualify for relief.’ Most modern academic accounts of the Famine have been very critical of Gregory. It is widely accepted that the purpose of the Gregory clause was to assist landlords to clear their estates of pauperised smallholders who were paying little or no rent. This measure has been seen by some as leading to mass evictions and causing the clearance of many small farmers and labourers throughout Ireland.

The eighteenth century, a period when pain, suffering and illness was an ‘omnipresent threat’, saw medicine became more institutionally-based, increasingly state-funded, and wedded to a more scientific and analytical approach to disease. Voluntary hospitals, county infirmaries, medical supply dispensaries for the poor, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and various medical guilds, schools and societies, were established or grew in importance. Collectively these institutions did much to influence how Ireland's main medical practitioners (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries) were educated, trained and organised, as well as the way the sick were cared for. While university-trained Irish physicians catered mostly for wealthy elites, the sick, rural poor usually only possessed the means or opportunity to engage the services of apothecaries or, occasionally, surgeons. Along with commercial, patent medicines, domestic remedies and self-medication, the sick had at their disposal an array of untrained, unregulated empirics, quacks, mountebanks, druggists, oculists, and faith and magical healers.

Seán Lemass remains an enigmatic figure in the study of contemporary Ireland. He became taoiseach in 1959, after a long and successful career in the leadership of Fianna Fáil. Notwithstanding this, he is widely associated with the transformation of Irish life that began under his stewardship between 1959 and 1966. In 1966, he convened the Informal Committee on the Constitution, often considered to be the most surprising initiative of his career. While change had not occurred by the time he died in 1971, the constitution had by this time become the focus for discussion, controversy and in some cases vilification. The questions this article seeks to answer are why Lemass promoted constitutional change and what were the consequences of this decision. More generally, it will assess the nature of constitutional change in a stable democratic state that is undergoing modernisation.

William Nicholas Keogh (1817–1878) has long been remembered as the placehunting lawyer who betrayed his country and wrecked the political fortunes of Irish constitutional nationalism for a generation. As a member of the fifty-strong Irish Independent Party of the early 1850s, Keogh pledged himself to independent opposition, only to accept ministerial office in 1852 as solicitor-general for Ireland. For this act Keogh has long been represented as a man who succumbed to personal ambition at the expense of a popular cause, which he allegedly supported with the sole objective of extracting political capital. Such was the ignominy with which he came to be regarded in later years that his name became a byword for betrayal, as evidenced by the fact that members of John Redmond’s Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party were characterised as the Keoghs and Sadleirs of their day. Keogh’s infamy was exacerbated further by the inflammatory judgment he issued when presiding over the Galway election petition of 1872, for which he would be labelled ‘villifier-in-ordinary of the Irish priests’.

The Irish workhouse has had a troubled history, attracting mostly negative commentary from the inception of the national poor law system after 1838 to the final abolition of the poor law in Northern Ireland in 1948. The popular historian of the institution opens his account with the bald statement that ‘the workhouse was the most feared and hated institution ever established in Ireland’. While one might quibble with this (the penitentiaries and asylums of the nineteenth century were surely as much feared, and perhaps with more reason; the record of the industrial schools and Magdalene asylums has more recently attracted the appalled attention of Irish society), the statement contains a kernel of truth. Designed with the deterrent principle of ‘less eligibility’ to the forefront, and irrevocably associated with the horrors of mass mortality during the Great Famine, the workhouses became in Irish popular memory (and in the bulk of historical commentary) associated with the suffering and degradation of their inmates. Nevertheless, the early history of the poor law and its associated workhouses is more complex than this suggests and deserves closer attention.

The idea of an ‘Irish empire’ has had enduring appeal. It was a rare source of pride promoted by politicians and churchmen during depressed periods in independent Ireland, particularly the 1950s, and the phrase provided an evocative title for at least one popular – and notably sanguine – version of the Irish diaspora's story as late as the turn of this century. In such contexts ‘Irish empire’ can appear simply a wry play on a far more commonly used and, if recent scholarship is to be taken into account, by no means unrelated term, ‘British empire’. Yet as many historians of the Irish abroad, the Irish Catholic Church, and Irish culture more generally have noted, the existence of a peculiarly Irish ‘spiritual empire’ was widely spoken of even as the island's ports were daily choked with emigrants. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness and persistence of the concept, invariably involving the perception of a special, God-given emigrants' ‘mission’ to spread the Catholic religion in whatever part of the world they settled, warrant a more searching analysis than historians in the above-mentioned categories have hitherto devoted to it.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, cycling in Ireland progressed from being a relatively exclusive pursuit, confined mainly to young, middleclass men, to a popular sport and pastime which appealed alike to young, middleaged and elderly members of the middle class, including large numbers of women. At the beginning of the 1880s, most Irish cyclists were young men who rode the high-wheeled ‘Ordinary’ or ‘Penny-farthing’ machine. The introduction of the more cumbersome, but easily mountable, tricycle meant that in the early to mid-1880s cycling became accessible to older or more timid men than those who braved the Ordinary machine, and many women also took to the roads on the tricycle. The pastime also received a boost later in the decade, with the invention of the chain-driven ‘safety’ bicycle in the mid-1880s. The safety bicycle did not render the Ordinary obsolete until after the development of the pneumatic tyre, by John Boyd Dunlop, in 1888. Once it became apparent in a number of cycling races in Ireland and England in 1889 and 1890 that the chain-driven and pneumatic-tyred safety bicycle was both quicker and easier to ride than the Ordinary bicycle, the latter's days were numbered. From 1890 onwards, bicycle dealers in both countries were inundated with requests for pneumatic-tyred safety bicycles, and in the course of the 1890s cycling was transformed into a popular, albeit still mainly middle-class activity, that appealed to both sexes.

If, as Thomas Flanagan has asserted, ‘the importance of John Mitchel's Jail journal to the tradition of Irish separatism has been underestimated’, the appearance of James Quinn's recent short biography of Mitchel is to be welcomed. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that Quinn's was the first book-length biography of Mitchel to be published since 1938. The biographical literature on Mitchel has veered between the hagiographic and the critical before settling, ultimately, into an apparent historiographical indifference. This essay examines Mitchel's biographies, his commemoration in periodical and ephemeral sources, and the development of the historiography of this most ardent republican, concluding that a renewed interest in Mitchel is timely.

‘Since our foundation, the S.D.L.P. has been proudly nationalist and is 100 per cent for a United Ireland.’ This description, from the website of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.), advances a claim which might be thought not to sit easy with the party's founding ideals which claimed it as a ‘radical socialist party’ and insisted that, while a united Ireland was one of the party's main aims, it would prioritise the socio-economic above the constitutional question. This article will argue that while the S.D.L.P. was widely recognised as a major advance in nationalist politics in Northern Ireland when it was formed in August 1970, it had lost its avant-garde approach to the constitutional question and become a more organised form of the old Nationalist Party by 1975. Although initially the S.D.L.P. combined socialist rhetoric with a discourse that linked social justice with the reunification of the island – its ideal was a ‘completely new constitution for the whole of Ireland, a constitution which will provide the framework for the emergence of a just, egalitarian and secular society’ – there existed an uneasy tension between nationalist and socialist aims within the party, with the former taking precedence by the time of the powersharing Executive of 1974.

This article will examine the unique power structure that governed the lives of inmates of Ireland's borstal institution from its foundation in 1906 until the end of British rule in 1921. The borstal system was developed at the close of the nineteenth century at a time when penal administrators were searching for new and more enlightened modes of detention. Reform became something of a catchphrase and the borstal was one of two approaches, the other being the inebriate reformatory system that captured the imagination of Home Office officials. During this time there was a transition of leadership in the British penal system as those who subscribed to the more outdated idea of imprisonment without reform were replaced with more enlightened idealists. Borstal offenders in Ireland and Britain were subjected to an authoritarian structure unlike that experienced by prisoners within mainstream institutions of the penal systems in both countries. The division of power involved a three-way process in Clonmel borstal between 1906 and 1921. Three different but inextricably linked bodies, the General Prisons Board (G.P.B.), the institutional management, and the aftercare body, the Borstal Association of Ireland (B.A.I.), cooperated in a type of alliance with the aim of bringing about the reform of the juvenile-adult offender. Ultimate power rested in the hands of G.P.B. administrators but it is clear that governors, warders and aftercare officials had considerable influence in the decision-making process.

This article examines one of the most intense divisions between Irish nationalists during the Northern Ireland conflict. The Provisional I.R.A. claimed to be waging a similar war to that of the I.R.A. of the revolutionary era (1916–1921); an assertion disputed by many. The argument was significant because all the major political forces in the Irish Republic honoured the memory of what they called the ‘old’ I.R.A. (defined in a popular school history book as ‘the men who fought for Irish freedom between 1916 and 1923’). They argued that in contrast to the Provisionals, the ‘old’ I.R.A. possessed a democratic mandate and avoided causing civilian casualties. Echoes of these disputes resurfaced during Sinn Féin's bid for the Irish presidency during 2011. Commemorating Denis Barry, an anti-treaty I.R.A. prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1923, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin claimed that in contrast to men like Barry ‘those who waged war in Northern Ireland during the more recent Troubles were an impediment to Irish unity and directly responsible for causing distress and grief to many families. Yet they still seek to hijack history and the achievements of the noble people who fought for Ireland in our War of Independence … to justify their terrorist campaign.’

The late Peter Hart's tentative yet provocative application of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the Irish revolution, especially as practised in Co. Cork, continues to arouse widespread indignation and incredulity. Two associated issues have dominated the debate: the influence of sectarian hatred on the conduct of the I.R.A., and the extent to which Protestants were actually forced out of their homes by intimidation or fear. Though a few historians have endorsed Hart's claim that a substantial number of Protestants were murdered or expelled because of their religion, most argue that such attacks were primarily motivated by political or economic rather than sectarian motives. Similar points have been made, from the revolutionary epoch onwards, by liberal Protestants as well as republican sympathisers, whose rejection of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ hypothesis has sometimes degenerated into vicious ad hominem attacks on Hart and his allies. The issue of motivation is notoriously resistant to historical analysis: all motives are mixed, some are deliberately concealed, and others are unconscious. Little would be gained by making yet another attempt to disentangle the often contradictory hopes, fears, resentments, and rationalisations underlying republican conduct in the revolutionary years.

On 19 December 1946, the Irish President, Seán T. O'Kelly, signed the Unemployment Insurance Act into law. This innocuous-sounding piece of legislation has received very little attention from historians, but was of great importance to one section of post-war Irish society. Under its terms, Dublin and London entered into a special scheme whereby Irish men and women who had served with the British forces during the Second World War were allowed to claim British unemployment insurance payments, while still resident in the twenty-six counties of independent Ireland. Coming at a time of unemployment and economic slump in Ireland, this was of crucial importance to many exservicemen. This article will explore the background, negotiation and implementation of the unemployment insurance agreement, and will speculate on the reasons why the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, agreed to it. It will also examine the British side of the scheme and explore London's motives, both concrete and notional.

Control over the media is a key lever of state power. During the First World War and immediate post-war period, British officials in Ireland exercised this power as they attempted to curtail radical Irish nationalism. While state control over the media can be wielded in direct form (usually through suppression), it frequently manifests itself more subtly and indirectly, through moderate censorship for example, especially when the state in question has a democratic dimension and liberal traditions or pretensions. In Ireland in the period covered by this article state interference with the media was both direct and indirect, partially mirroring the dual policy of coercion and conciliation that marked the final years of British governance over the whole island. Neither strategy succeeded in hobbling republican political advance, however, and censorship and suppression came to be regarded by radicals as irritants and obstacles that could be overcome.