Among a number of early modern collections of Uí Néill genealogies are two pedigrees entitled Genelach Clainne Eruilb (‘Genealogy of the Descendants of Erulb’) which are of interest as they contain a relatively high proportion of Scandinavian personal names. The scheme of the two pedigrees, with dates supplied from the chronicles, can be set out diagramatically thus:

Clann Eruilb evidently took its name from Erulb mac Murchada, who is the common ancestor of the two constituent lines. As recorded in the manuscripts, the pedigrees do not go back beyond Áed Allán mac Fergaile (king of Tara, 734–43) but could be extended to Éogan mac Néill Noígiallaig, eponymous ancestor of the Cenél nÉogain kings of Ailech.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond were among the élite of Hiberno-Norman society in Ireland. Equalled in status among the nobility of Ireland only by the earls of Kildare and of Ormond, the Desmonds possessed great power, wealth and influence. Their huge earldom, which covered much of Munster, rendered them the virtual masters of the province and of all the Gaelic Irish and Hiberno-Norman lords therein.

Yet by 1584 they were gone, the earl of Desmond killed while in rebellion, the earldom broken up as an entity, the estates and castles in ruins. Apart from a short-lived return at the end of the century, the house of Desmond was defunct.

The dramatic fall of the house of Desmond has intrigued many historians, who seek its cause in the period leading up to the 1580s and in the political context of the time. They cite the breakdown of the earl’s control, the indebtedness of the earldom, the alleged madness and incapacity for rule of Gerald, the fifteenth earl. They refer to the extension of crown control in Elizabethan Ireland, the English fear of foreign intervention in Ireland, and the campaign for conformity to the new Protestant religion.

The valiant efforts of certain professional historians to redeem the reputation of King John of England have had a limited impact on the public imagination: there he remains a cruel tyrant, the oppressor of his subjects’ liberty. Even within the profession, it must be said, John has never managed fully to endear himself, and while there is general acknowledgement that he was an innovative king who paid meticulous attention to the day-to-day workings of his civil service, this is hardly likely to overcome the lingering and firmly fixed impression that he was a nasty individual, an unpopular ruler and, ultimately, a failure. Curiously, apart from his reputation for administrative innnovation, John’s Irish policy is one of the few areas of either his public or his private life which has not been viewed unfavourably and where approval by modern historians approaches unanimity.

Unlike some members of his profession, Richard Hadsor (c. 1570–1635), a Middle Temple lawyer born in Ireland, has not been caught in the spotlight which historians have aimed at the dramatic political confrontations in England and Ireland during the early seventeenth century. Nor, since he was not a recusant, has he attracted the attention of Irish historians of the legal profession. Although canvassed for both, he never attained a seat in a parliament or a place on the English or Irish judiciary. He had no part in the ‘inflation of honours’ as either a broker or a recipient. Although he spent the whole of his professional life in London, nothing is known of his English social circle — apart from a single reference in his will to Sir lohn Bramston, a fellow Templar — or the value of his private practice, and only a little (which is, however, suggestive) of his clientèle. He wrote nothing for publication. He had no legitimate offspring and, therefore, none of the successful lawyer’s usual inclination to create a substantial patrimony. In consequence, it is hardly surprising that he does not figure in the standard works of biography or even in a commemoration of nearly one thousand Middle Templars straddling several centuries. Nevertheless, in his own time Richard Hadsor was no nonentity, and he deserves to be rescued from an entirely posthumous obscurity by something more generous than a scholarly footnote. His career as a devoted royal servant spanned a period in which the Old English were being relentlessly excluded from high office in Ireland, yet as crown counsel for Irish affairs he succeeded in establishing a distinctive niche in the Whitehall bureaucracy.

The censuses of 1841 and 1851 provide the earliest detailed and consistent data on the occupations pursued by the people of Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper presents a series, constructed from this data, on occupations classified by industry for the years 1841 and 1851. Its purpose is to establish the industrial distribution of the labour force for each of the four provinces, to describe the changes in industrial employment by province during the famine decade, and to make a contribution to debate on the origins of employment decline.

I

In its return of occupations, the census of 1841 differed from the censuses of 1821 and 1831 in three ways: in method of estimation, in compilation, and in system of classification. As regards estimation, the 1841 commissioners issued a ‘Form of family return’ to be completed by the head of the family, rather than, as in 1821 and 1831, having the details entered by the enumerator from viva voce inquiry. This has its limitations in that it depends on the accuracy of the householders’ returns, but it is preferable to relying on the accuracy of enumerators’ returns. As regards compilation, the 1841 census returned the occupations of all persons active in the labour force by age and gender; the 1821 census returned all persons active; the 1831 census returned males upwards of twenty years of age in agriculture, industry and services (except servants), all male servants and female servants (age unspecified). As regards the system of classification, the 1821 occupation returns were made under three, and the 1831 under eleven general headings with no return of the numbers engaged in the component occupations of these headings (but see note 1); the 1841 census provided a return of the numbers of males and females engaged in each of 471 occupations classified as belonging to one of nine classes: ministering to food; clothing; lodging; furniture; machinery, etc.; health; charity; justice; education; religion; unclassified.

During a twelve-week period in the late summer of 1828 upwards of a quarter of a million people participated in at least sixty mass demonstrations in the south-west of Ireland. Appearing to erupt spontaneously in response to Daniel O’Connell’s historic victory in the County Clare election in early July, these gatherings grew in size and complexity over the succeeding weeks; by late September jubilant but well-ordered assemblies of twenty and thirty thousand people — many marching in identical green uniforms and with military precision behind bands and colourful banners — were taking place simultaneously in several County Tipperary towns to support O’Connell’s crusade for Catholic emancipation.

Political demonstrations on this scale were virtually unprecedented outside the province of Ulster. While processions and large rallies had sometimes been used to honour important politicians during parliamentary elections, and while they had long been part of civic, military and religious pageantry, they had never before been staged in such a co-ordinated and prolonged fashion. What made these spectacles particularly remarkable, however, was that their participants were mainly drawn from the very lowest ranks of rural society and represented groups which had hitherto been excluded from the political process. The novelty of such people marching so often with uniforms and other military regalia caused widespread bewilderment and alarm. Journalists and magistrates liberally sprinkled their descriptions of the meetings with phrases such as ‘novel’, ‘portentous’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘frightful’, and ‘the strangest scene ever witnessed’. One of them observed that had such displays taken place even a few years earlier, they ‘would not only have been deemed factious but treasonable’. As the meetings swelled, many observers thought them to be the harbingers of a mass uprising.

Between folios 179v and 181v of volume 216 of the state papers for Ireland is a document entitled ‘Discourse humbly presented by Richard Hadsor ...’ which a later hand has endorsed as having being written ‘probably some time in 1604 when Tyrone & Tyrconel were in peace’. In 1854 an anonymous scholar (possibly E.P. Shirley) published a transcript of the document in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, but without appending either notes or commentary on the text or investigating its authorship. In the first volume of the Jacobean series of the Calendar of State Papers, Ireland the editors, C. W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast, provided an almost complete transcript, suggesting that they too found it noteworthy. But since then the ‘Discourse’ has received virtually no further attention from historians. Yet it contains, among other things, the earliest articulation of a ‘three kingdoms’ approach to the new Stuart multiple monarchy. Two reasons may account for its neglect: first, neither the anonymous editor of 1854 nor Russell and Prendergast paid any attention to the question of the authorship of the treatise — the former being apparently of the view that certain sections of the text would be of interest to the journal’s antiquarian readership, while the latter mistakenly attributed the tract to either a Richard or a John Hudson, neither of whom was identifiable; secondly, its contents are odd, a mixture of useful information and relatively unconventional opinion.

Irish nationalism and the success of Sinn Féin in acquiring dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1921–2 had a profound influence upon many nationalist movements in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the Irish example was of greatest significance for the shaping of political organisations and guerrilla warfare, it was also valuable in inspiring broader academic analyses of the consequences of colonial rule. In 1927 and again in 1936 Professor Yanaihara Tadao of Tokyo Imperial University published an essay on the Airurando mondai or Irish question entitled ‘Airurando mondai no enkaku’ (‘The history of the Irish question’). The main purpose of the essay was to compare Britain’s Irish question with Japan’s Chôsen mondai or Korean question, and it not only provides us with a unique Japanese perspective on Irish history but reminds us of the importance of the Irish example in Asia.

Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961) is even today much respected in Japan for his resistance to militarism and his sympathy for colonial peoples in the 1930s. In 1910, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he was touched by the plight of the Korean people under Japanese rule as a result of reading Frederick Arthur McKenzie’s The tragedy of Corea. McKenzie’s tirade against Japanese atrocities in Korea both during and after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 caused Yanaihara ‘to consider the truth of colonial policy’. At this time Yanaihara had just been admitted to the First Higher School, a preparatory college for entry to Tokyo Imperial University, and the years spent at the school proved to be his most formative.

The origin and the purpose of the Irish penal laws have always been subjects of contention. These laws have often been viewed as a ‘rag-bag’ of legislation, lacking in government policy, without precedent or forethought, motivated by rapacity, unfavoured in England and yet tolerated in return for concessions by an Irish parliament greedy for Catholic land and wealth. However, in the context of the first two Irish penal laws of 1695, and most specifically the disarming act, this generality does not hold good. It is the aim of this article to show that the two penal laws of 1695, for disarming Catholics and prohibiting foreign education, were the result of a definite policy which existed in Ireland from the time of the Williamite war. This policy was built upon a previous tradition of English statutes and Irish proclamations. The pressure for this policy came not only from Irish Protestants, but also from English ministers and from the crown. And the prime motive was security of the Protestant interest.

Victory at Limerick in October 1691 did not end the threat to the Williamite Protestant interest in Ireland. Fear of Catholic Europe remained constant as long as William III was at war with France, a fear that was heightened by the activities of privateers and rapparees. In the search for greater security, a policy developed for disarming Irish Catholics, which was actively supported by William III and his executive and legislature in England, was implemented by the executive in Ireland, and was encouraged and promoted by the Irish Protestant interest.

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party.

The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

In 1843 Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for repeal of the Act of Union won the support of millions of Irish Catholics. This movement, of which the famous ‘monster meetings’ were the most striking feature, greatly alarmed adherents to the union in both Britain and Ireland. This article is concerned with the response of those M.P.s who supported the union but repudiated ‘Protestant ascendancy’ and advocated removal of the grievances of Ireland’s Catholic majority. There were about forty such ‘liberal-unionist’ members then in parliament, their landed influence and popular sympathies having enabled them to emerge relatively unscathed from the Whig electoral disaster of 1841. They were a mixed bag of Protestants and Catholics, Whigs and liberals, and they had as little idea of party unity as the stereotypical independent member of nineteenth-century fame. This picture of unco-ordinated individual activity was to change dramatically in response to the momentous events of what O’Connell called ‘the great Repeal Year’.

The Wood’s Halfpence affair has long been recognised as one of the most serious disputes to have occurred between the Irish and British political establishments during the eighteenth century. There is no doubt that the conflict — caused by Irish resentment over the patent granted to William Wood to coin copper halfpence for Ireland — was one of the most serious ruptures in Anglo-Irish relations between the Williamite war and the ‘patriot’ campaign of the 1750s. The simple fact is that in 1723–4 the British administration was unable to implement its policy in Ireland. The Irish parliamentary managers declined to co-operate in the implementation of Wood’s patent, the Irish privy council failed to offer advice about how the conflict might be resolved, and the Irish lords justices refused to obey the positive orders of the British government.

In the past historians have argued that, shocked by the demonstrable unreliability of its Irish servants during this episode, the British government adopted a systematic policy of appointing English officials to the highest offices of Irish state and church. The appointment of Hugh Boulter as primate of the Church of Ireland in 1724 and of Richard West as lord chancellor in 1725 seemed to support such an interpretation.

By October 1926 the Irish Free State seemed to have emerged at last from the prolonged nightmare of the ‘Troubles’. Within three and a half years of the abandonment of armed insurrection by the republicans, Cosgrave’s government had proved unexpectedly effective in securing both internal stability and external reconciliation with its former antagonists. In May 1926 de Valera had committed his followers to parliamentary struggle by founding Fianna Fáil, thereby marginalising intransigent republicanism until it became a lingering irritant rather than an immediate menace to domestic security. The tripartite agreements of December 1925 had perpetuated partition and resolved some of the thorny fiscal problems raised by the Anglo-Irish treaty. The process of reconciliation with Britain was crowned during October and November 1926, when Kevin O’Higgins and the Irish delegation played a creative and enthusiastic role in remodelling the British Empire at the Imperial Conference in London. The consolidation of the Irish Free State as an autonomous dominion of twenty-six counties, comfortably acknowledging its strategic and economic dependence on Britain, seemed virtually assured.

In 1913 part of the enormous fortune of the American millionaire John D. Rockefeller was put aside for philanthropic and charitable purposes under the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation. Throughout the twentieth century the Rockefeller Foundation disbursed money to a wide range of economic, scientific and artistic projects. Among its interests were health and medical research, and Rockefeller invested funds in public health programmes throughout the world for the eradication of particular diseases or to strengthen the effectiveness of existing public health structures.

The Rockefeller Foundation was also interested in providing aid for the reorganisation and modernisation of medical education. It was, however, loath to part with any of its monies unless it was assured of the political and social stability of a country, and also of the competence, honesty and good intentions of those to whom it entrusted funds. In order to assess this, the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation visited potential recipients. They reported back to the New York headquarters of the Foundation on the political and social background of the countries to which assistance might be given and also on the feasibility of the programmes of assistance devised to help them.

For Ulster Protestants, riven by division since the fall of Terence O’Neill as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969, the recent troubles have seen their future steadily being conceded by default. Where there was certainty, there is now confusion; where there was once leadership, there are now only leaders. Not surprisingly, there have been wistful glances back to the mythical heroes of the past, in particular to Sir Edward Carson, who had steered them through the home rule crisis of 1912–14 to the promised land of Northern Ireland. Carson not only mobilised all Ulster Protestants, but also organised a largely successful rebellion and in time squared the circle to become one of the few rebels in English history to go on to be a law lord. Moreover, he was also a British leader, being four times in office, twice in the cabinet, and for twenty years one of the dominating figures in Tory politics. It is this duality that made Carson’s position exceptional in Anglo-Irish relations and contributed to the immense authority he periodically enjoyed. Indeed, in Ulster before the Great War his sway assumed near-charismatic proportions. Viewed as a case study in leadership, therefore, his career was, in terms of British politics, unique.

In his recent book dealing with the history of duelling in Ireland, James Kelly comes to the conclusion that eighteenth-century Ireland was essentially ‘a violent society’, peopled at least in part ‘by wilful men who put their individual reputations above their lives, their families, their religion, and the law’. Such comments seem to continue a well-established tradition of interpretation that goes back to the nineteenth century. However, this image of a society in which violence was endemic, and conflict a feature of everyday life, has not gone unquestioned by historians. For example, Thomas Bartlett and Sean Connolly have instead noted the relatively controlled nature of popular protest, the early disappearance of banditry, and the reliance, until the very end of the century, on local enforcement of the law, as possible indications that Ireland may not have been as disorderly a society as has been suggested. These differing interpretations have, in turn, an obvious relevance to the wider debate on how eighteenth-century Ireland should be perceived: as a society irreconcilably and uniquely divided by religious and ethnic conflicts, or as a more or less typical part of the European ancient régime.

Academic study of the development of Irish political parties has been hampered by a shortage of primary source material available to historians and political scientists. This is because the headquarters records of parties, where they have survived, are generally fragmentary and ill-organised, and because few national politicians or party organisers have left papers for research.

The shortage of primary sources on the major political parties is reflected in the standard academic works dealing with their development, from Maurice Manning’s Irish political parties (1972) and Michael Gallagher’s The Irish Labour Party in transition, 1957–1982 (1982) to Richard Dunphy’s recent The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland (1995). These are largely based on secondary sources, on interviews, and on the private papers of individual politicians. Where scholars have had access to party records, furthermore, it has generally been on an informal and improvised basis. It was in such circumstances that John Bowman, while preparing De Valera and the Ulster question, 1917–1973 (1982), and Dermot Keogh, while researching Ireland and Europe, 1919–1948 (1988), were given sight of some of the records of the Fianna Fail national executive committee and the parliamentary party.