During the winter of 1713-14 the tory ministry in England began to disintegrate. Despite a massive tory victory at the 1713 election, the new parliament which met in the following spring did not furnish the court with a reliable majority in either house. The tory party had fallen into complete disarray Queen Anne’s deteriorating health was the root cause, giving rise to panic among tories. It was clear that there was little hope for them at Hanover, where Prince George, angry at thepeaceofutrecht, wascommitted to thewhigs. Some tories actively considered declaring for the Pretender Others, more afraid of a Jacobite restoration than the accession of a whiggish but protestant king, identified themselves as Hanoverians and voted against the ministry in parliament. The vast majority, whether Jacobite or Hanoverian, were agreed on the necessity of taking some decisive measures to crush the whigs and entrench themselves in power against the fateful day when the queen should die. More than ever they were impatient of the leadership of Lord Treasurer Oxford, the former Robert Harley, the essence of whose political management seemed to be duplicity and procrastination.

Alone amongst the major rebellions of the sixteenth century the Desmond rebellion of 1579 seems to have retained its romantic fascination untarnished. While the rebellions of 1534 and 1569 and the major uprising in Ulster at the end of the century have each been subjected to critical historical analysis, the uprising of the last Desmond earl seems to contain a mysterious element which has somehow deflected all attempts at detached assessment, and which continues to attract popular historians, like Richard Berleth, in search of a good Gothic tale at the close of the feudal age. The dramatic appeal of the Desmond rebellion, I suspect, lies in the aura of inevitability which appears to surround it. As Macbeth was doomed to be overthrown, as Othello was doomed to kill that which, he loved most, as Hamlet was doomed to do nothing, so it seems Desmond was doomed to destroy himself in rebellion.

The obscurity surrounding Richard’s involvement in his Irish lordship has made it difficult to understand royal policy for Ireland in the 1390s, despite the availability in print of many original sources recording the successes of his first Irish expedition. These documents reveal how Richard in 1394-5 succeeded in winning more wide-spread submissions from Gaelic Ireland than any of his predecessors had done, and that this was the deliberate aim of royal policy cannot seriously be doubted. Historical neglect of this material as evidence on royal policy has resulted from reservations about the political value of Gaelic submission, which, it has been assumed, was the inevitable by-product of any royal visit and a poor alternative to military conquest. This dismissive attitude towards Gaelic submissions to the crown, judged by what they effected rather than what they sought to establish.

From 1740–1922, as many as seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. Arguably, if there are any patterns in modern Irish history, a cultural analysis of this vast flow may help to reveal them. For while the Irish question is usually defined in Anglo/Irish terms (those of conflict) it has more universal import as the adjustment of Irish identity and culture, both personal and national, to the demands of the modern industrialising world. Emigration afforded one such response; Irish nationalism another; Irish American nationalism linked the two. More humans were directly and articulately involved in the migratory response than in the nationalist, both cumulatively over time and in the degree of freely active personal involvement. If scholars such as Robert Kennedy, Cormac Ó Gráda and others have studied emigration in terms of Ireland’s economic modernization, we would suggest that it may be studied culturally as a revealing cross-section of Ireland’s attendant psychic modernisation.

The suppression of the Irish provincial presidencies in August 1672 has received scant attention from historians. Scarcity of surviving source material has resulted in little serious scholarship being devoted to this particular form of regional government. This basic handicap was intensified by the circumstances of the decision to terminate the system. No serious abuses existed in its operation and no demand for its removal was evident yet the decision was implemented without official explanation. As a result most writers on restoration Ireland have confined themselves to brief and guarded generalisations when dealing with the subject.

F. S. L. Lyons in his Ford lectures at Oxford, and in a broadcast talk, has stressed the need for a new general theory of Irish culture, a wider understanding of the Irish tradition. This essay is an attempt to take a few steps in this direction. It will review some of the English literature written in Ireland between 1780 and 1820, and trace its connections with Ireland and with England. In the forty years after the Volunteer movement, it will be argued, Irish authors writing in English, influenced by new ideas about Celts and constitutions and even about Carthaginians, did something to establish a tradition of specifically Irish literature. This has all too often been neglected or misunderstood by literary historians, for whom Anglo-Irish literature begins more than half a century later.

The most remarkable aspect of Ireland’s aberrant history in the later nineteenth century is surely the disappearance of nearly half her population. This was largely due not to heavy mortality during the Great Famine, but to massive emigration. Of few enough Irish families might it be said, in the words of the Vicar of Wakefield, that all their adventures were by the fire-side, and all their migrations from the blue bed to the brown. For both Irishmen and Irishwomen emigration became an expected episode in the life-cycle, akin to marriage or inheritance. Thus for the generation entering the employment market in about 1876, when the pace of post-Famine flight had already slackened, the probability of eventual emigration was still almost one-half. For those of either sex remaining in Ireland, the chance of marriage was only three in four For earlier generations, particularly of those brought up in the south-west, the likelihood of emigration had reached the extraordinary level of two in three.

Political life in Ireland in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was disturbed by three major opposition campaigns. From 1753 to 1756 there was the so-called money bill dispute in which Henry Boyle (later first earl of Shannon) mounted a formidable and largely successful opposition to the designs of the Dublin Castle administration for replacing him as chief undertaker. The years 1769-71 saw a noisy but ineffective opposition to Viscount Townshend’s plans for re-modelling the way Ireland was governed. And from 1778 to 1783 there was the famous patriot opposition led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood which won for Ireland ‘a free trade’ and the ‘constitution of ’82’ The first and last ofthese opposition campaigns have been studied in detail; but the opposition to Townshend has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because the result was so unequivocally a victory for the Castle and hence less ‘heroic’ in its outcome than the other two campaigns. This paper sets out in the first instance to correct this imbalance by examining the reasons for the failure of the Irish opposition to Townshend.

There is general acceptance in recent writings that fenianism in its heyday — which is to say the middle 1860s — was espoused predominantly by members of lower-ranking social and occupational groups. It is not difficult to assemble supporting references and texts from well-placed contemporary observers. T.D.Sullivan writing privately to Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1862 described the active but still anonymous organisation subsequently known as the ‘I.R.B.’ or the ‘feninas’ as drawing the bulk of its membership from among ‘shopkeepers’ assistants in our cities and chief towns who have a little smattering — often a very little indeed — of education’, and from ‘the very poorest and most ignorant people’ By 1865 the term ‘fenianism’ was in extensive use and the thing itself was receiving widespread attention. Writing his diary for 26 June that year, W J. O’Neill Daunt expressed the opinion that in his part of County Cork those implicated in fenian activities were ‘country lads’ and ‘town shop-boys’ At the same time, the mounting pile of constabulary reports from around the country provided more and more references to the infection of specific categories by fenianism: in one area, shopboys, artisans, servants and reduced farmers; in another, ‘young men of the labouring class and also mechanics or tradesmen such as tailors, nailors, shoemakers’; elsewhere, subordinate employees on the railway Less specifically, an alarmed detective visiting the Thurles area reported that the ‘lower orders’ thereabouts were fenians virtually to a man.

In an article published in 1970 Professor Harkness has examined in some detail the negotiations between Britain and the Irish Free State during the economic war, particularly as they affected the relationships of Britain and the Commonwealth. This article discusses an aspect of the dispute not covered in his paper, the part Northern Ireland played in the quarrel, and in particular its role in making a final settlement more difficult. It also examines how the economic war affected relations between Britain and the province.

Although in the end the dispute proved, at least to Malcolm Macdonald’s satisfaction, that ‘the difficulty between North and South still lies at the root of the Anglo-Irish problem’, this was not evident when it began. In 1932, at the outbreak of the war, the question of partition did not arise. As Professor Mansergh has pointed out ‘the coin of contemporary political controversy in Ireland’ concerned the oath of allegiance, the position of the Governor-General, the question ofthe treaty ports and even the right of Ireland to secede from the Commonwealth.

Desmond Bowen’s recently published ‘Study of Protestant-Catholic relations between the Act of Union and Disestablishment’ has been a well received investigation of the polarisation between evangelical anglicanism and an increasingly ‘Roman’ catholicism. In his view the historically fragmented religio-political culture of pre-nineteenth century Ireland was, after 1822, the perfect battleground for two imperialistic ecclesiastical systems: ‘When protestant proselytising was openly encouraged in parts of the country after 1822 and the movement for emancipation gained momentum, the castigation of religious leaders who urged conciliation instead of confrontation increased.’

During the imperial conference of 1930 a senior British official vented his exasperation at the demands of the Irish delegation, commenting ‘surely de Valera could not be worse than this. If their opponents came into power, this might clear the air. We might get rid of this sapping by which we are losing much and gaining little goodwill.’

In retrospect, as many British ministers and officials would have ruefully admitted, this view had much to commend it. But the peculiar circumstances surrounding Eamon de Valera’s accession to power, followed so soon by a major disturbance in Anglo-Irish relations, instead of clearing the air, fogged it with tension, rumour and misunderstanding. In such an atmosphere rational assessments of the new Irish leader and his policy were at a premium.

Erskine Childers has commonly been seen as the éminence grise of hardline republicanism in the negotiations for an Anglo-Irish treaty that took place in London between October and December 1921. Lloyd George described him as ‘rigid and fanatical’ and believed that Childers had attempted to ‘wreck every endeavour to reach agreement’ Thomas Jones saw Childers as an ‘intense republican’, and it is clear that Jones, too, regarded Childers as an obstacle to an agreed solution. Childers has been portrayed as an inflexible wrangler who stood in the way of an agreement in the winter of 1921 and who was fundamentally opposed to the more conciliatory views of Arthur Griffith, in particular, and of Michael Collins. In Peace by ordeal Lord Longford has stressed the gulf that lay between Childers and Griffith and the way in which this contributed to a division in the Irish dele-g ation as a whole. On one side were the delegates who were more prepared to compromise and reach a settlement with the British negotiators; on the other were those, backed by Childers, who held out against concessions and who signed the treaty on 6 December only with the greatest reluctance.

Éire was economically and militarily impotent, strategically significant, and the only European neutral behind allied lines in World War II. Although the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, refused to co-operate openly with his protectors in Britain and his friends in America or even to distinguish publicly between them and Nazi Germany, he wanted Anglo-American aid, and he wanted it without conditions. He wanted what the American minister at Dublin, David Gray, called a ‘free ride’

On St Patrick’s Day, 1941, de Valera announced that he would send a special agent to purchase American food and weapons and expressed the hope that Ireland’s friends would help the mission. Acknowledging that the war was causing shortages, he repeated earlier claims that the belligerents, blockading each other, were blockading Éire, a land determined to avoid involvement in any ‘imperial adventure’

On 11 July 1921 a truce between the British army and the army of the selfproclaimed Irish Republic began, and the politicians on both sides prepared instead to settle the Irish question by negotiation. For Lloyd George, if negotiation failed, the alternative would be war. His troops would remain in Ireland and his generals would prepare for the resumption of the campaign, if and when he so resolved — a position the implications of which he continued to stress for the benefit of the Irish.

In the months following signature of the Anglo-Irish treaty the British government was particularly concerned with the transfer of power to a legally constituted government and parliament in Dublin which would be committed to implementation of the treaty and supported by an electoral majority This goal was, however, subject to an overriding consideration: preservation, at almost any cost, of the agreement embodied in the treaty The Collins-de Valera pact brought these considerations into conflict. It is the purpose of this paper to examine why the British government, and Winston Churchill in particular, objected so strenuously to the pact and why, despite these objections, an election under the terms of the pact was permitted.