This article investigates the antiquarian response to the opportunity for Irish Catholic relief during the Anglo–American crisis and views Sylvester O’Halloran’s General history as an innovative attempt to initiate Irish Catholic participation in the British empire predicated on a historic and current fittingness. The London publication of the General history indicated that this work was directed at an audience outside of, as well as within, Ireland. An investigation of the subscription-list confirms that that audience consisted of members of Britain’s political élite and successful émigré Irishmen in the service of European Catholic powers. The narrative analysis, when compared with its principal sources, Keating’s seventeenth-century Foras feasa ar Éirinn and the twelfth-century Lebor gabála Érenn, shows that O’Halloran altered his source materials to construct an historical picture of a Milesian maritime empire. O’Halloran’s argument for Catholic inclusion in the British empire was twofold. He altered his source material to suggest an ancient parity with the contemporary British empire to demonstrate an Irish historical fittingness for an imperial role, while his subscription-list confirmed a current aptitude. This argument was directed at and partly endorsed by another section of the subscription-list, London’s political élite.

The Battle of Clontarf was fought in A.D. 1014 by the forces of Brian Boru, over-king of Munster, and his allies against the forces of Viking Dublin, Leinster and their foreign allies. The saga ‘The War of the Irish and the Foreigners’ (Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib) was written about events leading up the conflict and gives a dramatic account of events on the battlefield. It became the archetype for many later legends about Clontarf. This paper explores stylistic contrast in the saga between the terse description of events in the early Viking Age and the florid account of the reign of Brian Boru. This contrast has led some readers to conclude that two separate narratives were conflated in Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib – the first being a summary of annals and the second being a saga. However this paper argues that there is a unity of purpose throughout the work and that its stylistic divisions were deliberately contrived to help glorify Brian’s victory at the Battle of Clontarf.

In 1435 the Irish council complained to Henry VI that there is not left in the nether parts of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, that join together, out of the subjection of the said enemies and rebels scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, thereas a man may surely ride or go in the said counties to answer to the king’s writs and to his commandments.

The letter was accompanied by a request that the king render payment due to the lord lieutenant Thomas Stanley for his service in Ireland, and also suggested that the king should travel to the colony to help fight off its enemies. Accordingly, the perilous state of English Ireland was almost certainly exaggerated to strengthen the arguments for financial and military support from the crown. Nevertheless this letter demonstrates that in the minds of the settler elite, which staffed the Irish council, the four counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare were the bastion of English rule in Ireland, beset, the council would have us believe, by enemies on all sides. This picture of the ‘four counties’ as the political, and to a certain extent the cultural, stronghold of Englishness in Ireland can be found in other contemporary sources, as the region was perceived as both distinct and distinctly English.

Even though violent popular protest was a common feature of life in early eighteenth-century Dublin, the riots that broke out in 1729 were exceptionally severe and long-lasting and resulted in the worst disorder to occur in the capital in decades. Over a ten-month period rival gangs rioted against each other or against government forces, causing a considerable degree of destruction, injury and death. At the height of the disorder, in late spring and summer, ‘vast numbers’ of people were reportedly beaten and abused by rioters, and residents of the city became fearful for their personal safety. According to the Dublin Intelligence citizens moved ‘mostly in a kind of hurry’ on account of the riots; parts of the city became no-go areas, and gangs of ‘reprobates’ gathered on the outskirts of the city to rob travellers and rape women. The political elite voiced their concerns too, in particular at the length of time the disorder was lasting. The archbishop of Armagh, Hugh Boulter, wrote to the secretary of state, the duke of Newcastle, from Dublin in March 1730 complaining that they had ‘suffered very much from riots and tumults in this town last summer and even during the present sitting of the parliament’.

Historians of socialist thought have rated the Irish political philosopher and radical economist William Thompson (1778–1833) as the most influential theorist to emerge from the Owenite movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. Indeed, Gregory Claeys has judged him to be that movement's ‘most analytical and original thinker ... and a writer whose subsequent influence upon the history of socialist economic thought has been long established’. Furthermore, stressing Thompson's democratic values, Claeys insists that the Irishman ‘may rightfully be considered the founder of a more traditionally republican form of British democratic socialism’. While Robert Owen is remembered for his ambitious co-operative experiments, he was not a theoretical or deeply reflective writer and his intellectual legacy was minimal. The Corkborn Thompson, on the other hand, wrote assiduously on the theory and practice of early socialism, reputedly influenced Karl Marx and became a key figure in the history of feminism; nonetheless, our knowledge of this important Irish intellectual remains deficient.

Scholars have devoted much attention to the causes and consequences of Presbyterian emigration from Ulster to the thirteen colonies before 1776. This article moves beyond the eighteenth century to examine the continued religious links between Presbyterians in Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the influence of evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic and how this promoted unity in denominational identity, missionary activity to convert Catholics, and revivalist religion during the first half of the century. Though Irish Presbyterians had great affection for their American co-religionists, they were not uncritical, and significant tensions did develop over slavery. The article then examines the religious character of Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scots identity in the late nineteenth century, which was articulated in response to the alleged demoralising influence of large-scale Irish immigration during and after the Famine of the 1840s, the so-called Romanisation of Catholicism, and the threat of Home Rule in Ireland. The importance of identity politics should not obscure religious developments, and the article ends with a consideration of the origins and character of fundamentalism, perhaps one of the most important cultural connections between Protestants in Northern Ireland and the United States in the twentieth century.

Existing evidence pertaining to Ireland’s Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) strongly lends itself to the impression that the majority of Old English Palesmen, at least those of higher social status, chose to support the English crown during this conflict rather than their co-religionist Gaelic Irish countrymen. Loyalties, however, were anything but straightforward and could depend on any number of cultural values, social concerns, and economic incentives. Nevertheless, James Fitzpiers Fitzgerald, a ‘Bastard Geraldine’ who served as sheriff of Kildare, seemed to have been driven by a genuine sense of duty to the English crown and establishment. With the outbreak of hostilities in the 1590s, Fitzpiers proved to be a devout crown servitor, risking life and limb to confront the English queen’s Irish enemies. But, in late 1598 he suddenly, and somewhat inexplicably, threw his lot in with the Irish confederacy, defying the government he had once championed. During the ensuing investigation, the Dublin administration accumulated much damning evidence against Fitzpiers, including a patriotic plea from rebel leader Hugh O’Neill which urged Fitzpiers to defend his Irish homeland from the oppressions of English Protestant rule. Yet, at the very same time, a counter case was made by Fitzpiers’s controversial English friend, Captain Thomas Lee, which argued that Fitzpiers’s actions were more loyal than anyone could have imagined. Through an examination of Fitzpiers’s perplexing case, this paper will explore the complicated nature of allegiances in 1590s Ireland and how loyalties were not always what they seemed.

In the advertisement prefacing Charles O’Conor’s Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753), the editor challenged an unnamed gentleman who had, apparently, smeared the good name of the author. The editor, Michael Reily (who went under the cognomen ‘Civicus’) was intricately involved in this dispute from its early stages and did not spare any criticism for the individual he deemed responsible, Dr John Fergus, the erstwhile friend and associate of both Reily and O’Conor. ‘A Gentleman of great Reputation’ alleged Reily, had branded O’Conor with ‘the meanest Species of Immorality’. The dispute did not centre on some esoteric point of Irish mythology or any disagreement over issues of interpretation. It was not even, at least not in any direct way, a rift over political issues regarding the penal laws and the status of papists in the Irish polity, a tendency quite prevalent among the fissiparous Catholic organisations and pugilistic personalities of this period. Rather, it was wholly concerned with those most pertinent aspects of existence for an eighteenth century gentlemen – credit and honour. The disagreement was about Newton’s Chronology and its application to the Irish annalistic corpus as a means of validating the latter – not about the principle of its applicability, nor regarding the minutiae of dates or similar arcana, but to who should gain the credit for appropriating Newton’s prestige to such a particularly Irish topic.

In 4 October 1842, Richard Mant, the Church of Ireland bishop of Down and Connor, presided over the first meeting of the Down and Connor Church Architecture Society in the Clerical Rooms in central Belfast. The scholarly Mant doubtless was in his element as he introduced this initiative dedicated to promoting discussion about historical and contemporary aspects of Anglican church architecture. The Ulster Times, the city’s self-proclaimed newspaper of the Church of Ireland, welcomed the new society, arguing that it was good to have ‘correct views’ on these matters and hoping that features like arched roofs, Gothic windows and lengthened aisles could be maintained so that Anglican churches could be distinguished from their Dissenting counterparts.

In 1878, a meeting organised in Dublin by those in favour of repealing the contentious Contagious Diseases Acts ended in chaos and disruption. The acts themselves empowered police and doctors to forcibly detain and examine women (within specified geographical locations) suspected of being infected with venereal disease. The campaign to abolish the acts appeared to lack the widespread support that it had gathered in England, particularly in medical circles, and the disorderliness of the Dublin meeting seemed to confirm this. The Irish medical press, specifically the weekly Dublin Medical Press and Circular (D.M.P.C.) mirrored The Lancet’s vilification of those who sought to abolish the acts. This article examines the D.M.P.C.’s campaign to extend the acts in Ireland and explores its influence within the context of the debate surrounding these controversial acts. Despite prolific representation of leading English medics among those who opposed the acts, the D.M.P.C. did not offer any outspoken testimony for the repeal of the C.D.A.s by an important figure in the Irish medical profession. This article examines the reasons for such a muted response by Irish doctors to the draconian legislation that directly involved the profession.

Chartism, though weak in Ireland, was the most significant popular political mobilisation in nineteenth-century Britain. Among its main architects was the Irish-born radical journalist and orator, Bronterre O'Brien. This article will describe and explain a key element in O’Brien’s politics. Dubbed ‘the schoolmaster of Chartism’ because of his contribution to the movement's intellectual foundations, O'Brien was one of the few Chartist leaders who had celebrity status, though he broke with other leaders and with the mainstream movement in the early 1840s. His influence waned thereafter and his reputation among historians of Chartism is mixed, but his thoughts about Irish issues circulated widely for a time and they offer suggestive revelations about Ireland's importance to radicals of the Chartist era, about wider debates concerning Irish society and its problems, and about contemporary concepts of Irishness.

This study aims to critically re-evaluate existing explanations for the scale and significance of rape during the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland, using a contextual analysis of the legal testimonies of English Protestant settlers, known collectively as the ‘1641 Depositions’, analysing as far as possible the veracity of reports of rape, the circumstances in which rape occurred, and the identities of - and relationships between - victims and perpetrators. This study considers how women reported rape, comparing the Depositions to similar processes of legal testimony in early modern England. Rape perpetrated by combatants in contemporaneous conflicts is also considered, and the existence of - and adherence to - ad hoc codes of military conduct in Irish rebel ranks is investigated. Most reports of rape during the Rebellion appear highly credible, and almost all perpetrators were known to their victims as members of the same communities. There is a multiplicity of possible motivations for these crimes, with no clear pattern other than opportunism within situations where standards of ethical and military conduct were collectively ignored by rebel soldiers.

Despite the extensive scholarly literature on both the Great Famine in Ireland and the Famine immigration to the United States, little is known about precisely which Irish men and women emigrated from Ireland in the Famine era. This article makes use of a new dataset comprised of 18,000 Famine-era emigrants (2 per cent of the total) who landed at the port of New York from 1846 to 1854 and whose ship manifests list their Irish county of origin. The data is used to estimate the number of emigrants from each county in Ireland who arrived in New York during the Famine era. Because three-quarters of all Irish immigrants intending to settle in the United States took ships to New York, this dataset provides the best means available for estimating the origins of the United States’s Famine immigrants. The authors find that while the largest number of Irish immigrants came from some of Ireland’s most populous counties, such as Cork, Galway, and Tipperary, surprisingly large numbers also originated in Counties Cavan, Meath, Dublin, and Queen’s County, places not usually associated with the highest levels of emigration. The data also indicates that the overall level of emigration in the Famine years was significantly higher than scholars have previously understood.

Throughout the Irish cultural revival of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wales was held up as an example by some Irish nationalists of how a nation could revive its traditional culture and language. These writers told their audience of the heroic deeds of the Welsh in restoring their language to show Irish language revivalists that their task was not impossible. The Welsh example was studied by enthusiasts to see what steps were needed to improve the position of Irish. Organisations such as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (S.P.I.L.) and the Gaelic League noted with envy the levels of literacy among Welsh speakers. Revivalists believed that literacy had prevented Welsh from disappearing, and they hoped to boost literacy rates in Irish to save that language. They noted how successful the eisteddfodau were in instilling pride among the Welsh people in their culture. Accordingly, members of the Gaelic League established the Oireachtas to encourage the people of Ireland to celebrate their own distinctive characteristics. Yet while the example of the Welsh language was regularly discussed, this did not reflect a deep understanding of linguistic developments in Wales.

During the Second World War tens of thousands of volunteers from the island of Ireland served in the British armed forces. This article will examine the effect of an Irish background on the volunteers’ experience of the British forces. It will explore the ways in which the military authorities facilitated and encouraged the development of a pluralist Irish identity. In doing so the article will demonstrate how the volunteers’ ideas of Irishness were influenced by British perceptions and it will assess to what extent volunteers from North and South really shared a common Irish identity. The article will also place the Irish experience of the British forces in the context of a multinational army incorporating personnel from, among others, Scotland, Wales, the dominions and Poland.

Female activists across the United Kingdom had insisted from the late nineteenth century that the employment of women police who would deal with problems specific to women and children could help to address pressing social questions, or at least to offer women some protection within the entirely male criminal justice system. Their campaign for women police was connected to similar demands for the employment of female prison visitors and inspectors and, later, jurors and lawyers, and it was predicated on the idea that neither prisons nor courts afforded women fair and equal treatment under the law. Early victories included the appointment of police matrons and searchers, but the resistance of police authorities and most other civil servants to female officers remained solid into the early twentieth century, feminist campaigning notwithstanding. The outbreak of the First World War, however, provided an ideal context for renewed activism on the issue, not least because commentators across the British Isles predicted that the apparent inability of girls and young women to resist the lure of uniformed men would lead to outbreaks of war-induced sexual promiscuity and a decline in standards of public behaviour.

In his vivid account of Easter Week 1916, The insurrection in Dublin, the writer James Stephens observed: ‘The finest part of our city has been blown to smithereens, and burned into ashes. Soldiers amongst us who have served abroad say that the ruin of this quarter is more complete than anything they have seen at Ypres, than anything they have seen anywhere in France or Flanders.’ In a letter to his sister, Henry Beater, company secretary of Arnotts, also likened the smouldering ruins of Sackville Street and the adjoining thoroughfares to a scene from the war:

It is now widely admitted that the Great War was also Ireland’s war, with profound consequences for every element of Irish life after 1914. Its impact may be discerned in aberrant aspects of Ireland’s demographic, economic and social history, as well as in the more familiar political and military convulsions of the war years. This article surveys recent scholarship, assesses statistical evidence of the war’s social and economic impact (both positive and negative), and explores its far-reaching political repercussions. These include the postponement of expected civil conflict, the unexpected occurrence of an unpopular rebellion in 1916, and public response to the consequent coercion. The speculative final section outlines a number of plausible outcomes for Irish history in the absence of war, concluding that no single counterfactual history of a warless Ireland is defensible.

In 1959 the Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.) abandoned the idea that relations between the government in Belfast and the two main parties in Westminster should be maintained with a semblance of impartiality. Hitherto, although the Unionist M.P.s at Westminster had taken the Conservative whip, overt criticism of Labour had remained comparatively muted, if only to ensure that those with socialist sympathies would remain under the Unionist umbrella rather than defect to the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). In the run-up to the 1959 Westminster general election, however, the U.U.P. not only made offers of unconditional support to the Conservatives, but accompanied them with disparagement of Labour policies and objectives. The logic of that choice was not only contrary to the experience of inter-governmental relations with London since 1945, it also carried a high risk at a time when key areas of the Northern Ireland economy were becoming dependent on support from the British government, and a Conservative victory in the election was by no means certain. It therefore raised the inter-related questions of whether relations with the Labour party had been so toxic, and whether the attitude of the Conservatives, who had been in government in Westminster for most of the decade, had been so benevolent as to justify abandoning the approach which formerly had prevailed. Support for the Conservatives was the U.U.P. default setting, but unless carefully managed, that support carried with it the danger of alienating the Labour party which, given the rotation of power at Westminster, was bound someday to form the government with which Northern Ireland ministers would have to work.

Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom’s only self-governing region, recorded year-on- year the worst statistics on health and poverty. However, it was far from certain that the Unionist government in Belfast would enact the kind of sweeping post-war reform that occurred in England and Wales. The raft of legislation governing health and social care introduced in 1948 was, therefore, the product of conditions and circumstances peculiar to Northern Ireland. The government in Belfast needed to overcome the conservative instincts of Ulster Unionism as well as suspicions regarding Clement Attlee’s Labour administration. Although the process was somewhat blighted by sectarianism, the government of Sir Basil Brooke enacted what amounted to a revolution in health and social care provision.