During the lord lieutenancy of Camden the executive had taken action against newspapers friendly to, or suspected of leanings towards, the United Irishmen, and by the time of the '98 rising all newspapers which it had been unable to purchase had been suppressed. Although a few newspaper owners roused themselves to oppose the union, they reverted to sycophancy, or at best extreme circumspection, in 1803 and for some years afterwards. That O'Connell should have grown up with a distrust of the power of the press, seeing it daily perverted to the Castle's purposes, goes some way to explain his attitude towards it in later years. During the time when he was beginning to make his name at the Bar and in catholic counsels, no Dublin newspaper could be relied upon to present, let alone to advocate, the causes with which he was concerned. Of the old established newspapers Giffard's Dublin Journal showed the most independence of the government—but it was bigotedly anti-catholic and tory. The Freeman's Journal had not recovered from the Sham Squire's ownership—Higgins lived on until 1802 : and Saunders's News-Letter avoided trouble by printing no home news at all of a controversial character.

There is no catalogue of the contents of the records branch of the Irish land commission, nor is there even a summary description; in consequence, it is not claimed that the description given in this paper is by any means complete. Indeed, it is probable that not all the land commission records are contained in the records branch. For instance, a few of the rare examples of judicial leases executed under the land law act of 1881 appeared in the records branch for the first time in September 1949, having till then been in the hands of another department of the commission—a warning to the historian that the land commission is a working department of government, and not primarily a research institution.