One of the things which has united historians across the generations when writing about the Reformation in its Tudor Irish context is the conviction that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the allegiance of the indigenous population to its religious dictates. Where this agreement has broken down, and continues to break down, is in the significance attached to the Tudor state’s failure, and in determining precisely when it became apparent.

Until the end of the 1960s most examinations of sixteenth-century Ireland identified the Tudor failure as being synonymous with the practical and absolute failure of the Protestant Reformation. These studies were generally characterised by a partipris approach and by their employment of an interlinked and deterministic vision to explain this failure. Echoing the observations of contemporaries like Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, who spoke of the Irish people’s ‘disposition to popery’, writers of all religious persuasions saw the Reformation’s failure as an inevitable consequence of the inherently conservative character of the island’s inhabitants.

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.

The history of the Church of Ireland between 1641 and 1690 has not excited much interest among historians over the past thirty years. It was not always so, and earlier generations of writers found more to describe or investigate in a period which saw effective disestablishment in the 1650s, restoration in the 1660s, and crisis in the later 1680s. Phillips devoted almost one hundred pages to these years: the 1640s and 1650s in the authoritative hands of St John D. Seymour, and the 1660s to 1680s (and beyond) covered by R. H. Murray. Mant’s History, published almost a century before Phillips, still provides a useful narrative and valuable quotations from primary sources. The much shorter treatment of J. T. Ball, first published in 1886, gave only 33 pages out of 305 to the period, but contained some perceptive comments. In other histories of the Church of Ireland the period receives more cursory treatment.

The history of this period, as currently studied, falls neatly into three phases. The twenty-five years or so after the fall of James II are marked by limited and largely unsuccessful attempts at reform, undertaken against a background of fundamental divisions on matters of religious and political principle. Thereafter the emphasis shifts to consensus, privilege and self-interest, as we turn to the workings of a comfortable ecclesiastical establishment firmly embedded in the patronage networks of the Hanoverian one-party state. In the last years of the eighteenth century this image of complacent stagnation is qualified by the first signs of spiritual revitalisation. Recent work has modified this chronological framework. Whether it will have to be more radically revised remains to be seen.

The ‘United Church of England and Ireland’, established by the Act of Union ‘for ever’ as ‘an essential and fundamental part of the Union’, survived less than seventy years. N. D. Emerson, in his 1933 essay on the church in this period, presented the history of the church in the first half of the nineteenth century as ‘the history of many separate interests and movements’; he suggested a thesis of fundamental importance in the historiography of the Church of Ireland:

Recent historical work has begun to trace the ‘many separate interests and movements’ and to explore in detail both the ‘worldly Establishment’ and the increasingly predominant evangelical influence of the Church of Ireland during the post-union period. The main topics investigated have been the structure of the church, the political relationships of the church, the evangelical movement, the mentalities of various social groups (drawing upon literary sources), and local or regional studies. The numerous gaps in the research and in our knowledge which exist seem now all the starker given the high quality of so many recent studies concerning the Church of Ireland in this period.

The standard general histories of the Church of Ireland are inevitably curtailed in their treatment of the years under review in this section. Mant’s two volumes were published in 1840, and the relevant volume of Phillips’s three-part work appeared in 1934. The final chapter (by C. A. Webster) is entitled ‘The church since disestablishment’, and its tone is consistent with the instructions given to the team of authors by the general synod in 1929, when the work was commissioned, that it should constitute ‘a measure of defence against hostile propaganda’. Accordingly, considerable attention is paid to such Church of Ireland grievances as the bull Apostolicae curiae and the Ne temere decree. Several pages are devoted to the St Bartholomew’s ritual cases, and space is given to changes in the church constitution and to missionary work overseas. Of the Church of Ireland's interaction with the profound social and political changes then taking place in the country, little is said, apart from a reference to the need for church extension in Belfast. Perhaps it was too soon. Scarcely of the same magnitude as Phillips's extensive survey, the single-volume history by Johnston, Robinson and Jackson, though published thirty years later, takes the story no further, nor can it be said to show evidence of the transformation in Irish historiography that had taken place in the intervening decades.

The purpose of this note is to identify the place-name Telach Cail as Castletown Delvin, County Westmeath, and to demonstrate the continued use of the site from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period. While archaeologists have identified a number of earthwork sites which had a continuous use from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period, documentary sources may also provide valuable evidence. A combination of near-contemporary pre-Norman and Anglo-Norman documentary evidence indicates that the pre-Norman royal site of Telach Cail in Delbna was chosen for the location of an Anglo-Norman motte.

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

In November 1660 the newly restored king published a declaration for the settlement of Ireland. The substance of this document was that the ‘adventurers’ of the 1640s and the Cromwellian soldiers were to keep what they had got; the Irish Protestants who had actively supported the royalist cause (especially between 1648 and 1650) and who had not yet obtained compensation for this service were to receive their arrears of pay; Irish Catholics who had been deprived of their lands merely on the grounds of their religion were to be restored to what they had lost. From the clash of these interest groups came the moulding forces behind what is known as the ‘Restoration settlement’. (That settlement was based on two acts: the Act of Settlement, 1663, and the Act of Explanation, 1666. The former set out who were to receive lands and where; the latter explained and clarified the many conflicting clauses in the former.)

This article will concentrate on two Irish republican projects from the 1930s: Cumann Poblachta na h-Éireann and the I.R.A.’s British bombing campaign. It will, in each case, focus on one leading individual: Cumann Poblachta’s Seán MacBride and, for the bombing campaign, the I.R.A.’s Seán Russell. Drawing on much material which has not previously been discussed in the literature, it will examine the self-sustaining republican mentality which characterised both projects and both individuals. It will be argued that republicanism in the 1930s is best understood in terms of the concept of solipsism, defined as the view that self is ‘the only thing really existent’. The argument is that republicans acted as though their own political views, beliefs and culture were the only really existent ones and that those of others could, as a consequence, be ignored. Republicans could — in the words of leading Irish-American republican, Joseph McGarrity — ‘pay no heed to public clamor’ as long as they felt that they were ‘doing a national duty’. As such, they were in possession of a self-sustaining but, it will be argued, ultimately self-defeating mentality.