The overarching narrative from 1800 to 1922 begins with Union and ends with partition and disunion. Another and cruder way of saying this is that it began with Anglo–Irish conflict (1798–1800) and ended with an all-Irish war. In between, there is more than a fair share of conflict too. Almost omnipresent was, as Lyons observed in the conclusion of his 1979 Clarendon Lectures in Oxford, an ‘anarchy in the mind and in the heart which forbade not just unity of territories but also “unity of being”’. The consciousness of this state of disturbance and disequilibrium is a constant finding for the historian of modern Ireland. Ireland is, for Thomas Bartlett, a ‘theatre of disorder’. The story of the malignancies of Irish history is almost too familiar. To understand her history means engaging with the ideology and practice of official coercion, the occurrence of rebellion and war, of hunger and exodus, and, throughout, of endemic levels of violence in the shape of ambushes and evictions, boycotting and assault. It was not a society which could be said to have achieved long-term stability in this period – turbulence was the rule rather than the exception. It was a place which, for example, in 1870, spent £1 million on maintaining its police forces, £668,202 relieving its paupers and a mere £373,950 on educating its children. Every other day from 1921, the Times ran a story about the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Told in this way, Ireland's history is an especially unhappy one.