In modern history there are few countries which present the historian with the kind of interpretative challenge offered by Ireland. The general outlines of the problem are well known—the impact on the island of successive waves of colonisation; the endemic unrest, religious strife, and political instability, exemplified in recent times by the partition of the island between two states; and the interaction and conflict since the middle ages of two cultures and two peoples, Gaelic and English. These salient features of Irish history raise the question of an appropriate historiographical framework within which the island’s history might be interpreted—if we accept that Ireland’s historical experience cannot be understood in isolation. In an article published in this journal three years ago, I outlined an alternative perspective on the history of late medieval Ireland which, it seemed to me, also held possibilities for other periods of Irish history. In the course of the discussion, the article also urged the modification or replacement of particular terms and concepts which have traditionally been used by historians but which, I argued, are an obstacle to a more balanced, pluralistic understanding of Ireland’s past. The article has since attracted a reply by Dr Brendan Bradshaw, on which the journal’s editors have kindly allowed me to comment.

This paper has been prompted by two recent articles in Irish Historical Studies. Both are by distinguished historians from outside Ireland — Professor Michael Richter from Germany (to which he has recently returned) and Dr Steven G. Ellis from England — who have spent many years teaching in the history departments of University College, Dublin, and University College, Galway, respectively. Their different backgrounds and experiences enable them to bring fresh perspectives to bear upon the history of medieval Ireland and have led them to question some traditional assumptions about the Irish past. Here I should confess that coming as I do from Northern Ireland I am something of an outsider myself, and my own origin and background must inevitably influence my interpretation of the past.

Professor Richter took the opportunity granted by a review of an important collection of essays to challenge ‘the unquestioned assumption that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland marked a turning point in Irish history’. Arguing that the event should be seen in a wider context, both geographical and chronological, he suggested that a close parallel to the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland is provided by the German expansion into western Slav territories and that a comparison with the Scandinavian impact in the three centuries prior to 1169 would help to get the importance of the English in medieval Ireland into perspective.

Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.

As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.

The destruction of the Royalist field armies at Naseby and Langport in 1645 did not end the English Civil War. Althought the king had suffered irreversible military defeats, Parliament was unable to govern effectively while politically important towns and fortresses remained in enemy hands. To ensure political stability Parliament’s army was forced to besiege and reduce a large number of strongholds in England, Ireland and Scotland, a task that was not finally completed until the surrender of Galway in 1652. In particular the war in Ireland was to test the army’s siege-making capacity more severely than any previous campaign. To complete the political conquest of Britain and Ireland the army and its generals were compelled increasingly to practise an aspect of warfare that had been traditionally neglected by English soldiers. In contrast, siege warfare was an area in which their continental counterparts had excelled.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European wars produced few set-piece battles. Conflicts were more frequently resolved by the assault and defence of fortified cities and towns. Consequently the art of siege warfare evolved rapidly. England’s political and military insularity during this period detached the country from advances in siege technology that had transformed the conduct of European warfare. No major siege had been undertaken by an English army since Henry VIII had invested Boulogne in 1544, and as there had been no siege of English towns or fortresses since medieval times, there had been little innovation in defensive fortifications. What improvements did occur were sporadic and unco-ordinated. In the sixteenth century a great fortress was built at Berwick-on-Tweed to counter Scottish infiltration and a number of coastal towns in the south-east were refortified against the threat of Spanish invasion. However, by the outbreak of civil war in 1642, even these were obsolete by contemporary continental standards.

In February 1849, the Whig prime minister Lord John Russell gave the first hint of what was to be the last of his special relief measures for famine-stricken Ireland. This was a national rate to be imposed on every poor-law union in the country in aid of twenty-three bankrupt unions, all of them, with the exception of Glenties (County Donegal), in the provinces of Connacht and Munster. The opposition of Ulster interests to the rate was so vehement that the matter came to be regarded in parliament as ‘the Ulster question’. Ulster opposition was stimulated by the widespread conviction among local boards of guardians that they had managed the famine crisis well, while boards in the west and south had mismanaged it badly. These local perceptions were shared — and publicly acknowledged — by the senior poor-law administrators in Ireland. The poor-law boundary commissioners of 1848–9 were similarly complimentary. Ulster members of parliament had no doubts about the superiority of their local guardians. Led by Viscount Castlereagh and William Sharman Crawford and helped by some Dublin Tories, they spread an Ulster propaganda within parliament whereby they conveyed the misleading impression that the rate would bear more heavily on Ulster than on any other province. The parliamentary campaign was supported by a vigorous programme of public meetings at home, although there is evidence to suggest that this programme was not as successful as had been hoped, because the ‘heads of society’ in the province failed to provide sufficiently vigorous leadership.

South Australia was the least Irish part of nineteenth-century Australia. Proportionately fewer Irish arrived at Port Adelaide than at the other great immigrant ports of the southern continent. They also came later: relatively few Irish participated in the first dozen years of colonisation in South Australia after its inception in 1836. In contrast with other parts of Australia the Irish were slow to reach a tenth and never reached a third of the colonial population. They were not in South Australia ‘a founding people’. They were indeed conspicuously a minority which faced the established and unquestioned primacy of Anglo-Scottish colonisation.

South Australia was overwhelmingly English in its origins. From the beginning it was virtually a fragment of southern England, a Home Counties colony expressly designed for superior expatriates. It was also heavily advertised as a haven for Protestant dissenters. The first Catholic priest in South Australia, William Benson, was hardly exaggerating when he described it in 1843 as ‘a little dissenting colony, exclusively Protestant evangelical’. He went further, saying that ‘when this colony was established no Catholic gentlemen of property were allowed to join the founders’ — implying thereby that the planners deliberately discouraged Irish participation. Only when the colonial population reached 14,000, asserted Benson, did ‘our late evangelical governors’ feel confident enough to permit a minority of Catholics reasonable and equal entry. Another Catholic Irishman, Major Thomas O’Halloran, also claimed that the early colonial planners had been anti-Irish, wishing to restrict their numbers to less than 5 per cent of the colonial population. It is little wonder that South Australia seemed, in Irish eyes, the most alien quarter of the new continent.

The repeated use of special legislation to suppress popular disorder in Ireland and the failure to provide any permanent remedy has been a recurrent theme of Irish history. Introducing the Catholic relief bill in 1829, Robert Peel stressed the ‘melancholy fact’ that ‘for scarcely one year, during the period that has elapsed since the Union, has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course of the law’. Catholic emancipation proved no more of a panacea than the Union before it. Ireland, as J.L. Hammond once observed, was ruled under the ordinary law for only five years of the first half of the nineteenth century. Approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, Samuel Clark tells us that governments passed or renewed thirty-five coercion acts between the Union and the Famine. But although this state of affairs has occasioned much comment from historians it has been subjected to little systematic analysis. There has, for example, been no attempt to emulate for the earlier part of the century Townshend’s examination of British policy in response to political violence after 1848. Such a project cannot be attempted in a single article but it is hoped that a brief survey of repressive legislation in the years from 1821 to 1841, and a more detailed look at that aimed at agrarian disturbances will help to fill this historical lacuna.

The document commonly known as the ‘Remonstrance of the Irish princes’, which was sent to Pope John XXII in or about 1317, has inspired a great deal of written comment since the text first became generally available during the nineteenth century. It has been seen as an early statement and vindication of Irish national identity and political independence; it throws light on the application of the English common law in early fourteenth-century Ireland; it illustrates the relations between English and Irish monks and secular clergy within the Irish church; it demonstrates that in the early fourteenth century Pope Adrian IV’s bull Laudabiliter, in which he had urged Henry II of England to conquer Ireland, was regarded even by enemies of the English as a key element in the English monarchy’s claims to the lordship of Ireland; and its account of the English settlers in Ireland has been used to demonstrate a growing distinction between them and their cousins in England. In recent years the remonstrance has also been quarried for evidence on the application of the canon law of the just war, and for information on racial attitudes on the frontiers of medieval Europe.

By the turn of the twentieth century the west of Ireland had become a geographical expression synonymous with poverty and destitution. Whilst in the eighteenth century Connacht was regarded as inaccessible, it was not considered to be overpopulated, hungry or poverty-stricken. Its economic and social condition began to change for the worse in the nineteenth century. From 1816-17 onwards the western seaboard was affected more and more severely by a series of famines and localised distress and typhus. Hardship on the islands off Mayo and Galway was so severe in 1822-3 that London philanthropists set up a committee to launch a large-scale relief programme. The committee blamed the distress on potato failure, ‘want of employment’, high rents and low agricultural prices.

The deterioration in economic and social conditions is considered to have been exacerbated by the equalisation of the currencies of, and the removal of tariffs between, Ireland and Great Britain in the mid 1820s. Some rural industries, like textiles, glass and kelp-production, were wiped out. The resistance of the western economy to natural disaster was thereby severely weakened. The western isles were hit badly by the distress of 1835 and even more so by the Great Famine ten years later. Rents remained high whilst incomes fell.

Historians of Ireland continue to place exceptional reliance on the ‘cultural’ explanation of economic, social and political behaviour. In many cases, appeal to supposedly common characteristics of ‘the Irish’ has provided a glib substitute for more rigorous analysis of the interaction between mentality and performance. The nature of Irish ethnicity is postulated rather than explained or demonstrated, so that arguments incorporating such postulates stand or fall according to the plausibility rather than documentation of the writer’s vision of ‘Irishness’. A recent and beguiling example is Joseph Lee’s postulate of the ‘begrudger mentality’, whereby Ireland’s relatively poor economic performance is attributed to this supposedly ‘direct inheritance from . . . traditional Ireland’. Lee sketches an anatomy of ‘traditional Ireland’ which might have generated envy rather than healthy competitiveness, and proceeds to develop with far more elaboration consequences which might have arisen from begrudgery. What he fails to demonstrate is the actual prevalence of this ‘mentality’ in either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ Ireland: this we must accept, either intuitively (if Irish) or on trust (if foreign). The logical crudity of this form of explanation calls to mind the corner-cutting of nationalist myth-makers and folklorists.

As J.G. Simms remarked more than thirty years ago in the introduction to his notable book on the subject, ‘the Williamite confiscation was the last of a series which in the course of a century and a half changed the ownership of the greater part of Ireland’. The Williamite confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 was a landmark in the complicated and, till then, much misunderstood history of the subject. In fact, and rather oddly considering the importance of the war of 1689–91 and its consequences, there was no earlier detailed account of the confiscation of Irish land that followed the defeat of the Jacobites at the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick; and most references to it were based upon the printed report of the parliamentary commissioners of 1699, in some important respects a highly tendentious and misleading document. Simms based his work upon manuscript sources not previously used: the detailed records of the 1699 commissioners; the records of the forfeiture trustees who succeeded them; and the Books of Survey and Distribution that recorded the ownership of Irish land and its redistribution during the years after 1641. His main general conclusions —

— have provided all later students of the subject with a firm frame of reference within which to examine the details of the settlement.

In the words of one veteran communist, the Irish republican movement has experienced throughout its existence ‘a constant searching’ on social issues. In 1934 the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) was fractured when a group of members who believed in socialism seceded to establish the Republican Congress movement. This article will examine a programme for government published early in 1934 by the I.R.A., consider the schism that occurred in March 1934, giving rise to the Republican Congress, and describe the aims, character and early activities of the new movement. It will be argued that there existed among republicans in 1934 two significant interpretations of the relationship between social radicalism and republican philosophy. The first involved a multi-class, Gaelic communalism. Public and private ownership were to be blended in post-revolutionary Ireland and emphasis was placed on class harmony rather than class struggle. Advocates of this approach employed radical rhetoric but tended to avoid any tangible involvement in immediate social struggle. Socio-economic radicalism was effectively obscured by nationalism. The second interpretation was socialist. This held that class conflict and the national struggle were necessarily complementary. Any attempt to restrain the social advance until independence had been achieved was ill-advised, since the republic could only be won through a struggle that was deeply imbued with class struggle.

The six months following the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 saw an appalling level of violence in Belfast and on the border, which threatened the stability of the newly formed Northern Ireland government. Official figures for the period between 6 December 1921 and 31 May 1922 listed seventy-three protestants and 147 catholics killed in Belfast and eight protestants and twenty-two catholics killed in the six counties outside Belfast. In that period two wide-ranging agreements aimed to reform the northern government and security system: they became known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Craig-Collins pacts, of 21 January and 30 March 1922. This article discusses the motivation behind the pacts and the reasons for their failure in a wide context, by giving equal weight to the attitudes of the British government and to opinion on both sides of the Irish border.

The Northern Ireland government was established in 1920–21. It was unrecognised by the dáil government in the south and by much of the northern catholic minority. The province developed against a background of violence and upheaval, including the expulsion of catholic shipyard workers from their work in the summer of 1920; the dáil retaliated by boycotting Belfast goods. The period also saw increasing I.R.A. activity in the north during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war, and the five-month truce that followed it. Though the northern government was not a party to the treaty negotiations, only reluctantly accepting the granting of dominion status to the south, the months before and after the settlement greatly increased tensions in the north-east.

In recent years there has been a lively historical debate on English perceptions of the Irish. The growth and persistence of ‘racial’ stereotypes that go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which survive even today, have been traced. The Irish, the Catholic Irish above all, were usually perceived in England in an unfavourable or a downright hostile fashion, which reflected the often troubled colonial relationship between England and Ireland. The mass emigration from Ireland to England in the nineteenth century, which brought millions of Irish into direct contact with the English, intensified both the fear of the Irish and the patronising attitudes which accompanied that fear. Historical research has, undoubtedly, added considerably to our understanding of the complexity of anti-Irish feeling: how it depended on class as well as ethnic prejudice; and how it often existed alongside an idealised, sentimental picture of the Catholic Irish as a vigorous and ‘pure’ race, with a culture unsullied by the corrupting influence of modern industrial civilisation.

The 1930s were years of political turmoil and economic crisis and change in Ireland. Economic activity had peaked in 1929, and the last years of the Cumann na nGaedheal government (in power since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922) saw substantial drops in output, trade and employment. The policies pursued after Fianna Fáil’s victory in the election of February 1932 were therefore influenced both by immediate economic pressures and by the party’s ideological commitments. The highly protectionist measures associated with de Valera and Lemass — key men of the new régime — sought both to create jobs quickly and to build more gradually a large indigenous industrial sector, producing primarily for the home market.

Political controversy complicated matters. De Valera was regarded as a headstrong fanatic by the British establishment. His government’s refusal to hand over to Britain the so-called ‘land annuities’ — a disputed item in the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921 — led to an ‘economic war’, in which the British Treasury sought payment instead through penal ‘emergency’ tariffs on Irish imports. The Irish imposed their own duties, bounties and licensing restrictions in turn. The economic war hurt Irish agriculture badly; the prices of fat and store cattle dropped by almost half between 1932 and mid-1935. Farmers got some relief through export bounties and the coal-cattle pacts (quota exchanges of Irish cattle for British coal) of 1935-7, but Anglo-Irish relations were not normalised again until the finance and trade agreements of the spring of 1938, and the resolution of the annuities dispute did not mean an end to protection. The questions ‘Who won the economic war?’ and ‘What was the impact of protection on the Irish economy?’ are analytically distinct, but they are not that easy to keep apart in practice.