Search

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article constitutes the first large-scale examination of the Cork anti-Methodist riots of 1749–50. Methodist hagiographers have described the rioters as disengaged foot soldiers for Cork's corporation and Anglican clergy. By exploring these disturbances in their religious, political and social context, this paper suggests that the predominantly Catholic rioters were fuelled by their own politico-theological grievances, thereby illuminating the persistence of religious violence in eighteenth-century Ireland. Furthermore, by exploring tensions between Cork Methodists and Baptists, it highlights both the ways in which Methodists sometimes fuelled opposition and the fact that they were not always the sole victims of anti-Methodist violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article constitutes the first large-scale examination of the Cork anti-Methodist riots of 1749–50. Methodist hagiographers have described the rioters as disengaged foot soldiers for Cork's corporation and Anglican clergy. By exploring these disturbances in their religious, political and social context, this paper suggests that the predominantly Catholic rioters were fuelled by their own politico-theological grievances, thereby illuminating the persistence of religious violence in eighteenth-century Ireland. Furthermore, by exploring tensions between Cork Methodists and Baptists, it highlights both the ways in which Methodists sometimes fuelled opposition and the fact that they were not always the sole victims of anti-Methodist violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the connection between the army, the press and the Unionist party during the so-called ‘Curragh incident’ of March 1914 in which certain army officers expressed their unwillingness to impose Home Rule on Ireland. Although there is much scholarship on this aspect of Irish history, there has been no study of the crucial role played by the press and the army’s attempts to use it for political purposes. This article centres upon a thorough examination of a broad range of newspapers and other supporting material in order to provide a fresh perspective on the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a series of contacts between the marquis of Ormond and the Ulster Protestant forces in 1645–6, using sources that include the Carte manuscripts, parliamentary papers, pamphlet material, and other political correspondence, both manuscript and printed. It is argued that Ormond's Ulster contacts were as least as important as the concurrent negotiations with the Catholic confederates, which up to now have been prioritized by historians, and that his Ulster strategy was designed to avoid further negotiations with the Catholic Irish by regaining Protestant Ireland's support for the royalist cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article traces the development of the term ‘outrages’, which by the nineteenth century was used in an almost exclusively Irish context. It argues that British and Irish politicians used the term to communicate the collective insecurity they felt particular forms of Irish violence exposed, especially concerning the stability of the Act of Union. ‘Outrages’ was deployed rhetorically to brand Irish violence as politically subversive. Simultaneously, its meaning was systematized by the newly reformed Irish constabulary who surveilled particular forms of Irish violence and quantified its existence. Politicians used these statistics as one vital measure of British progress in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how English radicals reacted to the challenge of Irish nationalism in the mid nineteenth century. The Young Ireland, Fenian and Home Rule movements brought forth responses from across the spectrum of English radicalism, but scholars have neglected this topic, even as they have emphasized the importance of continental nationalisms for understanding English radicalism. This article, drawing on the radical press and manuscript sources, argues that a belief in the exceptional nature of the United Kingdom constitution, together with the growing importance of the imperial interest, convinced English radicals to reject Irish nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intellectual-cultural history of sovereignty in Henrician Ireland, this article mines government writings and printed pamphlets to argue for Ireland's integration within the dynastic strife, spiritual controversies and imperial ambitions that bridged the 'New World', the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the early Reformation. Its conclusions are twofold: that the Henrician Reformation galvanized the political theologies of interfaith representation in Ireland, and that the island felt the weight of European Atlantic colonialism earlier than has hitherto been appreciated. The article suggests the need to reconsider Henrician Ireland in its entanglements with the political-theological Reformation worlds of inter-imperial rivalry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the literature of liberal ideology in Ireland from the views of historian J.L. Hammond. Impact of the Irish problem of 1911 to 1914 on the Liberal party; Importance of home rule measure for Liberalism; Willingness of Liberal journalists to advocate compromise over home rule measure; Nature of Irish politics under self-government.

This article explores the violence surrounding the collapse of the Munster plantation in 1598. It situates this event in the wider context of violence in early modern Ireland, and highlights both similarities and differences in the behaviour seen there, and in other, better-explored Irish episodes of violence. It also argues that while the memory of those earlier settlers was apparently forgotten or silenced, violence in 1598 played a significant part in how later violent incidents in Ireland were narrated, particularly the 1641 rebellion, and that consequently Munster played an important role in New English identity-building in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the last twenty years of the life of one of Ireland's most controversial scholars, the polymath John Pentland Mahaffy. Mahaffy's name still has wide resonance in Irish historiography owing to his interventions in Irish cultural politics in the decades before 1919. He is frequently seen as an 'anti-Irish' figure. This article places Mahaffy in the wider context of international scholarship of the late Victorian era, arguing that he was a cosmopolitan whose overriding concern was not Ireland, or even Britain, but the fracturing of the republic of letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kilmichael incident of November 1920, in which an Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) column of nearly forty men ambushed and killed all bar one of a motorized patrol of eighteen Auxiliary Division Royal Irish Constabulary cadets, proved to be one of the I.R.A.'s most noted victories of the Anglo- Irish War. Recent historiography has been dominated by controversy over the late Peter Hart's 1998 conclusion that contemporary British claims of I.R.A. mutilation of the cadet's dead bodies were true. However, this article aims to demonstrate that studying other aspects of Kilmichael, such as the British unit, can enable a broader understanding of both the ambush, and of contemporary British policy concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the parameters of a lifecycles project that was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, entitled 'From the cradle to the grave: lifecycles in modern Ireland (pilot study: maternity)'. The project used individual hospital records to bring the regional effects of 'medicalization' outside metropolitan areas into a sharper focus. With an emphasis on rural Ireland from 1926 to 1956, this 'pilot' study used longitudinal data modelling to explore the medicalization of the female reproductive cycle in a general hospital and again in a psychiatric hospital setting. The project team chose disparate clinical settings to test how people understood their functions, to see, for example, if medical cases were presenting to the psychiatric setting. This article describes the digitization and data modelling processes and the parameters of the research agenda. It locates the broader medical and statistical findings of the project in their socio-economic context to highlight whether such matters conditioned when and how women resorted to medical care. It discusses the analytical challenges that the project posed and points to avenues of further research and future publications. It concludes that for historical reasons, in the rural Irish context, people engaged more freely with the asylum than the general hospital setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the attempts to establish a statutory militia force in post-revolutionary Ireland, which finally came to fruition in 1716. It argues that the process tells us much about the way the Irish parliament conducted its business in this period, as well as revealing a great deal about Protestant mentalities and relationships. The Irish parliament is shown to be a fractious yet adaptable institution, in which successful business depended upon the active support of a multitude of factions. The Anglican elite appear as a quietly confident minority, although the crisis of the Hanoverian succession excited unprecedented concern. Meanwhile relations between this group and the Presbyterian minority are revealed as at best indifferent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out the ironic contours of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the British empire in the period 1800-1921. Despite mutual sectarian antipathy, and the unconstitutional nature of the practice, the church and empire evolved a modus vivendi that enabled financial support to be given to Catholic missionary activity from government funds. Imperial and ecclesiastical expansion was facilitated by Irish Catholics, notwithstanding what they regarded as the hostile Protestant governance of Ireland. Utilizing material from state and ecclesiastical archives and drawing on a wide range of printed and secondary material, the article for the first time in the literature reveals not only how the Vatican appreciated British government largesse but also that successive popes were quite prepared to downplay Irish Catholic interests for the sake of church expansion in the empire as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role played by the recollection of the Irish rebellion of 1641 (or more properly the perception of the often exaggerated accounts of atrocities committed by the rebels) in formulating fundamental legislative elements of the late seventeenth-century Irish state. Repressive and punitive measures against Irish Catholics, intended in part to forestall further rebellions, were justified and rationalized by the fear of a potential recurrence of the attacks on Protestants. Thus, the representation of 1641 played an integral part in the Restoration settlement in Ireland, and arguably underpinned the 'penal laws' of a later era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From about 1970, Irish history moved into a fast-forward phase culminating in an extraordinary economic boom for the Republic. This took place against the background of violence in Northern Ireland, up to the uneasy resolution of Good Friday 1998. It is now possible to try and analyse this era from a variety of sources, such as the reports of tribunals investigating corruption, contemporary memoirs, political records and investigative journalism. This article considers the forces and events behind dramatic and unforeseen change in politics, economics, cultural influence, religious profession and gender roles, and discusses how far the ‘key’ is to be found in American rather than European models and influence. Moreover, ‘liberalization’ in economic, religious, sexual and other spheres has been accompanied, on other levels, by a retreat into atavistic attitudes – particularly concerning the construction of Irish ‘identity’ and the packaging of Irish history. This masks a less-noticed revolution in attitudes over the last thirty years of the twentieth century – the strengthening of partitionist attitudes in the Republic, and the copper-fastening of the border between North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As England lurched towards war in 1642, the Westminster parliament had already become embroiled in a lengthy and costly war of reconquest in Ireland. An examination of the war effort in Ireland reveals the scale of parliament's commitment to sustained long-distance warfare, the range of initiatives developed to harness the necessary political and material resources, and its increasing reliance upon an emerging war interest of investors and suppliers. The outbreak of civil war in England saw parliament deploy a similar gamut of initiatives, nationally and locally, to those used in Ireland, but in very different strategic and political contexts. Parliament was engaged in a smaller-scale version of the multiple-front conflicts of the great European powers and disengagement from Ireland, England's Flanders, was not an option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contextualize an anonymous set of allegations written in late 1547 which helped to collapse the government of Sir Anthony St. Leger, the lord deputy of Ireland. Often thought to be a symptom of the mid-Tudor crisis, this document reveals that the Edwardian regime's decision to replace the popular Irish deputy was greatly influenced by elements within Ireland. In his effort to effect a change in Tudor policy toward Ireland, the author of this eclectic and lengthy assortment of allegations against the St. Leger-led government has provided a window into many aspects of Irish political life at the outset of Edward VI's reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Dr. Henry Jones's work in conveying first-hand testimony on the Irish rising to English audiences in 1642. It compares Jones's Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland with the archival materials from which he drew his information. In order to persuade the English parliament and the English people to support charitable projects for Ireland's poor, Jones needed to portray the victims of the rising in a positive light. The resulting image of deserving war victims was broadly sympathetic but in fact reflected a distorted view of the experiences of those despoiled in the rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the modern historiography of the Huguenots in Ireland. Contributions of the Huguenots in Irish history; Consideration of the Huguenots as potent symbol of nonconformity; Role of the Huguenots in the central political debate on Irish nationhood; Factors influencing the growth of interest in Huguenots diaspora.