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.

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.

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.

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.