Several writers on Irish population in the pre-famine period have suggested that detailed local studies are urgently needed to supplement the evidence from national data, such as the early census returns or the hearth tax lists, and to assist in clarifying elusive problems such as age of marriage, size of family, death-rate changes etc. It is often asserted, however, that the amount of detailed information relating to specific areas is limited and of poor quality; in particular, contrasts are drawn between the availability and usefulness of parish registers relating to pre-famine Ireland and those available to scholars in England, France and Scandinavia. Pre-famine parochial registers of burials, marriages and baptisms do nonetheless exist, and, although their use poses problems, there are indications that a good deal of useful information may be waiting to be uncovered.

The 1840s, when O’Connell’s Repeal Association and Young Ireland flourished, constitute an important period in the history of the relationship between the catholic church and the Irish national movement. One of the major themes in Young Ireland’s challenge to O’Connell’s leadership of the repeal movement was that under O’Connell the association paid too much attention to religious issues, and was too closely identified with the interests of the catholic church. According to Young Ireland, Irishmen should sink their differences—including religious ones—and join together to discover their real interests, which lay in seeking Irish independence from England.

Paul Cullen (1803-78) became archbishop of Armagh in 1849, after long service as rector of the Irish College in Rome, returned to Ireland the following vear, was translated to Dublin in 1852 and created cardinal in 1866. The picture of Cardinal Cullen as a prelate whose brand of ultramontanism made him an inveterate opponent of Irish nationalism, both constitutional and revolutionary, ought not to have survived the work of Monsignor Corish, Fr Mac-Suibhne and Dr John Whyte. In fact, this caricature has been perpetuated by such established historians as Professor Dudley Edwards, Dr F. S. L. Lyons and others. They continue to reproduce the hostile view which several generations of nationalist writers have taken of Cullen’s actions and motives in Irish politics. Take the charge that in the 1850s he tried to put an end to the clerical participation in politics which had been so important in the national movement. ‘Archbishop Cullen of Dublin attempted to withdraw the clergy completely from politics’ —thus Professor Edwards in A new history of Ireland (1972), writing as if Dr MThyte had never examined this question with the compulsive impartiality typical of him.

On 26 May 1315 a Scottish army commanded by Edward Bruce, recently created earl of Carrick, landed near Larne in County Antrim. From this date until his death at Faughart on 14 October 1318 there was a Scottish presence in Ireland. We are told that Edward was crowned king of Ireland near the scene of his eventual defeat soon after 1 May 1316; his supporters certainly regarded him as king, and he himself used the title. In reality, however, his control never extended beyond the lands of the earldom of Ulster, which he used as a base from which to launch destructive expeditions to other parts of the country. Yet at least until the retreat of the Bruces from Limerick in April 1317 a Scottish conquest of Ireland must have appeared to be within the bounds of possibility; it is hardly too much to say that during this brief period the future political shape of the British Isles depended on the outcome of an often obscure series of campaigns and alliances in Ireland.

Acts of pains and penalties are an antique form of criminal action, related (but as a small brother, so to speak) to acts of attainder. Both consisted of bills directed against an individual, and passed by king, lords and commons, in contradistinction to impeachment, where the commons acted as accusers and the lords as sole judges in the case. Whereas, however, attainder was confined to cases of treason and felony and carried the death penalty, pains and penalties also covered conduct tending to grave public mischief and were attended by lesser punishments. The first acts of pains and penalties noticed in the legal textbooks belong to the thirteenth century, and generally concern fugitives domiciled abroad, the last belong to the 1720s and 1730s and cover a wide range of political or quasi-political offences. The Layers conspiracy, the South Sea Bubble scandal and the Porteous riots all ended in this form of punitive legislation.

At the time of the Norman invasion the Irish church under its primate, Gilla Mac Liag or Gelasius, had welcomed the advent of Henry II and accepted his claim to be an ecclesiastical reformer. As a result the invaders, while ensuring that English or French clerics controlled the church in the areas they themselves had colonised, did not interfere with the primacy of all Ireland at Armagh. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the coarbship of Patrick was held in turn by ten primates of native Irish stock, a German, an Italian and only one Anglo-Norman, Luke Netterville, freely elected in 1217.

Why did a minority succeed in defeating the League of Nations? The failure of the United States senate to ratify President Woodrow Wilson’s peace treaty has invited explanation for half a century and more. Historians argue that the intraisigence of Wilson and of his outright opponents, the ‘Irreconcilables’, forced a sufficient number of senators to drop their support. They attribute significance to the sensitivities of Republicans and congressmen smarting under the wartime powers of a Democratic president. They have also, rather reluctantly, turned their attention to the senators’ constituents. In dealing with the latter, historians have emphasised the influence of Irish-Americans. The Irish contingent, Link argues, ‘were up in arms because Wilson had refused to press the cause of Irish independence in Paris and because the treaty allegedly benefited the hated English’. According to Adler, even those who considered that ‘American-Irishmen were asses’ conceded their influence: ‘each jackass had one vote and there were lots of them’. Stone agrees that the ‘Irish vote, always important in American politics, had added significance for the league fight’.

The usual route to the discovery of Froude’s English in Ireland in the eighteenth century, first published between 1872 and 1874, and Lecky’s History of Ireland in the eighteenth century, which first appeared as a separate work in 1892, lies through the bibliographies of more recent historians. Today, eighty to a hundred years after their appearance on the scene of history, politics and rature, these works are still authorities for the period they cover. They are monumental works: monuments to the skill, industry, personality and opinions of their authors and, in varying degrees, to their scholarship.

Recently Mr Charles Webster has urged a less restrictive view of seventeenth-century scientific development, allotting a more important role to Samuel Hartlib and his circle. An examination of scientific activity in Ireland during the interregnum offers support for Dr Webster’s argument. This article will attempt to add to what is known of Hartlib, his friends and their interests by considering their activities in Ireland. Relating those activities to the gradual diffusion of experimental science in seventeenthcentury Ireland produces a picture rather different from that offered by Dr K. T. Hoppen in his study of the Dublin Philosophical Society’s origin.

By the beginning of 1880 the sitting parliament was entering its seventh session and a general election was expected before the year ended. Opinion varied on exactly when the government would dissolve. Some liberals believed that the dissolution would come in the spring after the budget had been presented, others thought it would take place in the summer following the completion of the parliamentary session, a few people even felt that the government might wait out its mandate and not dissolve until the end of the year, or the beginning of 1881. The dissolution ultimately came as a surprise on 8 March only a month after parliament had met and before any serious business had been transacted.

It is of the nature of a revolutionary conspiracy that it tends to leave as little trace as possible of its internal history; and it is not surprising that documentarv evidence of the activity of the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood is scanty. The documents printed below are for this reason of peculiar interest and importance.

In October 1912, Alfred Stead, who had succeeded his father, the veteran journalist, W. T. Stead, as editor of the Review of Reviews, after the elder Stead’s death on the Titanic during the preceding April, found Stead’s memorandum of his interview with John Redmond, in December 1906, among his father’s papers. In view of the current crisis of the Irish home rule bill, Alfred Stead planned to publish the memorandum under the title ‘What Mr Redmond thought : special interview by Mr W. T. Stead’ in the November issue of the Review of Reviews, and on 7 October, posted page proof of the interview to Redmond with a note requesting Redmond to inform him ‘whether there are any points which are not in accord with … [his] … remembrance of this interview’.

Parnell remains an enigma to historians. As a protestant and a landowner, he would seem to have had every reason to oppose the home rule movement and certainly little incentive to take an active part in it. Nor does it appear that he had any clearly developed policies in mind to be followed in an autonomous Ireland. One simple explanation is that Parnell was driven by a strong dislike of England, and in particular of its upper class political leadership. Yet until the age of nineteen, when he went to Cambridge, Parnell had spent only relatively brief periods among the English—and these mainly at small private schools. He was briefly at school in Somerset at the age of six, and in Derbyshire when he was eight. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a private tutor and from there entered Magdalene College, Cambridge in October 1865. There he remained until May 1869 when he failed to return from rustication imposed after he had been successfully sued for asasult in a local court.