The historiography of the Munster plantation has not been extensive; in the ninety-five years since Robert Dunlop published the first proper study of the greatest of all the Tudor settlements in Ireland, only D. B. Quinn has treated the subject in any detail. In the absence therefore, of any full-scale study of the plantation, it is fair to say that it has usually been characterised as the process of driving the native Irish off their lands and settling them with English colonists. In this scenario, the administrations, both in England and Ireland, are seen as backing the settlers judicially and extra-judicially, and the natives come off distinctly the worst; as Quinn puts it, the native population greatly resented the ‘presence and domination of the planters who were felt to twist the law in favour of a minority’. Yet, a study of the extant evidence does not support this simple stereotyping; rather, both the privy council (to which many of the native land claims were directed) and the government commission of 1592 were quite willing to consider cases against the undertakers and their tenants and to rule in favour of the native claimant. For instance, Hugh Cuffe, who had originally been granted a seignory of 12,000 acres in Cork, lost most of it to appeals by Ellen Fitzedmund Gibbon and James MacShane to the privy council in 1591, and had to make do with a new grant of a mere 1,953 acres in the same area.

The historiography of poor-law administration in Ireland ever since Nicholls’s ‘official’ history in the mid-nineteenth century has suffered from a certain selectivity on the part of commentators. As a source of first-hand information Nicholls’s book is of little value. The relatively well-researched account of pre-poor-law relief mechanisms which forms the early part of the book is followed by a disappointing series of extracts from published annual reports, almost devoid of personal comment or reminiscence. The explanation for this lies (if anywhere) in the date of the book’s publication (1856) and the fact that Nicholls had left Ireland under a cloud in 1842. The brief ‘life’ of Nicholls published as an introduction to a later edition of his English poor law is far more revealing.

‘Compared with present work in British and American economic history’, observes Dr L. A. Clarkson, ‘current Irish writing looks a trifle old-fashioned, with the bewitching voices of the social sciences muted and statistical wizardry missing’. While historically-minded sociologists might consider that this judgement of a meagre contribution from the social sciences needs qualification, there is no doubt that studies embodying sophisticated quantitative techniques are only beginning to trickle into the mainstream of Irish historiography. Yet there have been a number of important contributions, particularly in econometric history. While these constitute a small current in the flood of historical writings in the last decade or so, their qualitative and strategic significance is such as to merit detailed analysis.

It is ironic that in Ireland, a country which has witnessed some of the most successful catholic-inspired crusades against alcohol consumption, the catholic church cannot be said to have been particularly favourably inclined towards the temperance movement. The Irish protestant churches and the catholic church in countries like the United States of America, England and Australia (where its membership was largely Irish) were far more forthright and consistent in their support for temperance than was the catholic church in Ireland itself. The Irish church’s ambivalent attitude to the anti-drink movement sprang from a variety of sources, some related to the nature of Irish society, others to the nature of the Irish temperance movement. To elucidate the church’s attitude and the reasons for its hostility to the anti-drink movement, I shall in this paper examine the development of the catholic temperance movement in Ireland from Father Mathew’s crusade in the 1840s to the rise of the Pioneer Total Abstinence League of the Sacred Heart in the 1890s.

In the general election of January 1906, R. G. Glendinning, a taciturn baptist linen manufacturer of Belfast, won the North Antrim parliamentary seat. The significance of this event was his success in an overwhelmingly protestant constituency at the expense of the highly articulate and intelligent unionist sitting member, William Moore, the principal architect of the Ulster Unionist Council and the leader of the unionist campaign to expose the devolutionary dangers of ‘Macdonnellism’. Furthermore Glendinning had campaigned as a ‘liberal unionist’, but had been condemned as a home ruler by his opponent and indeed upon arrival in the house of commons took his seat on the liberal government benches. Some years later, in 1913, despite the heightened political temperature, it was still possible for a meeting on 24 October in Ballymoney town hall attended by some four or five hundred protestants to denounce ‘the lawless policy of Carsonism’, and for this same meeting to be addressed by such noted nationalists as Captain Jack White, Sir Roger Casement and Mrs Alice Stopford Green. Their audience was invited to sign an anti-covenant devised by White and closely modelled on, though directly opposed to, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. As late as 1925 an independent protestant candidate, George Henderson, representing the Unbought Tenants Association, secured one of the seven County Antrim seats in the Northern Ireland parliament, thus preventing the election of an official unionist, R. D. Megaw. Then there is the interesting phenomenon of the Independent Orange Order which in the years before 1914 had established itself more firmly in north Antrim than anywhere else. The area also threw up in this period a number of prominent individuals who became active in non-unionist politics, of whom the Reverend J. B. Armour, the Reverend D. D. Boyle, John Pinkerton and Samuel Craig McElroy are perhaps the best known. Finally Bally money and the Route was the epicentre of the Ulster tenant-right movement in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

On 11 June 1832 Humphrey O’Sullivan, a schoolteacher living in Callan, County Kilkenny, made the following entry in his diary:

O’Sullivan did not exaggerate. The events which he described were part of a remarkable popular panic which in the space of six days swept across the greater part of Ireland, from County Wexford in the south-east to County Donegal in the north-west, and from County Cork to the outskirts of Dublin city. It was an episode regarded by some contemporary observers with amused condescension, by others with deep alarm. For the modern historian it offers a brief but vivid insight into the mental world of a section of the catholic population in pre-Famine Ireland, and an opportunity to document in detail features of that mental world which are rarely reflected in conventional historical records.

The growth of interest in urban studies in recent years had induced scholars to take a new interest in Irish immigrants to Britain during the nineteenth century. The Irish encountered most of the problems of immigrants and were the subject of much comment from contemporary English writers. Moreover, since they constituted a small but homogeneous minority, easily discernible in the larger community, they can be conveniently studied in depth. The purpose of this article is not, however, to do this so much as to enter a few caveats for anyone thinking of specialising in one facet of Irish immigration to Britain, namely, juvenile deliquency. The subject of delinquency among Irish children in Britain, which has intrigued Englishmen for at least 150 years, has taken on new importance in recent times, partly as a result of the revival of an old allegation that there is a connexion between Catholicism and crime. Formerly, the assertion was made by ultra-protestants, especially Recordite evangelicals. Now it is being made by some English Roman Catholic priests. While this article will not deal conclusively with the overall question of a connexion between Catholicism and crime, it is intended to argue that, at least as far as Irish immigrant catholics in nineteenth-century London were concerned, such a connexion could not reasonably be said to exist. In the course of doing so, it will contend that, even granting that the Irish were a police problem as distinct from a crime control problem, there is, nevertheless, evidence of police prejudice against them. It also aims to show that destitution and vagrancy were common among London’s juvenile poor, especially the Irish, and that destitute juveniles were frequently classified as delinquent juveniles and treated accordingly. Finally it will put forward evidence to suggest that some English protestant philanthropists, including some evangelicals, have through over-generalisation, and perhaps unwittingly, caricatured the London Irish.

Studies to date of the Dublin working class have tended to concentrate on the history of trade unionism and labour relations, examining the working class only insofar as this is relevant to the question of labour politics. Although the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers is generally noted, there is little detailed study of distinctions and similarities within the working class except on questions of wages, trade union membership and related issues such as workers’ benefits. The only disaggregation in terms of broader social characteristics occurs in studies relating to Ulster, where the distinctions and similarities between catholic and protestant households have been explored.

This paper analyses the Dublin working class in terms of religion, social background, birthplace, housing conditions and family structure. The major sources employed are the censuses of population, using both published and manuscript material and the registry of marriages. Before examining these however it is essential to sketch the city’s overall economic character.

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by the view that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.

This study deals with one facet of British rule in Ireland: the careful, systematic and almost wholly bureaucratic takeover of key Irish scientific institutions by the Department of Science and Art in South Kensington. The department is now largely forgotten except by educational and institutional historians; and histories of Irish scientific organisations, whilst they may allude to skirmishes with the department, have rarely attempted to come to grips with the complexity of the relationships. We can, however, organise this complexity with a few, comparatively simple ideas.

‘Home rule’, complained Augustine Birrell, ‘is the most unlucky cause mortal man was ever associated with. Its path is strewn with ghosts and skeletons — wine, women and money. Now it is money. … Sentiment is easily kept alive, from one generation to another; it costs nothing but a harp and a song. But cash — where is that to come from?’ The problem of finance proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to any compromise over Irish home rule at the abortive Irish Convention of 1917–18. By contrast, the struggle over the third home-rule bill from 1912 to 1914 was dominated by the question of Ulster and not finance. The bill was ultimately wrecked by the opposition of the Ulster protestants to any home-rule bill for a united Ireland. Home-rule finance has been overlooked by most historians because it seemed less important and no doubt also because it was immensely complicated. But the problem of finance was a very real difficulty which still confronted politicians even if the objections of the Ulster protestants could be overcome. More important, the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain cannot be fully understood unless the financial dimension is taken into account.

The Irish question, in one form or another, became a feature of American public life from the period of the great Irish migration to the United States in the 1840s to the twentieth century. Seemingly each generation saw a version of the Irish struggle for self-government played out in both Ireland and America. By 1920 this struggle, in the shape of the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War, had assumed dramatic proportions.

Many Irish-Americans, anxious to assist and support the nationalist movement in Ireland, resumed their traditional role of raising money for Ireland and attempting to influence the American government to intercede in some way on Ireland’s behalf. In 1919 Eamon de Valera, president of Dáil Íireann, went to the United States to further these objectives. However, serious rifts developed within the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States which caused Irish-Americans to divide into several hostile groups. The result was that during the summer and autumn of 1920, when crown forces in Ireland were escalating their military campaign, the Irish-American nationalist movement was largely ineffectual.

In 1969 the late Dr Eoin Mac White published a ‘Guide to Russian writing on Irish history, 1917-1963’. Dr Mac White, a professional diplomat who combined with his work a close and scholarly interest in many aspects of Irish-Soviet relations, hoped at some stage to expand his guide into a ‘fuller and more historiographical study’. He doubted, however, if he would be able to find time for such a project, and in the meantime he thought the growing volume of Soviet writing on Irish history ‘should be better known both for its own intrinsic interest as well as an addition to the bibliography of Irish history’. Dr Mac White’s forebodings, unhappily, were borne out; he suffered an untimely death in a motor-car accident in 1972, and to this day the continually expanding Soviet treatment of all aspects of Irish history has remained uncatalogued. This bibliography is intended to repair that omission; it attempts to record all books and journal articles dealing wholly or in substantial part with Irish history published in the U.S.S.R. in Russian or in any other Soviet language between 1917 and 1980. Compared with Dr Mac White’s compilation it lists over sixty additional items (out of a total of 162): an indication, perhaps, of the expansion of Soviet scholarly interest in Ireland over the past decade or so, and in itself some justification for undertaking an exercise of this kind.

John V. Kelleher of Harvard remarked to me in October 1982: ‘I used to think I knew a little about the Irish in America. Now I realise I just knew a lot about the Irish in Lawrence.’ The pioneer and comprehensive bibliography by Seamus Metress of Toledo underscores what scholars of Irish America now perhaps generally recognise.

Virtually all general treatment of Irish America, as of so many other topics in American history, has been flawed by premature generalisation. The pressures to simplify a sub-topic such as Irish America have been understandable and considerable, given the multiform character of national development. Nonetheless, half a century or more after general historians have taken account of America’s pluralism, regionalism and political decentralisation, scholars attempting an overview of Irish America have inclined to the shortcut. Assuming that the body of Irish-Americans are today found in Boston, New York city and Philadelphia, they have tended to discuss the political, social and religious history of the community as though these cities and their past encapsulated it. A demurrer has come from Chicago; but its scholars have in turn tended to correct the picture with an eye to their own particular experience. As a result, most general treatments bear the hallmark of their origin: those of Daniel Moynihan, William Shannon, George Potter, Thomas N. Brown and Oscar Handlin being shaped by the assumptions of the Atlantic urban seabord; those of L. J. McCaffrey, Andrew Greeley and Ernest Levine by a Chicago counter-emphasis. More seriously, recent attempts to establish a more scientific methodology for the study of Irish and other immigrant groups, as pioneered by Stephan Thernstrom in 1964 and mushrooming since then, have been biased toward this east-coast selectivity of the more traditional historians. Thus, minute studies of occupational mobility, marriage and fertility patterns, working lives and community concentration and dispersal have assumed, and even asserted, the representativeness of east coast experience, especially that of New England; no fewer than eleven Massachusetts cities have enjoyed full-scale academic study of their Irish proletariats.

This paper is concerned with the secret service vote provided by parliament expressly for the purchase of secret information at home and abroad ‘with a view to defeating the machinations of the enemies of the crown and country’, and with the proportion of that money spent by the Irish authorities up to 1922. Figures are available which disclose the actual expenditure by Dublin Castle of money from this source for the last fifty-four years of British rule in Ireland, from 1868–9 to 1921–2. It must be stressed that these amounts represent only a part of the spending in any one year on intelligence concerning Ireland: other departments were also involved in Irish affairs from time to time, and there is little doubt that on occasion funds from other votes were used for secret service purposes —which was certainly the case in wartime. It should be noted too that distinctions between criminal, agrarian and subversive activity in Ireland were frequently difficult to make, and that money from the secret service vote was probably used to obtain information on matters not political or seditious in themselves. Thus the figures when considered in isolation are not an accurate index of official activity against potentially subversive organisations. Nevertheless as concrete data on an aspect of government for which documentary evidence is hard to come by, they are of some interest.

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

The early years of Irish independence were years of precedent-setting decisions that shaped and moulded the new state. In a country just emerging from a struggle for independence and a devastating civil war, the army was one of the most vital and central institutions; and the relationship between the military and the elected civilian government was crucial. In fact, at the end of the civil war, a strong possibility existed that, unless the government acted quickly to establish its control, the army could remain the dominant force in Irish politics for years to come. The response to the Irish army mutiny of 1924, however, upheld and affirmed the supremacy of constitutional rule in Ireland.

In June 1926 Herbert Wood, deputy-keeper of the public records of Ireland, read a paper to the Royal Irish Academy under the title ‘Letter from Domnall O’Neill to Fineen MacCarthy, 1317’, based on a manuscript (Add. MS 34727, ff 268–9) in the British Museum. The paper was published shortly afterwards as an interesting — perhaps unique — example of a personal communication from one Gaelic lord to another in the era of the Bruce wars. Wood, who obviously had some doubts concerning it, debated in his final paragraphs the case for and against the possibility of forgery before accepting the letter as genuine. But despite the singularity of the letter and the circumstances of its provenance through one person — Thomas O’Sullivan of Middle Temple, London — it has been unquestioningly accepted by historians both general and specialist.

Since 1926 several contemporary and near-contemporary sources of early MacCarthy history have been published, providing evidence which was not readily accessible in Wood’s time. In the light of sources such as these, the authenticity of the letter deserves to be reassessed, and the purpose of this article is to show that the whole document could well have been a fabrication concocted by O’Sullivan.