Between 13 and 15 August 1969 communal violence in Belfast saw seven people killed and over 400 treated for injuries. Nearly 2,000 families were forced from their homes. British troops were deployed on the streets to prevent further violence, events usually seen as the starting point of the modern Irish Troubles. In 1972 the Sunday Times Insight Team's Ulster set the tone for commentary on the role of the I.R.A. during this period. It claimed that the organisation had been ‘largely an irrelevance’ in Belfast during August 1969 and as a result ‘I.R.A. – I Ran Away was scrawled derisively over the walls of the Catholic Ghettos’. Conor Cruise O'Brien soon asserted in States of Ireland that when violence erupted ‘the I.R.A. had very few weapons and very few people trained and ready to use them. Their prestige in the Ghettos went sharply down. People wrote on walls I.R.A. I Ran Away.’ Echoing these statements twentythree years later Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Troubles stated that ‘the I.R.A. posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the I.R.A. in the traditional role of “the defenders” wrote up the letters I.R.A. on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.' Similar assertions are found in a wide variety of the literature, both popular and academic, dealing with the outbreak of the Troubles.

The 1970s was a time of crisis internationally, when governments struggled to cope with rising inflation and public indebtedness in the aftermath of the first oil shock. It was also a period of social change, of demands for divorce and abortion, and second-wave feminism campaigned for greater rights for women. But as many of the contributors to The shock of the global have shown, amidst the political, social and economic turmoil, there was development and transformation. Ireland was not isolated from many of these trends that marked the 1970s. This article is concerned with the Fine Gael–Labour government of 1973 to 1977, in particular with the social reform agenda pursued by a coalition of one party (Fine Gael) that had advocated a ‘Just Society’ in the 1960s, and another (Labour) that had declared that the seventies would be socialist. They presented themselves at the 1973 general election as the socially progressive parties in the political system, attempting to outflank Fianna Fáil, which, in contrast, emphasised the Northern Ireland security question during the campaign. As the National Coalition grappled with fiscal expansion and the effects of stagflation, important changes occurred in the realm of social policy. Legislation affecting the status of women, recognising female heads of household and offering support to families of physically and mentally disabled children were all indicators of change.

The phenomenon of ‘unknown’ infant deaths addressed in this article was first explored in the course of research on fatalities arising from political violence during the Irish revolution of 1916–1921. Our data are derived from the General Register of Death Indices (G.R.D.I.), held in the General Register Office, Dublin, which are organised alphabetically, and which form an official record of deaths registered either by relatives of the deceased or by medical personnel. When infant ‘unknown’ fatalities were extracted to form a discrete database they showed a curious gender disparity. There were 100 male infant fatalities recorded for every seventy-eight females in the thirty-two counties over the five-year period. On extending the study to 1932, the same ratio was prevalent in the overall dataset of 895 ‘unknown infants’ drawn from the G.R.D.I. (a dataset which excludes the six counties of Northern Ireland for the period from1922). Initial research into the gender imbalance opened out wider questions concerning social mores regarding illegitimacy, and the extent of medical and lay knowledge of how newborn infants might be brought to death.

In December 1973, the British and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive designate agreed to the formal establishment of a ‘Council of Ireland’ as part of the historic Sunningdale Agreement. This council was to have executive functions and co-ordinate the provision of certain services on both sides of the border; it would have ‘executive and harmonising functions and a consultative role, and a consultative assembly with advisory and review functions’. The Council of Ireland proposal was the British government's formal recognition of the ‘Irish dimension’ which it had accepted in the March 1973 White Paper, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals. The proposed council was one of the most divisive issues in Northern Ireland politics during the 1972–4 period, and was strongly resisted by a majority of unionists. The council issue led to the collapse of the power-sharing Executive which had taken office in January 1974. Loyalist opponents of Sunningdale argued that the Council of Ireland, if allowed to operate, would be a stepping-stone to a united Ireland. Recently, some scholars have retrospectively endorsed this interpretation of the council, arguing that the Irish government, in concert with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.), sought a particularly strong institution – with the goal of Irish reunification. But was the proposed Council of Ireland really intended as a vehicle for future Irish unity?

On a plane leaving Baidoa refugee camp in Somalia in late 1992, an Arab doctor offered John O'Shea, head of the relief agency Goal, a glimpse of how the Irish were viewed in that civil war-ravaged state. ‘Ah, Ireland’, he remarked on learning of O'Shea's country of origin, ‘the caring nation’. He had reason to be complimentary. In addition to the aid agencies and aid workers involved in the ongoing relief effort, Somalia had recently hosted two highprofile visitors from the Irish state. In August 1992 the minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, spent three days in the country to view at first-hand its escalating civil war. He was followed less than two months later by President Mary Robinson, whose arrival at Baidoa on 2 October marked the beginning of a tour – the first by a Western head of state – of the feeding stations and refugee camps that provided succour to those displaced by the conflict.

During the First World War, Irish society experienced power struggles between civil authority, military governance, the constitutional nationalist establishment, and the emerging Republican movement. In the unstable wartime environment, political and social variables sparked intense controversies that mirrored competition for control over the Irish public. Inspired by the Easter Rising and emboldened by growing public disillusionment with the war, Republicans harnessed these eruptions to help fuel their attempt to overthrow Dublin Castle.

Historians studying the Irish parliament in the first half of the eighteenth century generally have to make do with sources that are far less rich than those available at Westminster. In particular, division-lists, a staple of British parliamentary history, remain a relatively rare delicacy in Ireland. Only a dozen or so are known from the period 1692–1760, and hitherto none at all between the divisions on the disputed by-elections for Westmeath in 1723 and Dublin city in 1749. The discovery of another list, from the session of 1735–6, is thus particularly welcome, and would be so whatever its subject matter. But what makes this new list even more valuable is that it relates to a highly controversial division, closely associated with the production of Swift's notorious satire on the Irish House of Commons, ‘A character, panegyric and description of the Legion Club’, and also provides crucial evidence for the dating of that poem.

In 1206, the year after he was created earl of Ulster by King John, the forces of Hugh II de Lacy (d. 1242) devastated the ecclesiastical civitas of Armagh for ten successive days and nights. Then, turning southwest into Monaghan, de Lacy laid waste ‘Teach Damhnata’ (Tydavnet), ‘Ceall Muragáin’ (Kilmore), and Clones, before striking northwards into Tír Eógain. There, he attacked Tullaghoge, seat of the king of Cenél nEógain, Áed Méith Ua Néill (d. 1230), reaching as far north as Ciannachta (bar. Keenaght, County Londonderry). This campaign, undertaken with the ‘Foreigners of Meath and of Leinster’, was followed up in the beginning of 1207 with another assault on Armagh around St Brigid’s day (1 February), which was severe enough to prompt Eugenius (Echdonn mac Gilla Uidir), archbishop of Armagh (d. 1217), to cross to the court of King John in order to ‘succour the churches of Ireland and to accuse the Foreigners’.

This study explores how power over primary and post-primary education was contested between a traditional Catholic elite and the Irish state during a period of far-reaching educational reform. The interaction between successive ministers for education and the Catholic bishops was a constant feature of the politics of educational expansion, but it was an uneasy and volatile relationship, which sometimes shaded into hostility. Power was contested between a newlyassertive Department of Education and the clerical managers or religious orders who traditionally controlled the schools. The Catholic Church did not react to policy change as a monolithic entity: divisions emerged within the traditional elite under the strain of adapting to unprecedented policy change, underlined by significant tensions between the bishops and the Catholic managerial authorities. A traditional consensus on the predominance of the Catholic Church in education disappeared, to be replaced by a new balance of power in which the state both contested with traditional stakeholders and collaborated uneasily with them to advance educational reform.