Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.

As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.

South Australia was the least Irish part of nineteenth-century Australia. Proportionately fewer Irish arrived at Port Adelaide than at the other great immigrant ports of the southern continent. They also came later: relatively few Irish participated in the first dozen years of colonisation in South Australia after its inception in 1836. In contrast with other parts of Australia the Irish were slow to reach a tenth and never reached a third of the colonial population. They were not in South Australia ‘a founding people’. They were indeed conspicuously a minority which faced the established and unquestioned primacy of Anglo-Scottish colonisation.

South Australia was overwhelmingly English in its origins. From the beginning it was virtually a fragment of southern England, a Home Counties colony expressly designed for superior expatriates. It was also heavily advertised as a haven for Protestant dissenters. The first Catholic priest in South Australia, William Benson, was hardly exaggerating when he described it in 1843 as ‘a little dissenting colony, exclusively Protestant evangelical’. He went further, saying that ‘when this colony was established no Catholic gentlemen of property were allowed to join the founders’ — implying thereby that the planners deliberately discouraged Irish participation. Only when the colonial population reached 14,000, asserted Benson, did ‘our late evangelical governors’ feel confident enough to permit a minority of Catholics reasonable and equal entry. Another Catholic Irishman, Major Thomas O’Halloran, also claimed that the early colonial planners had been anti-Irish, wishing to restrict their numbers to less than 5 per cent of the colonial population. It is little wonder that South Australia seemed, in Irish eyes, the most alien quarter of the new continent.

By the turn of the twentieth century the west of Ireland had become a geographical expression synonymous with poverty and destitution. Whilst in the eighteenth century Connacht was regarded as inaccessible, it was not considered to be overpopulated, hungry or poverty-stricken. Its economic and social condition began to change for the worse in the nineteenth century. From 1816-17 onwards the western seaboard was affected more and more severely by a series of famines and localised distress and typhus. Hardship on the islands off Mayo and Galway was so severe in 1822-3 that London philanthropists set up a committee to launch a large-scale relief programme. The committee blamed the distress on potato failure, ‘want of employment’, high rents and low agricultural prices.

The deterioration in economic and social conditions is considered to have been exacerbated by the equalisation of the currencies of, and the removal of tariffs between, Ireland and Great Britain in the mid 1820s. Some rural industries, like textiles, glass and kelp-production, were wiped out. The resistance of the western economy to natural disaster was thereby severely weakened. The western isles were hit badly by the distress of 1835 and even more so by the Great Famine ten years later. Rents remained high whilst incomes fell.

The 1930s were years of political turmoil and economic crisis and change in Ireland. Economic activity had peaked in 1929, and the last years of the Cumann na nGaedheal government (in power since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922) saw substantial drops in output, trade and employment. The policies pursued after Fianna Fáil’s victory in the election of February 1932 were therefore influenced both by immediate economic pressures and by the party’s ideological commitments. The highly protectionist measures associated with de Valera and Lemass — key men of the new régime — sought both to create jobs quickly and to build more gradually a large indigenous industrial sector, producing primarily for the home market.

Political controversy complicated matters. De Valera was regarded as a headstrong fanatic by the British establishment. His government’s refusal to hand over to Britain the so-called ‘land annuities’ — a disputed item in the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921 — led to an ‘economic war’, in which the British Treasury sought payment instead through penal ‘emergency’ tariffs on Irish imports. The Irish imposed their own duties, bounties and licensing restrictions in turn. The economic war hurt Irish agriculture badly; the prices of fat and store cattle dropped by almost half between 1932 and mid-1935. Farmers got some relief through export bounties and the coal-cattle pacts (quota exchanges of Irish cattle for British coal) of 1935-7, but Anglo-Irish relations were not normalised again until the finance and trade agreements of the spring of 1938, and the resolution of the annuities dispute did not mean an end to protection. The questions ‘Who won the economic war?’ and ‘What was the impact of protection on the Irish economy?’ are analytically distinct, but they are not that easy to keep apart in practice.