Professor T W Moody, whose scholarly career was linked so closely to the history and fortunes of this journal, died in Dublin on 11 February 1984, in his seventy-seventh year. One of his former students, now a contributor to the New History of Ireland, remembers a conversation with him only a few days before, and tells of Theo’s lively consideration of plans and projects, of his mind, crystal clear as ever.

Grieved and shocked as his family, friends and colleagues are at his sudden going, they will surely find solace in this memory of full activity and vitality so close to the end. Theo was spared the suffering of long illness, inactivity, and the dependence that these entail, which would have been a hard trial for his active spirit. Indeed, affirmation is a word that comes to mind in remembering his life as a man and a scholar It is reflected in his devotion to his family, in his concern for the work and careers of his students, in his care and never-ceasing responsibility for the projects he had been involved in founding or originating, the two most notable examples being Irish Historical Studies and A New History of Ireland, and in his assistance and kindness to foreign scholars who came to work in Dublin.

At first sight the choice of the Augustinian priory of Kells in Ossory as the subject of a case study may seem a trifle arbitrary. True, its imposing ruins provide a feast for the archaeologist, but the loss of the original register — in place of which we have to settle for a few pages of tantalising excerpts — leaves the historian with a mere snack. Moreover, the priory falls well short of being a member of the big monastic league: at the Dissolution its income was barely quarter that of the great Augustinian abbey of St Thomas, Dublin. How can one justify choosing a subject which is both poorly documented and undistinguished? The short answer is that it is precisely this lack of distinctiveness which makes it representative of a large proportion of Augustinian houses founded in the wake of the Norman conquest.

Professor Desmond Bowen has stressed the importance of the religious question in determining the development of the nation in nineteenth century Ireland:

religion was of paramount importance in the lives of the two peoples or ‘nations’ of Ireland. Their leaders ‘speaking in the name of religion’ could exercise tremendous power because they spoke to the hearts of men in a way that no secular political movement could ever do. It was ‘religion’ in a broad sense that divided the people shaped their different cultures and persuaded them to breed separately and to work separately in a rapidly changing society.

During the late nineteenth century Michael Davitt was a persistent advocate of a solid Irish-British working-class alliance to realise the political and social aspirations of the working people of both countries. Though he took it all rather more personally, the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor often made the same point. But the dynamic movement of Englishmen and Irishmen to challenge the establishment that governed both countries and to effect the restructuring of its economic and social bases did not develop during the century spanned by the lives of O’Connor and Davitt despite a brief period of mutually-perceived Anglo-Irish working-class common interest and some active collaboration. The functional life of this ’alliance’ between the English and Irish leaderships during the revolutionary year 1848 was of short duration. But in Lancashire, English Chartists and members of the Irish Confederation combined for several months of agitation before the fledgling fraternisation was smashed by arrests and flagging interest.

It is not surprising that Raymond Williams should cite Lady Morgan’s comment in 1818 that Ireland had for long been governed by a ‘bureaucratie or office tyranny’ as an early example of the use of the term. Dublin Castle, ‘the architectural emblem of England’s rule over Ireland’, with its extensive coercive and financial powers, appeared to many as a ‘congested district of impervious officialdom’ This unique apparatus of state was characterised by The Times as a ‘narrow bureaucracy saturated with bad traditions of race and creed’ The term ‘bureaucracy’ formed part of mid-Victorian political rhetoric. It cannot be seen as a sociological distortion of administrative history resulting from a rigid application of Max Weber’s ‘ideal type’, an analytical concept central to his writings on bureaucracy Dublin Castle represented a pure bureaucracy of a type the English press feared and assumed to be a continental aberration. To the nationalists, the Irish form of rule was seen as a ‘nominal parliamentary government really ruled by a bureaucracy’ The political structure within which the bureaucracy operated rendered it unrepresentative and unaccountable to parliament, and a constitutional enigma in growing debates on ministerial and civil service power.

In 1967 the late F S. L. Lyons published an essay entitled ‘The minority problem in the 26 counties’, defining the minority in the Irish Free State as ‘unionist in politics and mainly protestant in religion’. Since that date the topic has received considerable scholarly attention. Indeed the tendency has been to approach the cultural development of the new state in the years after independence from the point of view of that minority. While this paper does not seek to minimise the significance of the minority’s role in the evolution of the new state, it does seek to question the validity of the perspective produced by an excessive preoccupation with that role. That perspective is most clearly articulated in the published version of Lyons’s Ford lectures, Culture and anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939. The vision there presented is of an island rent by ‘four irrevocably warring cultures’ (Gaelic, English, Anglo-Irish and Ulster protestant). The cultural history of the Irish Free State in the first decade of independence, it is argued, is best understood as a battle between two of these apparently immutable cultures. In essence this view presents the nineteen-twenties as the decade during which Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Ireland confronted one another in the arenas of language and religion. The images are now fixed.

The Control of Manufactures Acts of 1932 and 1934 were ostensibly designed to ensure that new industries established in the Irish Free State under extensive tariff protection would be Irish-controlled. This legislation has been seen as one of the major implements of Fianna Fail industrial policy — a measure which indicated the party’s commitment to an introspective, self-sufficient Ireland; its partial repeal in 1956 and complete removal the following year has been taken as marking the transition from a protectionist mentality to a more outward industrial orientation.