Two recent books, one on protestantism, the other on plantation, have much in common. Both are by young authors who as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, identified aspects of the history of early modern Ireland that were in urgent need of investigation and who then proceeded with the necessary research in British universities; in one case under the supervision of Dr Brendan Bradshaw and in the other under the tutelage of Dr Toby Barnard. The enthusiasm and combativeness of their undergraduate years still linger on in these pages but there is even clearer evidence of the skills, interests and approaches to historical study that have been cultivated by their graduate mentors. Furthermore, each book derives its authority from the systematic examination of a mass of source material that has previously been neglected, and each author advances his conclusions in a vigorous fashion and relates them to developments in Britain and on the Continent as well as to what was happening in Ireland. The fact that authors of such ability and accomplishment have been forced to make careers for themselves outside the university world is a sad reflection upon Irish national priorities and raises serious questions about recruitment and tenure practices in universities and other third-level institutions that have a concern for the study of Irish history.

The study of history at both national and local levels featured prominently among the intellectual activities of early modern Europeans. The desire to know more of their own countries (as evidenced by the growth of mapmaking) and the use of history as a political tool both played important parts in the emergence of the past as a vital force in the present. The same was true of early modern Ireland. Settlers coming to a new environment looked to the past both as a way of understanding their new home, and as a way of legitimising current political realities. Sir James Perrott noted in the introduction to his Chronicle of Ireland ‘the use of reading histories is twofold: either private for a man’s particular knowledge and information, or public for the application of it to the service of the state’ Thus Sir John Davies’s treatise on the Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued was as much a justification of existing royal policy in Ireland as an explanation of Irish history Each, for his own reasons, was looking to the past to explain the present.

Eunan O’Halpin’s short paper, ‘The secret service vote and Ireland, 1868- 1922’, raises important questions about accountability for the payment of money for secret service work, a term not defined in any statute in nineteenth-century Ireland. What did ‘secret service work’ include and to what extent was the money properly authorised?

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the legal implications of the use of secret service money Accounts for 1833 in the Hatherton papers show the amount of money paid, to whom and for what purposes. Edward John Littleton, first Baron Hatherton (1791 – 1863), was chief secretary for Ireland in 1833 and 1834 during the second lord lieutenancy of Marquis Wellesley This article is based largely on evidence drawn from the Hatherton papers and raises questions about the impartiality of justice in Ireland.

Michael Davitt in his book, The fall of feudalism in Ireland, published in 1904, told the story.

it is related that Mr John O’Conneli, M.P., … son of the Liberator, read aloud in Conciliation Hall, Dublin [the meeting place of the Repeal Association], a letter he had received from a catholic bishop in west Cork, in 1847, in which this sentence occurred — ‘the famine is spreading with fearful rapidity and scores of persons are dying of starvation and fever, but the tenants are bravely paying their rents’ — whereupon John O'Connell exclaimed, in proud tones, ‘I thank God I live among a people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of the rent!’

The work of K. Theodore Hoppen has forced historians of nineteenthcentury Ireland to question the role and significance of nationalism in politics, particularly local politics. Parochialism is for Hoppen the predominant political sentiment in Irish life. In the words of one reviewer, Charles Townshend, 'his general image is of an anarchic society pursuing its particular concerns in defiance of governments and revolutionaries alike’ Yet, as Townshend points out, this image cannot adequately explain the political mobilisation which followed from the Land War, apparently for national ends. Nor can it encompass the dual nature of this, and earlier, temporary mobilisations, 'movements that were simultaneously national and local, modern and traditional - in which nationalist rhetoric reinforced local claims, and the release of local energy could be tapped to sustain the nationalist claim.

The singularity of the apparent clash of church and state in 1951 and its easy resolution in 1953 should alert us to the dangers of accepting the perception of events as the reality This paper attempts to explain the complexity of factors that gave rise to the appearance of conflict. The evolution of health policy, the relationship of de Valera and Archbishop McQuaid, the intricate politicking of the first inter-party government, the role of the Knights of St Columbanus, the lobbying of the Private Practitioners’ Group of the Irish Medical Association and the medical profession’s influence with the catholic church and the Irish government — these are some of the factors entangled in the controversy The crisis of 1951, however, provides the touchstone by which one can judge the relevance of any record, and the reader should bear; in mind that the confusion of influences covered here relates ultimately to the illusion of conflict. We must go back to the seminal period, the Emergency — the period of the Second World War — to begin to unravel perception from reality

The recent accession to the Vatican Archives of registers of the Sacred Penitentiary, a category of business which remained closed when the general records of the papacy were opened to scholarly research at large in 1881, is an important development. It has especially exciting implications for late medieval Irish history The availability of the Penitentiary material will greatly facilitate an undertaking which is of prime importance but for which the sources are otherwise scanty the study of religious sentiment in Ireland in the period from about the second decade of the fifteenth century, when these registers begin, to the Reformation. This is an aspect of ecclesiastical history to which the legalistic and contentious documents of the beneficiary deposits, the principal point of contact between Ireland and the papacy in the middle ages — though immensely valuable in their own right — do not readily lend themselves.

Shortly before Michaelmas, 1587, when he was not yet fifteen years old, Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill along with four companions went on board a vessel moored opposite Rathmullen in Lough Swilly, enticed mainly by the promise of wine. But the crew under one Nicholas Skipper of Dublin were decoys posing as merchants who, on instructions from Lord Deputy Sir John Perrot, brought the youths in captivity to Dublin. Aodh Ruadh and three of his companions were then lodged in prison in Dublin Castle. A first attempt at escape was made a little over three years later in January 1591 ending with O’Donnell’s prompt recapture, an event said to have caused widespread gloom among the Irish. But a second attempt a year later was successful. Aodh Ruadh returned to Ulster and, following a brief period of recuperation, was installed in the lordship of Tirconnell in the summer of 1592, in succession to his father who resigned in his favour A celebrated career ensued which was cut short by the defeat at Kinsale and his subsequent premature death at Simancas in September 1602.