Literary evidence for political and social developments in medieval Ireland comes down to us in a variety of languages: Latin; a rich and — by European standards — early production in the Irish vernacular; Old Norse; Middle English; with sparser reference in Old English, Welsh and other nearby linguistic communities. Some of this evidence, tightly circumscribed in time, is also in Anglo-Norman French, and reflects a very different Ireland from that of Arthurian romance. These Anglo-Norman works, composed in Ireland or in Britain on the basis of eye-witness testimony, constitute a unique body of material, though their value as historical evidence is constricted in two ways: firstly, they are limited to three preserved texts; secondly, they are rigorously selective in their criteria of historiographical relevancy and in their treatment of the native Irish population, culture and political presence.

Modern historical writing on the events of 1688 to 1691 in Ireland has been characterised by a sense that the two sides in that conflict were acting out predetermined roles. There is in the writing no doubt that Protestants would rally to the cause of William III and that Catholics would be the loyal supporters of the deposed James II. Roy Foster has characterised the ‘war of the two kings’ as a clash of two cultures: ‘one Catholic, French-connected, romantically Jacobite … and temperamentally Gaelic’, and the other that of the Protestant ‘Ascendancy’ created by ‘the traumatic events of James’s short reign and its aftermath’. For J. G. Simms political advantage was the key to the events of 1688–90: Catholics naturally supported James since to do so offered ‘an unusually favourable prospect of establishing their predominance’; and in the Protestant mind, since ‘William was lawful king of England, he was automatically king of Ireland … [and] would not abandon the English stake in Ireland’. Put more starkly by J. C. Beckett, ‘the struggle which reached its climax at the Boyne and ended at Limerick ran a clear course from the accession of James II’. Modern historians were not the only ones to make the assumption that Irish Protestants would support William and Catholics James. Many contemporaries outside Ireland made a similar equation. The English Jacobite John Stevens seems to have believed there was a definite link between religion and political loyalty when he arrived in Ireland in 1689 to serve James. On his arrival at Naas he was allocated a billet by the sovereign of the town, but the innkeeper refused to admit him. ‘The man being an Irishman and a Catholic’, Stevens noted, ‘made his ill carriage towards us appear more strange but his religion and country he thought would bear him out’. Arriving at Dublin he approached his prominent Jacobite friends, but ‘friendship was grown so rare in Ireland as loyalty in England’. He was relieved from apparent destitution by ‘the hands I least expected it from’, a New English Protestant who lent him £10.

Although there has been a continuous Irish presence at the Cape of Good Hope since the late eighteenth century, the chroniclers of the Irish diaspora have until the late 1980s ignored the continent of Africa. This was in part because relatively few Irish migrants ventured to Africa, but it is also the consequence of two other factors. The vast majority of Irish immigrants to Africa in the nineteenth century went to South Africa, a region which, with some exceptions, has been academically isolated for a generation. Then within South Africa there is much still to be learnt about the nature of English-speaking society in the region. While the meticulous analysis of black and Afrikaner history and society, and of related economic history, has dominated South African historiography for some two decades, professional academics have too often left the field of South African English-speaking studies to the amateur historian and the antiquarian. Thus what in Canada or Australia would be regarded as mainline historical research has in South Africa been sidelined in the name of historical relevancy. In fact an analysis of Irish settlement in southern Africa fills an important gap in the general survey of Irish emigration to the empire and reveals a pattern of Irish settlement very different from other regions of Irish migration.

On the morning of 22 June 1922 Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson left his home in London to unveil a war memorial at Liverpool Street railway station. When he returned at 2.30 that afternoon, two young men, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, were waiting for him. What happened next is best described in Reggie Dunne’s own words:

Dunne and O’Sullivan subsequently shot three pursuers (two policemen and a civilian) in their attempt to escape, but, fatally slowed by Joe O’Sullivan’s wooden leg, they were caught shortly afterwards. They were tried, convicted and, on 10 August, hanged in Wandsworth Prison.