It has been argued that the general election of 1852 marked the zenith of clerical influence in Irish politics in the nineteenth century. If so, it marked a barren use of power. The present paper is concerned with how such influence was acquired and why it was so curiously exercised; or, more precisely, with these questions in so far as the catholic hierarchy was concerned.

Acts of pains and penalties are an antique form of criminal action, related (but as a small brother, so to speak) to acts of attainder. Both consisted of bills directed against an individual, and passed by king, lords and commons, in contradistinction to impeachment, where the commons acted as accusers and the lords as sole judges in the case. Whereas, however, attainder was confined to cases of treason and felony and carried the death penalty, pains and penalties also covered conduct tending to grave public mischief and were attended by lesser punishments. The first acts of pains and penalties noticed in the legal textbooks belong to the thirteenth century, and generally concern fugitives domiciled abroad, the last belong to the 1720s and 1730s and cover a wide range of political or quasi-political offences. The Layers conspiracy, the South Sea Bubble scandal and the Porteous riots all ended in this form of punitive legislation.

Part, at least, of the historian's work consists of the formulation of general notions and the subsequent refinement of these generalities. One advance is made when a notion like romanticism is conceived, another when that notion is broken down and divided, both in terms of time and region and by the clarifications of logic, and fresh categories can be stated. This paper is concerned with proposing and-distinguishing a generalization of this type, an administrative or governmental revolution in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. It must be granted at once that this revolution has not the standing of its industrial and agrarian cousins. It can neither match them in ‘scale’ nor present such tangible or arresting phenomena. The very words have scarcely yet entered the historian's vocabulary, except perhaps to the accompaniment of deprecatory inverted commas. And even if the fact of its occurrence be allowed, it is clearly neither the first of its race nor indisputably the foremost. Mr Elton has staked a high claim for the corresponding Tudor change,1 and it is no doubt possible to point to really critical shifts in governmental behaviour in almost every succeeding age.

This paper is concerned with an obscure and long defunct branch of the administration, which was instituted in 1833 and reached its climax by the middle 'fifties. The branch, which had not even a distinctive name, consisted at most of between twenty and thirty executive members, almost all half-pay naval officers, who were at first directly controlled by the colonial office, and, after 1840, subject immediately to the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission. Though the corps of emigration officers, or agents, as they were indifferently called, was established in the 1830's, it by no means belonged to a new race of administrators. It did not originate in political agitation, or Benthamic or parliamentary inquiry. Its purpose and function were scarcely defined; certainly it was innocent of doctrinaire intention. No celebrated public servant, except, indirectly, James Stephen, was concerned with its workings; no considerable attention was ever drawn upon its officers. Indeed, by and large, the British public was unaffected by, and probably ignorant of, its existence.

In several respects the great famine revolutionized Irish overseas emigration. Numbers rose abruptly from an annual average of some 50,000 in the early ’forties to more than 100,000 in 1846, more than 200,000 in 1847 and an aggregate of well over one and a quarter millions in the six succeeding seasons. A relatively small, steady and considered emigration was replaced, especially during 1846-9, by a headlong outrush, sometimes more a hasty, even hysterical flight of economic refugees than a population movement as ordinarily understood. Unprecedented disasters overtook these emigrations, as epidemics swept over a passenger trade still painfully adjusting its shipping and standards to the new phenomenon and the growing predominance of Liverpool as the point of embarkation.

The catholic church in Ireland never, as a church, defined for itself an attitude towards emigration. Priests and bishops, when they spoke of emigration, usually spoke as individuals, not as members of their order. The relatively small number who have left any opinions on record were not necessarily the most influential. We cannot be certain that their views represented the feelings of the clergy as a whole. The day to day conversations and advice of ordinary priests, of which we can know little, mere far more influential in this matter than the pastorals or public letters which survive. In the place of a single voice speaking with authority or the steady murmur of unanimity, we can hear only the heterogeneous confusion of a score of voices, some perhaps seriously distorted by the public controversy in which they were raised.