The English marcher lineages, or, perhaps more accurately, those families or kindreds not of Gaelic descent who settled in the area now comprising south County Dublin following the arrival of the English, played an instrumental part in shaping the boundaries of what would by 1500 be known as the English Pale. There was a large number of these families living in this area from the 1170s, but for reasons of space we must limit the focus here to a specific few: of similar strength and drawn from a mixture of Scandinavian, Welsh and English ethnic backgrounds and inhabiting this compact district, the Harolds, Lawlesses, Howels, Archbolds and Walshes (or Walshmen) offer a broad perspective. The raison d’être of these five lineages occupying a border between two very different societies changed through the centuries, just as political and military conditions changed. The original motivation to colonise the district apparently reflected opportunism coupled with the Dublin administration’s desire to have English subjects moulding the adjacent countryside into a secure, profitable English entity. Yet Gaelic hostility — often manifesting itself in raids emanating from the nearby Leinster mountains — arrested the English colony’s southward expansion, and the role of the lineages assumed an increasingly military character.

The centre stage of early nineteenth-century Irish politics has long been held by Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association. This may be justifiable, as O’Connell created a mass constitutional movement for liberal reform out of a Catholic, peasant population on the fringe of Europe. Less justifiable is the single perspective that sees the struggle for Catholic emancipation as Catholic Ireland’s battle with the British establishment. In 1828 and 1829 there was also a massive Protestant political campaign in Ireland. This centred on the new Brunswick Clubs and Ulster. Yet anti-Catholic and Ulster politics merit few sentences in narratives of these years. Indeed, there is a general neglect of Ulster politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Presbyterianism, the evangelical revival, Catholicism, sectarian conflict, the Orange Order, the Irish Yeomanry, the economy and the growth of Belfast as a city have all received detailed treatment, but the nuances of politics remain vague. The Catholic Association appears to have reduced Ulster’s importance in shaping political developments in the island as a whole from its high-water mark of the 1790s. This does not, however, justify simply leaving Ulster out of the story. This article aims to look at the Ulster anti-emancipation campaign and to correct the skewed picture of Ireland in these years.

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

The land question from the mid-Victorian period to around 1903 looms large in Irish historiography. This is hardly surprising given the fact that, while it was immensely important in its own right, it could not be disentangled from the wider political developments of the time that saw the land and national questions merge. However, with the exception of recent work by Professor David Seth Jones, the land question in post-independence Ireland has been largely overlooked. There seems, in fact, to be a general assumption among political, social and economic historians that there was no land question after 1922, that the land act of the following year defused all potential for future agrarian unrest by completing the transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants.

The usefulness of parliamentary lists to historians interested in the biography of individual M.P.s as well as the political and parliamentary process is well established, and valuable listings have been produced to facilitate consultation of the surviving eighteenth-century examples. Only a modest percentage of the total has been published, but even this has proved of considerable assistance to historians interested in the operation and personnel of parliament in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Lord Townshend’s decision, following the rejection of the privy council’s money bill in 1769, to dispense with undertakers and vest the responsibility for constructing a parliamentary majority in Dublin Castle provided the stimulus for the preparation of the majority of known eighteenth-century lists. The abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 and the return thereafter of 100 Irish M.P.s to Westminster largely liberated the Irish executive from this onerous responsibility, and the number of lists of Irish members of parliament fell sharply as a result.