Since the late 1980s crusade historiography has shown increasing interest in the periphery of Europe and the less ‘traditional’ crusading areas of Scotland, Wales, Poland and Scandinavia. Consideration of Ireland has formed part of this spread of interest, but, like many other areas, it remains comparatively unstudied. In part, the paucity of Irish texts relating to all kinds of crusading discourages research, as does the comparatively low number of known Irish crucesignati.

At the 2002 Hay Literary Festival, Sir Michael Holroyd, the prolific biographer, delivered a lecture outlining the development of British biographical writing, and indicating what he thought might be the key developments in the future of the genre. Quoting Keats, he condemned ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, and called for a greater acknowledgement and utilisation of the fictional in the enhancing of our understanding of individuals. Such a readiness to shun or qualify empirical evidence when attempting to interpret and understand the past would be an anathema to most historians.

The historiography of nineteenth-century Irish newspapers centres on the development of a nationalist press nationally and locally, with expansion of readership and titles connected to the great waves of politicisation under O’Connell and Parnell. Studies of unionist newspapers tend to focus on Ulster or the Irish Times, whose institutional continuity maintains interest in its earlier incarnations, and whose relatively liberal nineteenth-century unionism was directed at the Dublin Protestant middle classes. There was, however, another type of nineteenth-century Southern unionist newspaper addressing a conservative audience of landlords, professionals and Church of Ireland clerics. Such diehard newspapers often clung to older business models involving limited readership, and underpinned their activities by second jobs and patronage from local elites, though the Dublin Tory press developed a somewhat wider audience.

Austere and forbidding, the workhouse occupied a prominent position in the towns of nineteenth-century Ireland. Reformer Laura Stephens, writing in the New Ireland Review in 1900, said of the Irish workhouse that ‘the great gloomy pile of grey stone buildings, surrounded with high walls is unmistakable,’ while Anna Clarke quotes William Field as having observed ‘Foreigners remark … that our constitution seems to produce poverty and lunacy; because, either the immense ugly union or the big regular asylum is generally the leading architectural feature in county towns; instead of the fine church or cathedral, the handsome maison de ville, and the pleasurable, instructive galleries to be found in other countries.’

Between 1879 and 1882, large amounts of relief were dispensed in Ireland by a range of state, private, clerical and political organisations and agencies. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, £800,000 in private charity and up to £2.4 million in government aid was expended in an attempt to alleviate the extreme distress of the period. That expenditure was greater than the £1.2 million in rent reductions secured by the 275,525 tenants who entered the courts of the Land Commission in 1881, factors that are seen as central to the deflation of the Land War. In the historiography of the period, the distribution of this relief is usually only mentioned in passing: R. V. Comerford and R. F. Foster have outlined the high politics of private charities such as the Duchess of Marlborough and Mansion House Funds. The administration of relief at local level has also received limited attention, and much of this scholarship concentrates on structural causes of poverty and the effectiveness of various measures adopted.

The besetting sin of all historical writing is myopia. Large as well as small nations suffer equally from the disheartening insularity of rarely looking beyond the borders of the nation state as geographical borders mutate into mental, cultural and historiographical ones. Myopia's close relative is the unshakeable doctrine of exceptionalism: the assumption that each nation's history is, by definition, sui generis. National histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered notions of a shared identity and created the sense of an embryonic nation. A critical element in this process was stressing the exceptional characteristics, such as the tradition of liberal governance in Britain, American liberty or the revolutionary origins of the French state. That this history of nations was presented for popular consumption as a story is understandable – story-telling is the most effective method of communicating a narrative to a wide audience.