Among a number of early modern collections of Uí Néill genealogies are two pedigrees entitled Genelach Clainne Eruilb (‘Genealogy of the Descendants of Erulb’) which are of interest as they contain a relatively high proportion of Scandinavian personal names. The scheme of the two pedigrees, with dates supplied from the chronicles, can be set out diagramatically thus:

Clann Eruilb evidently took its name from Erulb mac Murchada, who is the common ancestor of the two constituent lines. As recorded in the manuscripts, the pedigrees do not go back beyond Áed Allán mac Fergaile (king of Tara, 734–43) but could be extended to Éogan mac Néill Noígiallaig, eponymous ancestor of the Cenél nÉogain kings of Ailech.

The censuses of 1841 and 1851 provide the earliest detailed and consistent data on the occupations pursued by the people of Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper presents a series, constructed from this data, on occupations classified by industry for the years 1841 and 1851. Its purpose is to establish the industrial distribution of the labour force for each of the four provinces, to describe the changes in industrial employment by province during the famine decade, and to make a contribution to debate on the origins of employment decline.

I

In its return of occupations, the census of 1841 differed from the censuses of 1821 and 1831 in three ways: in method of estimation, in compilation, and in system of classification. As regards estimation, the 1841 commissioners issued a ‘Form of family return’ to be completed by the head of the family, rather than, as in 1821 and 1831, having the details entered by the enumerator from viva voce inquiry. This has its limitations in that it depends on the accuracy of the householders’ returns, but it is preferable to relying on the accuracy of enumerators’ returns. As regards compilation, the 1841 census returned the occupations of all persons active in the labour force by age and gender; the 1821 census returned all persons active; the 1831 census returned males upwards of twenty years of age in agriculture, industry and services (except servants), all male servants and female servants (age unspecified). As regards the system of classification, the 1821 occupation returns were made under three, and the 1831 under eleven general headings with no return of the numbers engaged in the component occupations of these headings (but see note 1); the 1841 census provided a return of the numbers of males and females engaged in each of 471 occupations classified as belonging to one of nine classes: ministering to food; clothing; lodging; furniture; machinery, etc.; health; charity; justice; education; religion; unclassified.

Irish nationalism and the success of Sinn Féin in acquiring dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1921–2 had a profound influence upon many nationalist movements in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the Irish example was of greatest significance for the shaping of political organisations and guerrilla warfare, it was also valuable in inspiring broader academic analyses of the consequences of colonial rule. In 1927 and again in 1936 Professor Yanaihara Tadao of Tokyo Imperial University published an essay on the Airurando mondai or Irish question entitled ‘Airurando mondai no enkaku’ (‘The history of the Irish question’). The main purpose of the essay was to compare Britain’s Irish question with Japan’s Chôsen mondai or Korean question, and it not only provides us with a unique Japanese perspective on Irish history but reminds us of the importance of the Irish example in Asia.

Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961) is even today much respected in Japan for his resistance to militarism and his sympathy for colonial peoples in the 1930s. In 1910, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he was touched by the plight of the Korean people under Japanese rule as a result of reading Frederick Arthur McKenzie’s The tragedy of Corea. McKenzie’s tirade against Japanese atrocities in Korea both during and after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 caused Yanaihara ‘to consider the truth of colonial policy’. At this time Yanaihara had just been admitted to the First Higher School, a preparatory college for entry to Tokyo Imperial University, and the years spent at the school proved to be his most formative.

By October 1926 the Irish Free State seemed to have emerged at last from the prolonged nightmare of the ‘Troubles’. Within three and a half years of the abandonment of armed insurrection by the republicans, Cosgrave’s government had proved unexpectedly effective in securing both internal stability and external reconciliation with its former antagonists. In May 1926 de Valera had committed his followers to parliamentary struggle by founding Fianna Fáil, thereby marginalising intransigent republicanism until it became a lingering irritant rather than an immediate menace to domestic security. The tripartite agreements of December 1925 had perpetuated partition and resolved some of the thorny fiscal problems raised by the Anglo-Irish treaty. The process of reconciliation with Britain was crowned during October and November 1926, when Kevin O’Higgins and the Irish delegation played a creative and enthusiastic role in remodelling the British Empire at the Imperial Conference in London. The consolidation of the Irish Free State as an autonomous dominion of twenty-six counties, comfortably acknowledging its strategic and economic dependence on Britain, seemed virtually assured.

Robert Dudley Edwards’s Church and state in Tudor Ireland is an extremely durable, almost monolithic, work. Despite recent judgements that it is shot through with the confessional bias of its author, it has managed to retain an eminent place in the Irish historical canon since its publication in 1935. Two plausible reasons for this durability are readily identifiable. The first concerns Dudley Edwards’s role as a ‘founding father’ of ‘scientific’ historical scholarship in Ireland. In this context, Church and state stands out as an archetypal publication of the ‘new history’ and, for the author’s increasingly self-conscious successors, an important reference point in any endeavour to analyse or explain their profession and its work. The second reason concerns the book’s recurrent utility. Despite its age, Church and state is still the most reliable single-volume history of sixteenth-century Ireland’s Reformation experience, a volume which provides informative and citable material for present-day students and researchers alike.