The historiography of the Munster plantation has not been extensive; in the ninety-five years since Robert Dunlop published the first proper study of the greatest of all the Tudor settlements in Ireland, only D. B. Quinn has treated the subject in any detail. In the absence therefore, of any full-scale study of the plantation, it is fair to say that it has usually been characterised as the process of driving the native Irish off their lands and settling them with English colonists. In this scenario, the administrations, both in England and Ireland, are seen as backing the settlers judicially and extra-judicially, and the natives come off distinctly the worst; as Quinn puts it, the native population greatly resented the ‘presence and domination of the planters who were felt to twist the law in favour of a minority’. Yet, a study of the extant evidence does not support this simple stereotyping; rather, both the privy council (to which many of the native land claims were directed) and the government commission of 1592 were quite willing to consider cases against the undertakers and their tenants and to rule in favour of the native claimant. For instance, Hugh Cuffe, who had originally been granted a seignory of 12,000 acres in Cork, lost most of it to appeals by Ellen Fitzedmund Gibbon and James MacShane to the privy council in 1591, and had to make do with a new grant of a mere 1,953 acres in the same area.

The growth of interest in urban studies in recent years had induced scholars to take a new interest in Irish immigrants to Britain during the nineteenth century. The Irish encountered most of the problems of immigrants and were the subject of much comment from contemporary English writers. Moreover, since they constituted a small but homogeneous minority, easily discernible in the larger community, they can be conveniently studied in depth. The purpose of this article is not, however, to do this so much as to enter a few caveats for anyone thinking of specialising in one facet of Irish immigration to Britain, namely, juvenile deliquency. The subject of delinquency among Irish children in Britain, which has intrigued Englishmen for at least 150 years, has taken on new importance in recent times, partly as a result of the revival of an old allegation that there is a connexion between Catholicism and crime. Formerly, the assertion was made by ultra-protestants, especially Recordite evangelicals. Now it is being made by some English Roman Catholic priests. While this article will not deal conclusively with the overall question of a connexion between Catholicism and crime, it is intended to argue that, at least as far as Irish immigrant catholics in nineteenth-century London were concerned, such a connexion could not reasonably be said to exist. In the course of doing so, it will contend that, even granting that the Irish were a police problem as distinct from a crime control problem, there is, nevertheless, evidence of police prejudice against them. It also aims to show that destitution and vagrancy were common among London’s juvenile poor, especially the Irish, and that destitute juveniles were frequently classified as delinquent juveniles and treated accordingly. Finally it will put forward evidence to suggest that some English protestant philanthropists, including some evangelicals, have through over-generalisation, and perhaps unwittingly, caricatured the London Irish.

This study deals with one facet of British rule in Ireland: the careful, systematic and almost wholly bureaucratic takeover of key Irish scientific institutions by the Department of Science and Art in South Kensington. The department is now largely forgotten except by educational and institutional historians; and histories of Irish scientific organisations, whilst they may allude to skirmishes with the department, have rarely attempted to come to grips with the complexity of the relationships. We can, however, organise this complexity with a few, comparatively simple ideas.

This paper is concerned with the secret service vote provided by parliament expressly for the purchase of secret information at home and abroad ‘with a view to defeating the machinations of the enemies of the crown and country’, and with the proportion of that money spent by the Irish authorities up to 1922. Figures are available which disclose the actual expenditure by Dublin Castle of money from this source for the last fifty-four years of British rule in Ireland, from 1868–9 to 1921–2. It must be stressed that these amounts represent only a part of the spending in any one year on intelligence concerning Ireland: other departments were also involved in Irish affairs from time to time, and there is little doubt that on occasion funds from other votes were used for secret service purposes —which was certainly the case in wartime. It should be noted too that distinctions between criminal, agrarian and subversive activity in Ireland were frequently difficult to make, and that money from the secret service vote was probably used to obtain information on matters not political or seditious in themselves. Thus the figures when considered in isolation are not an accurate index of official activity against potentially subversive organisations. Nevertheless as concrete data on an aspect of government for which documentary evidence is hard to come by, they are of some interest.

The early years of Irish independence were years of precedent-setting decisions that shaped and moulded the new state. In a country just emerging from a struggle for independence and a devastating civil war, the army was one of the most vital and central institutions; and the relationship between the military and the elected civilian government was crucial. In fact, at the end of the civil war, a strong possibility existed that, unless the government acted quickly to establish its control, the army could remain the dominant force in Irish politics for years to come. The response to the Irish army mutiny of 1924, however, upheld and affirmed the supremacy of constitutional rule in Ireland.