The ‘ Tigernach ’ Annals—the name is preferable to the current term ‘ Annals of Tigernach ’, which has grown out of a misunderstanding of an anonymous gloss—is one of the many varieties of a document which needs some such specific name as ‘ The Irish Annals ’ All the books of annals—‘ Ulster ’, ‘ Boyle ’, ‘ Inisfallen ’, ‘ Clonmacnois ’, ‘ Chronicum Scotorum ’, and the rest—are merely diversified forms of one fundamental text; this would be obvious if they were printed in parallel columns. The differences between them are due chiefly to interpolations, made not so much by compilers or scribes as by an endless succession of glossators.

It has been usual in works on nineteenth century Irish history to treat the Irish Church Act, 1869, as having been solely or predominantly an act of political justice and a setting right of an unfair relationship between churches and communities. The important place which the act holds in British economic policy as the first enactment for state-aided tenant purchase of land in Ireland has been generally ignored. What attention the subject of tenant purchase at that early period has received both from contemporaries and from subsequent writers has been mainly centred on the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870, which was, in its tenant purchase provisions, a much less successful and less extensively applied measure. There are several reasons for this ignoring of the place of the Irish Church Act in the history of tenant purchase. Neither the act nor any part of it was classified as falling within the mass of legislation to which the collective citation of the Land Purchase (Ireland) Acts was given, nor was it specifically directed to be read as part of any of these later acts.