The standard general histories of the Church of Ireland are inevitably curtailed in their treatment of the years under review in this section. Mant’s two volumes were published in 1840, and the relevant volume of Phillips’s three-part work appeared in 1934. The final chapter (by C. A. Webster) is entitled ‘The church since disestablishment’, and its tone is consistent with the instructions given to the team of authors by the general synod in 1929, when the work was commissioned, that it should constitute ‘a measure of defence against hostile propaganda’. Accordingly, considerable attention is paid to such Church of Ireland grievances as the bull Apostolicae curiae and the Ne temere decree. Several pages are devoted to the St Bartholomew’s ritual cases, and space is given to changes in the church constitution and to missionary work overseas. Of the Church of Ireland's interaction with the profound social and political changes then taking place in the country, little is said, apart from a reference to the need for church extension in Belfast. Perhaps it was too soon. Scarcely of the same magnitude as Phillips's extensive survey, the single-volume history by Johnston, Robinson and Jackson, though published thirty years later, takes the story no further, nor can it be said to show evidence of the transformation in Irish historiography that had taken place in the intervening decades.

The purpose of this note is to identify the place-name Telach Cail as Castletown Delvin, County Westmeath, and to demonstrate the continued use of the site from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period. While archaeologists have identified a number of earthwork sites which had a continuous use from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period, documentary sources may also provide valuable evidence. A combination of near-contemporary pre-Norman and Anglo-Norman documentary evidence indicates that the pre-Norman royal site of Telach Cail in Delbna was chosen for the location of an Anglo-Norman motte.

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

In November 1660 the newly restored king published a declaration for the settlement of Ireland. The substance of this document was that the ‘adventurers’ of the 1640s and the Cromwellian soldiers were to keep what they had got; the Irish Protestants who had actively supported the royalist cause (especially between 1648 and 1650) and who had not yet obtained compensation for this service were to receive their arrears of pay; Irish Catholics who had been deprived of their lands merely on the grounds of their religion were to be restored to what they had lost. From the clash of these interest groups came the moulding forces behind what is known as the ‘Restoration settlement’. (That settlement was based on two acts: the Act of Settlement, 1663, and the Act of Explanation, 1666. The former set out who were to receive lands and where; the latter explained and clarified the many conflicting clauses in the former.)

This article will concentrate on two Irish republican projects from the 1930s: Cumann Poblachta na h-Éireann and the I.R.A.’s British bombing campaign. It will, in each case, focus on one leading individual: Cumann Poblachta’s Seán MacBride and, for the bombing campaign, the I.R.A.’s Seán Russell. Drawing on much material which has not previously been discussed in the literature, it will examine the self-sustaining republican mentality which characterised both projects and both individuals. It will be argued that republicanism in the 1930s is best understood in terms of the concept of solipsism, defined as the view that self is ‘the only thing really existent’. The argument is that republicans acted as though their own political views, beliefs and culture were the only really existent ones and that those of others could, as a consequence, be ignored. Republicans could — in the words of leading Irish-American republican, Joseph McGarrity — ‘pay no heed to public clamor’ as long as they felt that they were ‘doing a national duty’. As such, they were in possession of a self-sustaining but, it will be argued, ultimately self-defeating mentality.