A part from the surviving state papers (notably those of Lord Lieutenant Clarendon) one of the most important sources for the history of Ireland in the reign of James II is the ‘Narrative’ written in 1702 by Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was appointed secretary to Lord Deputy Tyrconnell and first commissioner of the revenue at the end of 1686 and was dismissed, following allegations of corruption, early in 1688. Sheridan claimed that James had made him secretary against Tyrconnell’s wishes so that he could watch Tyrconnell’s behaviour on his behalf, and that Tyrconnell fabricated the charges of corruption in order to be rid of him. Most historians, especially those hostile to Tyrconnell, have accepted Sheridan’s account as accurate. Sir James Mackintosh, for example, wrote : ‘Clarendon and Sheridan’s MSS agree so exactly in their picture of Tyrconnell, have such an air of truth in their accounts of him that it is not easy to refuse them credit, though they were both his enemies’.

In August 1875, at the O’Connell centenary celebrations in Boston, three famous American abolitionists recalled the importance of O’Connell’s role in the American anti-slavery movement. John Greenleaf Whittier saw no reason to change the high opinion of O’Connell’s anti-slavery services that he had formed many years earlier; William Lloyd Garrison commented on the aid and inspiration he had always received from O’Connell; and Wendell Phillips noted how the Irishman’s actions as an agitator had influenced the abolitionists’ own concept of moral reform. Parallel celebrations in Dublin also mentioned this aspect of O’Connell’s career, but perhaps it is fitting that his anti-slavery commitment should receive greatest stress in Boston, which was not only an important Irish-American centre, but also the city with the closest links with British anti-slavery.

The dominance of successive earls of Kildare in Anglo-Irish politics between 1470 and 1534 has prompted historians to label the period that of ‘the Kildare ascendancy’. This term denotes more than just the years in which the earls were in office; it includes assumptions about government policy, and the king’s relations with his Anglo-Irish magnates. From the later fourteenth century, the crown had normally maintained a deputy in Ireland directly from its English resources; and from his salary the deputy agreed to provide a retinue for the defence of the lordship. The scale of subvention and size of the retinue declined progressively, however, and the Irish revenues were too small to support a deputy lacking a substantial landed interest there: the king therefore sacrificed a degree of political control for financial economy and after 1478 relied almost exclusively on the local power of Kildare.

During the Irish war for independence from 1916 to 1921, there were three important groups involved on the Irish side against Britain. These were Sinn Féin, the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) and the I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood).

Sinn Féin became in 1917 the political arm of the republicar movement for an independent Ireland. In the December 1918 general, election, Sinn Féin candidates won seventy-three of the 103 Irish constituencies and formed Dáil Eireann in January 1919. The dáil stood apart from the military side of the national struggle until March 1921, when it accepted responsibility for the activities of the I.R.A.

One of the most important influences on Irish life during the past century and a half has been the Roman Catholic church. This is true not only in Ireland, but also in Irish emigrant communities. What I hope to demonstrate is that the emergence of the catholic church in Lancashire as a primary social institution. which fostered the growth of a community identity, gave the immigrant Irish a valuable sense of constancy and continuity and paralleled developments in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. But the church’s influence, which was scarcely diminished, and was perhaps strengthened, by the experience of emigration, must have been founded on a very sound base to be in a position to assume such a dynamic role among the Irish in Ireland and the Irish living elsewhere.

The regulation and taxation of Irish trade under the Tudors have strong but neglected claims on the attention of the Irish historian. Their obvious relevance to the economic activities of the country and, in particular, its seaborne trade will only incidentally be discussed here. Dr Longfield’s pioneer account of Anglo-Irish trade has at length been followed up by more systematic explorations of her chief sources, the English and Welsh port books and customs accounts, and a definitive treatment of this sector is surely not far distant. Even here, however, where an enviable amount of solid information is available—despite their incompleteness and familiar problems of interpreting the port books—no one seems to have asked why Irish historians have to use non-Irish sources.

The publication of the first volume of A new history of Ireland to be issued from the press (volume iii of a set of nine volumes) is an event of the utmost significance in Irish historiography. It is the first-fruit of an ambitious proposal originally given an airing by Professor T. W. Moody in his presidential address to the Irish Historical Society in December 1962 and since pursued by him, through protracted discussions and negotiations, with rare tenacity, skill and devotion. In a longer perspective it is the culmination of forty years of sustained historical endeavour, which in its beginnings saw the foundation in 1936 of the Ulster Society for lrish Historical Studies and of the Irish Historical Society, and the first publication in 1938 of Irish Historical Studies, the journal sponsored by both societies, of which Professor Moody has since been joint editor.

Henry Edward Duke, 1st Lord Merrivale, is one of the forgotten men of Anglo-Irish relations. Duke’s chief secretaryship of Ireland has been eclipsed by that of his tragic predecessor, Augustine Birrell; and he has generally been regarded as a mere caretaker, a stop-gap chief secretary, who, in the words of The Times obituarist, showed neither ‘imagination’ nor ‘breadth of view’, and had ‘no appreciation of the Irish psychology’. If he is remembered at all, it is for his lapsus linguae at the opening of the Irish convention on 25 July 1917 when he declared, to an astonished audience, ‘Gentlemen, one thing I have learned in the course of my experience, never despair of the republic’.

The G.A.A. was founded as a consequence of an article, ‘A word about Irish athletics’, that appeared in United Ireland on 11 October 1884. The writer, almost certainly Michael Cusack, a Dublin teacher, bewailed the fact that traditional Irish games had been abandoned because of English rule : ‘the hated and hitherto dominant race drove the Irish people from their trysting places at the cross-roads and hurling-fields back to their cabins’; the Irish had become effete, pursuing fripperies and fashion, or, if they still practised athletics, did so under the control of an alien English Amateur Athletic Association where the main objective was to degrade the Irish by forcing them to compete in, and be defeated at, sports unfamiliar to them. The remedy was for ‘the Irish people to take the management of their games into their own hands’.

As a step towards a fuller understanding of the food situation in Ireland on the eve of and during the great famine it is necessary to analyse the exports and imports of grain and grain products in those years.

There are a number of major obstacles to doing this. To begin with the available statistics on the Irish grain trade are neither orderly nor complete. The most extensive of the relevant series covers each calendar year during the period 1839–48. Monthly figures are available only for the year 1846 and apply to exports only. Other official returns refer to isolated periods of varying length.

Irish newspapers are a valuable source of information for studies of the development of textile industries and their impact on the growth of towns and villages during the first half of the eighteenth century. A search has revealed two advertisements relating to the village of Dunmanway, situated in an isolated location near the source of the River Bandon in County Cork, which in the mid-eighteenth century was an important centre of textile manufacturing. Contemporary descriptions of Dunmanway include the reports of inspectors to the Linen Board, correspondence between Sir Richard Cox, the village landowner, and Thomas Prior, a founder member of the Dublin Society and an essay by Prior which described the characteristics of the Irish linen industry.

If there is a top civil service adviser to the British government on imperial affairs in the early twentieth century whose influence was such that his biography is long overdue, it is Lionel Curtis. And in the context of recent Irish history, if there is a person whose role in shaping the British conception of the 1921 Anglo-Irish settlement has yet to be fully appreciated or analysed, it is again Lionel Curtis. Lord Longford’s references to Curtis in Peace by ordeal give some indication of the influence his ideas had on British cabinet ministers before and during the treaty negotiations in the summer and autumn of 1921. But a much fuller and more systematic survey of Curtis’s association with Ireland over a broader period is needed to measure this extraordinary man’s imprint on Anglo-Irish relations.

This selected document was forwarded to Sir William Cecil in March 1571, but it was probably composed some years previously, and almost certainly before the Irish parliament of 1569–71 had assembled. It is transcribed from a copy, bearing the name of Secretary Thomas Wilson, which survives among the State Papers, Ireland in the Public Record Office, London (S.P 63, vol. 31, no. 32, ff 73–117). The piece is considered worthy of presentation because it is the most comprehensive analysis of the social and political condition of sixteenth century Ireland made by an Irish-born contemporary; because it indicates how the author’s perception of the world differed from that of the majority of Englishmen who commented on Ireland; and because it can be established that White’s opinions were shared by other articulate people within the Pale. The document, which is disposed of in nine lines in the Calendar of state papers Ireland, 1509–73, also serves to illustrate how grossly inadequate is that series for the sixteenth century.