From the autumn of 1918 until late in 1919 home rule was dead as a practical issue in British politics, and the government concerned itself with the administration in Ireland and the means by which republican violence might be stamped out. During the spring and summer of 1918 Lloyd George had attempted to follow what he called the ‘dual policy’ — home rule in return for military compulsion — and a cabinet committee, under the chairmanship of Walter Long, had drafted a home-rule bill which, in view of the deteriorating situation in Ireland, the cabinet had refused to take up. This bill had foreshadowed the basic outlines of the settlement which was to be embodied in the Government of Ireland Act more than two years later Despite the considerable historical attention given to Anglo-Irish affairs in the period 1918-22 comparatively little attention has been paid to the making of the Government of Ireland Act, though it was this piece of legislation which laid the basis for partition. The act is something of an historical aberration in that its application within nationalist Ireland was superseded within less than a year of reaching the statute book, for the treaty of 6 December 1921 effectively repealed it by granting full dominion status.

The singularity of the apparent clash of church and state in 1951 and its easy resolution in 1953 should alert us to the dangers of accepting the perception of events as the reality This paper attempts to explain the complexity of factors that gave rise to the appearance of conflict. The evolution of health policy, the relationship of de Valera and Archbishop McQuaid, the intricate politicking of the first inter-party government, the role of the Knights of St Columbanus, the lobbying of the Private Practitioners’ Group of the Irish Medical Association and the medical profession’s influence with the catholic church and the Irish government — these are some of the factors entangled in the controversy The crisis of 1951, however, provides the touchstone by which one can judge the relevance of any record, and the reader should bear; in mind that the confusion of influences covered here relates ultimately to the illusion of conflict. We must go back to the seminal period, the Emergency — the period of the Second World War — to begin to unravel perception from reality

The travail of the mountains has finally ended with the publication of the long-awaited second volume of A new history of Ireland, almost two decades after its inception. By a curious coincidence Clarendon has simultaneously published the second volume of the History of Wales (R.R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change: Wales, 1063-1415). A comparison is therefore not only inevitable, it is revealing. The Welsh volume is carefully integrated and closely written, whereas its Irish counterpart lumbers along camel-like with sometimes distressingly little co-ordination: where Davies contains his narrative within a tight conceptual framework, the latter is constructed on a traditional narrative scheme that consumes half of the text. The difference is due in part to the probably insurmountable difficulty of integrating the labours of nineteen contributors, but part of the problem arises from the rigidity of the scheme into which their labours are compressed.

The recent accession to the Vatican Archives of registers of the Sacred Penitentiary, a category of business which remained closed when the general records of the papacy were opened to scholarly research at large in 1881, is an important development. It has especially exciting implications for late medieval Irish history The availability of the Penitentiary material will greatly facilitate an undertaking which is of prime importance but for which the sources are otherwise scanty the study of religious sentiment in Ireland in the period from about the second decade of the fifteenth century, when these registers begin, to the Reformation. This is an aspect of ecclesiastical history to which the legalistic and contentious documents of the beneficiary deposits, the principal point of contact between Ireland and the papacy in the middle ages — though immensely valuable in their own right — do not readily lend themselves.

Shortly before Michaelmas, 1587, when he was not yet fifteen years old, Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill along with four companions went on board a vessel moored opposite Rathmullen in Lough Swilly, enticed mainly by the promise of wine. But the crew under one Nicholas Skipper of Dublin were decoys posing as merchants who, on instructions from Lord Deputy Sir John Perrot, brought the youths in captivity to Dublin. Aodh Ruadh and three of his companions were then lodged in prison in Dublin Castle. A first attempt at escape was made a little over three years later in January 1591 ending with O’Donnell’s prompt recapture, an event said to have caused widespread gloom among the Irish. But a second attempt a year later was successful. Aodh Ruadh returned to Ulster and, following a brief period of recuperation, was installed in the lordship of Tirconnell in the summer of 1592, in succession to his father who resigned in his favour A celebrated career ensued which was cut short by the defeat at Kinsale and his subsequent premature death at Simancas in September 1602.

As reactions to yet another initiative on Northern Ireland underlined the durability of traditional perspectives on both sides of the border, it was understandable that there should have been some nostalgic re-examination in the Irish media of the might-have-been of Gladstone’s first home rule initiative of a hundred years ago. Centenaries increasingly stimulate historians and publishers into action also, but the two major new studies of the home-rule ‘episode’ from Gill and Macmillan take a pessimistic, even jaundiced view of the 1886 scheme as unworkable, and incapable of satisfying Irish nationalists, much less unionists. Despite its precipitation of a major political realignment in British politics and its confirmation of Irish political polarisation, the crisis of 1885-6 has received relatively little attention from historians. In Britain, the only major study since Hammond’s romantic Gladstone and the Irish nation has been the decidedly anti-romantic and detailed dissection of the web of party intrigue and political calculation and infighting involved in Cooke and Vincent’s The governing passion.