This paper is concerned with the teaching of Irish history in Great Britain, with the students, the teachers and their subject. Each merits a brief mention before any detailed discussion, in order to draw attention to the problems that exist, and to clear up any misunderstanding or ignorance about the task that is to be performed.

In the great controversy between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution, Paine made at least one telling remark in his refutation of Burke’s defence of tradition and usage: he declared that an hereditary monarch was about as sensible as an hereditary mathematician. An hereditary Irish studies student in Great Britain makes about as much sense as both. Much nonsense is talked about the inherited genes of the Irish in Britain, on the assumption that (somehow) an interest in, and ability to comprehend, Irish studies can be transmitted from one generation of Irish immigrants to another. This may be the case; but if it is, it probably takes its rise from social rather than hereditary factors; and it is no more likely to produce an intelligent, perceptive student of Ireland than of France.

It has long become commonplace to observe that the act of union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament and established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, has since its enactment exerted a formative influence on Irish history and remained the dominant issue in Anglo-Irish relations. In view of this, it is surprising that so little notice has been afforded the development of unionist sentiment in Britain and Ireland in the century and a half to 1800, and that the origins of and background to the union have received such cursory attention. There is, of course, an obvious historical and historiographical reason for this. Generations of Irish nationalists, and all too frequently their historians, have perceived the union as a malign termination of the constitutional arrangement known grandly but misleadingly as Grattan’s parliament and, consequently, have been little interested in investigating or understanding its origins.

The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial increase in the pace and scale of Irish emigration to Britain, a process which culminated in the massive Irish pauper influx of 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish famine. During this period the Irish-born population of England, Scotland and Wales rose from 415,000 in 1841 to 727,000 in 1851, reaching 805,000 in 1861, when it comprised 3.5 per cent of the population. Thereafter, the number of Irish-born declined to 653,000 in 1891, reviving only in the twentieth century. These figures do not, however, include the children of Irish immigrants born in Britain; thus the actual size of ethnic Irish communities was undoubtedly much higher than contemporary census returns suggest. Indeed, a survey of the Irish in Britain conducted in 1872 by the Nation, a Dublin weekly newspaper, argued that the number of Irish-born indicated in official statistics should be doubled in order to arrive at a more realistic enumeration of the ethnic Irish community in Britain.

Nineteenth-century contested elections were by no means sedate affairs. Dickens’s ‘Eatanswill’, with its mob violence, voters being bribed, locked up, rendered insensible and thrown into canals, found echoes in real events. Bribery, violence, shouting, fighting and horse-play were ‘relatively minor’ features but certainly present in the election at Warwick in 1868 for example. The Victorian system introduced to Ireland could be an explosive mixture indeed. About a fifth of Dr Theodore Hoppen’s recent major work, Elections, politics and society in Ireland, 1832–1885, is devoted to violence including a section specifically on electoral violence. Corruption was also common, and petitions to parliament objecting to the conduct of individual elections and demanding a fresh ballot were not infrequent.

Historical comment upon the years between the death of Parnell and the outbreak of the First World War ranges widely. The historian’s vision focusses on conflict and change — nationalism, unionism, home rule, urban disruption, rural disorder, land reform and incessant social debate. This paper looks at one series of arguments partially obscured amidst the turmoil of those years. For rural-dwellers, state and private institutional intervention into the rural economy during this period radically affected power-relations and work-relations within their community. The attempts to reform the poultry industry provides one example of these changes.

Rearing poultry for sale rather than for household consumption was one of the most important occupations of the farm woman. Indeed, despite the impassioned debates and controversial decisions concerning the poultry industry from the 1890s, one thing was agreed: for better or (more commonly) for worse, the poultry industry was dominated by women.