In the general descriptions of Ireland written in Elizabethan and early Stuart times there are constant, although casual, references to the woodlands, Moryson, Perrott, Bagenal, Speede and Boate all allude to areas which were wooded or carried woody scrub on bog. Their descriptions are too general to be of use in assessing the probable extent of the woodland that remained at the end of the sixteenth-century, but they are pointers to the distribution. The same is true of contemporary maps although they are rather more helpful in that, in spite of their distortion of distance and configuration, they may indicate the position of a wood relative to physical features such as hills, rivers or bays.

One of the criticisms most frequently made of O’Connell’s conduct of his agitation for repeal of the union has always been that he failed to build up a parliamentary party that would be a credit to his cause. The accusation comes in its harshest form, naturally enough, from his political opponents at the time. A whig journalist, for instance, writing in 1843, described O’Connell’s followers in these terms:

Cringed to his face, consulted, and revered
His oracles—detested him—and feared.

And it was either a whig or a tory journalist who invented for O’Connell’s party the wounding nickname of ‘O’Connell’s tail’, with its implication that the members of the party were without wills of their own, completely subservient to their leader’s commands. But it was not from whigs and tories alone that criticism came: earnest repealers themselves complained that their party was damaging the cause they had at heart.