The story of late Tudor Ireland is, in part, a story of language. The political and military developments that brought New English and native Irish into a closer and increasingly violent proximity also brought two languages into confrontation. The issue of language difference became caught up in the wider conflict: the Irish language joined glibs, brehons and pastoral nomadism as yet another element in the Elizabethans’ dystopic assessment of Gaelic Ireland; in turn, the promotion of English — and the linguistic colonisation which that entailed — assumed its place in their agenda of conquest. Leaving aside larger questions of policy and ideology, language itself — and the experience of language difference — was part of the texture of that encounter. Yet the question of precisely how exchanges across the language frontier were managed has been largely ignored. The misunderstandings between Elizabethan newcomers and the Gaelic Irish were, at their simplest level, literal.

Chronic rural disturbances have featured prominently in the modern history of Ireland. In particular, the period from the 1760s to the 1830s witnessed frequent and widespread disturbances, ranging over several counties and lasting for years. The disturbers — contemporaries sometimes called them ‘Whiteboys’ — were often sworn into secret societies which operated at night under the command of a mythical leader, known variously as Captain Right, Captain Steel or Captain Rock. Historical scholarship has shed light on many of these disturbances. However, the Rockites in the south of Ireland in the early 1820s remain somewhat mysterious. Although this was the only instance of rural unrest in Munster in the early 1820s, the Rockite movement nonetheless constituted one of the most extensive and serious rural disturbances in Ireland before the Famine. Five regiments of troops were dispatched from Britain, ‘for the purpose of putting down actual, & most formidable Danger in Ireland’, as the home secretary admitted. The Insurrection Act, with its curfew at night and trial without jury, was introduced into eight counties, and in its first year the act brought to trial more than 1,500 men in Munster, of whom more than 200 were convicted and transported. In County Cork, where the movement was at its most formidable, open engagements between thousands of the Rockites and the military occurred in several places, while incendiarism prevailed to an extent unprecedented in the history of Irish agrarian disturbances. The special commissions appointed in February 1822, specifically to try Rockites in the county, convicted thirty-six men of capital crimes.

Between 1840 and 1914 approximately a third of a million people left Ireland for Australasia. Of this total, New Zealand received a comparatively meagre amount. For instance, when the Irish peaked in sheer numbers in New Zealand in 1886, they supplied just 51,408 of the country’s total population of half a million. Despite such low numbers in comparison with those arriving in other destinations in the Irish diaspora, investigation of the Irish in New Zealand has flourished during the last decade or so. This recent historiography, however, lacks the sustained intensity and depth of work exemplified in other regions of settlement in the diaspora from Ireland. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made in central issues such as the critical importance of kin and neighbourhood networks in the processes of relocation and adaptation from Ireland to New Zealand.

This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has been a focus of concern for feminist historians in particular, and recent work has clearly demonstrated the salience of questions of gender and sexuality for the politics of the Saorstát. This article is directed at these same concerns, elaborating on a series of proposals to regulate prostitution in the Free State in the mid-1920s. But when discussing prostitution or sex work, the word ‘regulation’ can be used in a quite specific sense, ‘regulationism’ referring to the argument that the state should control venereal disease by registering prostituted women, inspecting them for signs of communicable venereal disease, and incarcerating the contagious in order to protect the health of both nation and state. The history of ‘regulationist’ policies in Europe and beyond allows a point of comparison by which we may understand the specifics of Ireland’s situation in the post-revolutionary era. The history of regulationism, in this technical sense, is a particularly useful context, not least because such policies amply acknowledge ‘the enduring power of the state as the author and executor of regulation’. Particularly important, in ways that suggest a direct parallel to the Irish experience in the early twentieth century, is the coextensive experience of state formation and the regulation of sex work, the most notable example being that of modern Italy.