The necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.

It is now almost impossible to reflect upon the historical reputations of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins without considering the recent war in Northern Ireland (c. 1969–97) and the challenges to Irish identities it has induced. In the Republic this is evident in the movement away from irredentist nationalism toward official recognition of partition, following a constitutional referendum in 1998. Against a similarly barometric historiography, de Valera and Collins's historical representations have transformed. De Valera, it is clear, long since fell from favour among mainstream nationalists.

To what extent has the recent war in Northern Ireland influenced Irish historiography? Examining the nomenclature, periodization, and the use of democracy and state legitimization as interpretative tools in the historicization of the Irish Civil War (1922–3), the influence of a southern nationalist ideology is apparent. A dominating southern nationalist interest represented the revolutionary political elite's realpolitik after 1920, though its pan-nationalist rhetoric obscured this. Ignoring southern nationalism as a cogent influence has led to the misrepresentation of nationalism as ethnically homogeneous in twentieth-century Ireland. Once this is identified, historiographical and methodological problems are illuminated, which may be demonstrated in historians' work on the revolutionary period (c. 1912–23). Following the northern crisis's emergence in the late 1960s, the Republic's Irish governments required a revised public history that could reconcile the state's violent and revolutionary origins with its counterinsurgency against militarist-republicanism. At the same time many historians adopted constitutional, later democratic, state formation narratives for the south at the expense of historical precision. This facilitated a broader state-centred and statist historiography, mirroring the Republic's desire to re-orientate its nationalism away from irredentism, toward the conscious accommodation of partition. Reconciliation of southern nationalist identities with its state represents a singular political achievement, as well as a concomitant historiographical problem.

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party.

The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.