Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth-holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional spread, and compare them with their British counterparts. We also discuss the share of Catholics and Quakers

Similar to the proverbial bus, one waits decades for modern, full-length studies of either Richard Whately or Daniel Murray, among the most neglected figures of nineteenth-century Ireland, and two come along together. In Whately’s case, Donald Akenson’s 1981 biography was for four decades the most recent full-length study. The considerably greater neglect shown towards Murray is reflected by the fact

Historians of early modern Ireland are always looking for new angles, new perspectives, often with the aim of getting as far away as possible from political and constitutional history, from the State Papers Ireland series in the National Archives (Kew), and from other ‘official’, ‘mainstream’ archival sources. This new collection, by a cross-section of American and Irish historians, looks to social

From the outset, this work appears to be a standard biography of a person of historical significance – namely, Fr John Spratt (1796–1871), a Carmelite priest born in the heart of Dublin, who ministered nearly all of his life in his native city. Yet, Fergus D’Arcy’s study serves as a comprehensive exploration of numerous social, political and religious changes in Dublin from the early nineteenth century

In Strangling Angel, Michael Dwyer chronicles a nation’s crusade against a disease which might best be described as the embodiment of a parent’s nightmare. The moniker that lends this book its title refers to diphtheria, an infection characterised by the growth of a ‘leathery membrane in the lower airways’, often resulting in death by suffocation (p. 2). In Ireland, this menace loomed large and was

Edmund Borlase, author of The Reduction of Ireland to the Crown of England (1675), claimed that Richard Boyle’s death was caused by the conclusion of the first cessation of arms in September 1643 during the wars of the Three Kingdoms. Both Charles I and the Confederate Catholics of Ireland agreed to a one-year ceasefire between the Irish Catholic ‘rebel’ and royalist forces in Ireland, much to the

Andrew Holmes’ first book, The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice (2006), significantly advanced our understanding of the social history of one of Ireland’s leading religious groups. As the title suggests, Dr Holmes’ eagerly anticipated second book focuses more on the intellectual history of Presbyterianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this era, Irish Presbyterians

Children have always been one of the most vulnerable groups within society at times of food shortage and famine. In June 2017, the children’s charity UNICEF USA reported that famine endangered 2.5 million children and adolescents in Africa and the Middle East (https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/famine-threatens-25-million-children-africa-and-middle-east/32005; accessed 10 June 2019). During that same

This Four Courts volume has its origins in a 2015 conference, co-organised by the Group for the Study of Irish Historic Settlement and the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, on the topic of ‘Church and settlement in Ireland: landscape, life and legacy’. One of the papers from that conference, by Kevin Whelan, was developed into a monograph, which appeared in 2018 from the same publisher as

Patrick O’Farrell’s 1986 book The Irish in Australia casts a long shadow on the study of the Irish in Australia. The first academic book to grapple with the long and complex histories of the Irish who first came to the Australian colonies in 1791, it provided scholars with a strong starting point, particularly with regard to the Catholic Church in Australia. However, O’Farrell’s work was problematic

The latest volume in the Maynooth Research Guides for Irish Local History series is a very welcome exploration of the records of the Valuation Office. Written by a former director of the National Archives of Ireland – who has clearly immersed herself in the subject – this is a substantial volume that draws attention to the richness and diversity of the surviving documentation in a way that has never

By comparison with the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Carmelites and the Benedictines, the Jesuits might be characterised as relative latecomers to the Irish historical stage. The first Jesuit mission to Ireland was undertaken by two members of the Society in 1542, less than a decade after Ignatius Loyola penned his influential Spiritual Exercises and two year after Pope Paul III

In this accomplished, innovative and extensively researched monograph, Ann Power charts the ‘struggles, hardship, courage, resourcefulness, tenacity and contribution’ of one of the less well-known congregations of Irish sisters, the Sisters of St Brigid, or the Brigidines, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 18). The book, which is largely transnational in character, surveys the

With the publication of numerous online genealogical databases replete with sources dating from the nineteenth century to the present, research on family history has become more accessible and addictive. Who has successfully resisted the urge to search for family surnames mentioned in the National Archives of Ireland’s online censuses, or the records of births, marriages and deaths on irishgenealogy

The career of Timothy Aloysius Smiddy (1875–1962) spanned the first three decades of Irish independence. Smiddy in 1897 abandoned study for the priesthood in order to study economics at Cologne (p. 22). He subsequently enjoyed a long, varied and influential career employed in academia (for fifteen years) followed by over two decades within public service. Furthermore, this academic and public service

Sparky Booker is to be warmly praised for writing such an impressive book on the English and Irish communities of the ‘four obedient shires’ of the Pale in the later Middle Ages. It has been a controversial subject. Steven Ellis, in particular, has emphasised the English character of its society and politics and argued that the Pale was an integral part of the English state. He has claimed that in

1. Officers of the Society for 2019 were: James Kelly (president); Ella Kavanagh (treasurer); Rebecca Stuart (secretary); Chris Colvin (web editor); Deirdre Foley (social media officer); Catherine Cox and Graham Brownlow (journal editors); Jonathan Wright (book reviews); Juliana Adelman, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Eoin McLaughlin and Matthew Stout (committee members); and Catherine Cox (representative on the

As a new wave of British settlers moved into Ulster following the plantation there in the early seventeenth century, ports, towns, markets and fairs were both established and further developed. The survival of the port books for Londonderry, Coleraine, Carrickfergus and the Lecale ports of County Down for the years 1612–15 offers detailed information of goods imported into Ulster which affords us insights

What was more important to consumers in seventeenth-century Ireland: the fashion or the function of their silver? This article disentangles the multiple and complex motivations informing the robust acquisition and consumption by individuals and institutions of a wide-ranging assortment of silverwares. Using the body of extant plate and a large array of documentary sources, this article poses and addresses

St Joseph’s Asylum for Aged and Virtuous Females catered for Catholic aged, single women from 1836 to 1993, with the focus of this article on the period 1836–1922. Founded prior to the 1838 advent ...

This article traces the educational mission of three Catholic convent boarding schools from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s, highlighting striking similarities in Catholic female education across different temporal and geographical contexts. Using institutional records, community annals and student roll books, this article considers how the priorities and structure of female education can

This article serves as an introduction to a special issue of Irish Economic and Social History (Volume 47) that illuminates the diversity of childhoods experienced by children growing up in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora between the mid sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The article explores the development of the history of children and childhood in Ireland as a growing area of academic

In the 1850s, tens of thousands of children were imprisoned in Ireland. At that time there was a growing concern internationally that incarceration of children with adult criminals was inappropriate. This concern resulted in the passage of legislation in 1858 which facilitated the opening of reformatory schools in Ireland. By 1870, ten reformatories had opened, yet, as this article argues, three quarters

The Gaelic League of London (GLL) was founded in 1896 and by the early 1900s had about 2,000 members engaged in language learning and cultural activities. This article describes how the GLL reached out to children, believing that while the parents might be beyond ‘redemption’, the children offered new hope for the future of the Irish language. The article also examines the themes and tropes which underpinned

Wet-nursing and fosterage were widely used in early modern Ireland. Despite the difficulties of reconstructing practices surrounding the nourishment and care of infants and young children, the limited surviving sources provide some evidence for the practical arrangements involved, the role of these practices in extending families and creating long-lasting ties of ‘fictive kinship’, the emotional and

This research note updates Cormac O Grada’s (1996) critical review of the literature on the connection between the stature of the Irish, on the one hand, and their health and living standards, on t...

The identification of the involvement of young boys in cleaning chimneys as a social problem in the late eighteenth century, and its effectual elimination in the second half of the nineteenth, provides a yardstick against which one can measure changing attitudes to child labour during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The involvement of children as young as five in this trade and the injuries

teeming and importunate mass of poverty. The attempt to relieve poverty while controlling begging took different forms. Individual giving is, as McCabe rightly points out, impossible to trace – let alone calculate. But it was an essential part of life in both country and town, though possibly less so in the latter than in the former, where the giving of a handful of potatoes to the wandering beggar

more of their work. Seán Ó Gadhra’s 1697 poem, ‘Staid nua na hÉireann’, refers to a number of new taxes from the victorious Protestant elite including a mythical cı́os sróna (nose tax) and cı́os tóna (arse tax). D’Arcy and Nistotskaya convincingly conclude that while capacity to tax can be built, creating compliance and trust of state authority takes much, much longer. This excellent collection provides

discussion, and deservedly so. It is not the final word. There are too many loose ends – the role of religion and law, for example, are little discussed and the organisation of the economy rather than its structure needs further consideration. The models from which some of the ideas are derived need much refinement. Recovering the history of the silent is a complex business and one size (or model)

access to a library. On the basis of financing and constitutions, Manley distinguishes sharply between groups run by and catering to the ‘working class’ and those patronised by the ‘middle class’. How discrete these categories were in Ireland before 1825 may be questioned. Such a rigid division makes it hard to see where exactly apprentices, skilled artisans, ‘mechanics’ and aspirants to higher status

In July 1968, the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the ban on artificial contraception for Catholics. Utilising Dublin as a case study, this article explores how the Irish medical and social work community, their patients and the Catholic hierarchy responded to Humanae Vitae. Drawing on a range of medical and diocesan sources, as well as diverse material from the news media, this article illuminates

Padraic Kenney, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, ix þ 330 pp., €24 hardback) Ian Miller, A History of Force Feeding: Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics 1909-1974 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, ix þ 267 pp., Open Access, Ebook) Ian O’Donnell, Justice, Mercy and Caprice: Clemency and the Death Penalty in Ireland (Oxford:

Using primary archival material, this article explores the role of students and universities in the campaign for gay rights in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. At a time when few organisations in Ireland involved themselves in the campaign for gay rights, student bodies facilitated the promotion of gay rights, interaction between gay rights organisations and students and challenged the legal and societal

Infanticide reached record levels in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the rising population and increasing poverty provided the essential precondition for this, the sharp rise in the practice identified by contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s might not have taken place had the Dublin and Cork Foundling Hospitals continued to assume responsibility for the care of foundling children.

Covering the 1924 Tailteann Games, a 2-week sporting and cultural celebration held in the Irish Free State, the following article explores the broader sociocultural significance of the Tailteann’s opening ceremony. Said to be the restoration of an ancient Irish festival, the Tailteann Games were envisioned as an Irish ‘race Olympiad’ open to those born in Ireland and those of Irish descent. Welcoming

The Dublin Mechanics’ Institute (1824–1919), like others of its kind, was established with the declared purpose of providing technical education to the city’s working classes. While its educational objectives were at best partially achieved, the Institute made a significant contribution to the development of Dublin’s public sphere. Especially after 1848, when the Institute acquired the building that

Belief in the benefits of industrial protection had long been a cornerstone of nationalist ideology. Cumann na nGaedheal followed a policy of selective protection while Fianna Fáil was ideologically committed not just to import-substituting industrialisation but to as high a degree of self-sufficiency as possible. The Departments of Finance and Industry and Commerce differed sharply on the costs and

in its breath and range of perspectives from a broad array of scholars. In conclusion, this book is a welcome addition to our understandings of both France and Ireland in the period between 1798 and 1916, and Joannon and Whelan are to be congratulated for producing such a diverse and interesting collection of essays. As they note in the conclusion, the Franco-Irish relationship is more important than

motivations are used to explain Unionist identity (e.g. p. 157). For example, the statement that ‘Until he [the Northern Irish Unionist] comes to accept the traditions of the majority of the nation, we must be prepared to allow him to have his “Twelfth” walk, even in a United Ireland’ (p. 163) would not be one to win over the hearts and minds of even the most moderate Unionist. Likewise, his comments

Much has been written on the history of the railways and other transport forms in Ireland, from technological, economic, social and labour history viewpoints. However, the history of another important nineteenth-century transport form, the hackney carriage, remains neglected. In this article, it will be argued, using the hackney carriage business in Cork as a case study, that the hackney carriage was

Lodging and boarding were well-established housing options which played an important economic and social role in early twentieth-century cities, yet there has been little academic study of the phenomenon in an Irish context. For many people arriving to Dublin in search of work, as well as for adults who were not in a position to establish a separate household, lodging was an important accommodation

During the 1770s, Arthur Young dismissed demesne farming as a source of income for Irish landlords, and instead he observed how such farms were geared towards supplying domestic requirements. This article provides a more nuanced consideration of demesne farming during the first half of the eighteenth century through a case study of the example belonging to the Tipperary estate of Daniel Ryan of Inch

Over the past forty years, the historiography of British Army ex-serviceman in Ireland has undergone a veritable ‘historical revolution’. Like its British and international counterparts, the historiography on Ireland has focused on the lives and care of these men after the war within the Irish Free State; Irish government policy towards them; and ex-servicemen’s relationships with the Irish and British

Mary E. Daly’s analysis within Sixties Ireland is a useful corrective to simplistic and selfcongratulatory narratives concerning the place of the ‘long 1960s’ within modern Irish social and economic history. Daly’s interesting discussion covers the period between the First Programme for Economic Expansion (as well as membership of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) in 1957 and Ireland’s

Scholars have made considerable progress in recent years in researching the history of sport in Ireland, yet there are still important areas that have not received scholarly attention. One of these is the topic of sport during the Great Famine. A close perusal of contemporary newspapers reveals that large numbers of Irish people, from all social groups, continued to enjoy sports, either as participants

The introduction of the workhouse-centred Poor Law system into Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine transformed the provision of poor assistance in the country. Throughout various urban centres, the plethora of charitable societies that had been prominent in the provision of corporate assistance to the poor faced an increasingly uncertain future, fearing that the levying of compulsory poor rates

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period

organisation of a whole slew of competitions and cups’ (p. 207). This book has shown how soccer players and organisers in Munster refused to accept the notion that being Irish meant distancing oneself from anything that had British connections, and has added greatly to the view that challenges the idea, so prevalent in some recent publications of the GAA’s history, that only one organisation adequately

contemporaries who became or were by instinct, primarily parliamentarians. His social radicalism here is cast in opposition to Parnell and others, but particularly to the conservative Catholic nationalism of Tim Healy who remains a counterpoint to Davitt. The sense to which Davitt represented a font of alternative possibilities remains a motif throughout the book. King suggests he was more aware of

liberty’ (p. 22). Elsewhere throughout the biography, Stubbs manages to recreate the look and feel of eighteenth-century London and Dublin as well as the political and social aspects of Swift’s life. The courts of William and Mary and Queen Anne as well as the deep seeded partisanship of the Tories and Whigs are vividly and accurately described. Stubbs conjures the political leanings of Swift who,

the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum), there was a continuing intent of removing the social stigma attached to the asylums regarding the ‘criminalisation of the mentally ill’ (p. 170). The final chapter, ‘Inside the asylums’, sees the progression of moral management therapies adjust to the influence of medical practice and how such a development impacted everyday procedure. This is done by situating

that accompanied the staging of the Synod of Kells: 3,000 clerics, their attendant clerics and servants required accommodation for at least 9,000 people, at least 9,000 meals and 18,000 collations every day. He calculates a total of 261,000 meals and ponders the incalculable costs of looking after the participant’s horses, paying scribes and providing the necessities for innumerable church services

development in the treatises themselves ‘in the face of royal indifference’ – not only did they become more nuanced, and engaged in factional disputes, but more importantly they began to recommend ‘particular reformation’ to entice a reluctant king to engage in the ‘reduction’ of Ireland piecemeal, at the least. The Kildare rebellion forced Henry VIII into ‘engagement’ with Ireland but not necessarily

encounter the irascible John Milner, the sinuous Robert Stewart, the suave Ercole Consalvi, the patient William Poynter, the naive Giovanni Battista Quarantotti, the ageing figure of John Thomas Troy, the hectoring presence of Daniel O’Connell and a host of others, familiar (Henry Grattan, William Conyngham-Plunkett, Henry Grattan and Patrick Curtis) and unfamiliar (John Coxe-Hippisley, Charles Butler

Tax assessments provide unique information about the individual and relative wealth of early modern individuals and communities, but few such sources exist for early modern Ireland, so the survival of a tax assessment for the most prosperous inhabitants of Clonmel in 1642 is a unique source for the study of the town’s economic community in that year. An analysis of the tax paid by these men and women

This article surveys independent Ireland’s economic policies and performance. It has three main messages. First, the economic history of post-independence Ireland was not particularly unusual. Very often, things that were happening in Ireland were happening elsewhere as well. Second, for a long time, we were hampered by an excessive dependence on a poorly performing UK economy. And third, EC membership

Hercules Street and Hercules Place were two of Belfast’s oldest streets and, by the mid-nineteenth century, they were in the town centre. These streets always had a large concentration of butchers (a cluster). This cluster was broken up in 1880 when the area was cleared to create a new, modern street and did not reform. The clearance was to improve traffic flow but also for reasons of civic pride;

The new Irish export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI) regime of the 1950s was an inter-party government initiative that facilitated the later Whitaker and Lemass–led dismantling of protectionist trade barriers. The potential opposition of protectionist-era industry to the new FDI regime was defused by confining the new tax relief to profits derived solely from exports, by allocating new industrial

The Irish cooperative movement in the dairy industry was driven from above, first by the philanthropic Irish Agricultural Organisation Society and then by the Irish Free State. Although the early cooperative movement has been linked with constructive unionism, this article highlights important continuities in the approach taken to cooperative creameries by the Irish Free State government in the 1920s