It must have seemed a God-given set of circumstances: in Ireland after the Williamite war many areas of depopulated and unproductive countryside; in Europe several hundred thousand displaced persons ready to migrate with their families, their small means and considerable skills. And to fit the two together were three key people: the begetter of ‘Le … Read more
Collaboration usually implies betrayal, or deviation from some sanctified cause. Viewed from the opposite perspective, it is an ingenious, even admirable recipe for survival. This article considers the role of one magnate in Irish colonial society in the sixteenth century. It suggests a set of options in the face of the process of conquest … Read more
During the later middle ages the Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland and Scotland witnessed a revival in influence. In Ireland, the decline of Anglo-Norman power in the mid-fourteenth century facilitated a partial indigenous ‘reconquest’, whilst in Scotland the Hebridean population escaped Norse rule to maintain a degree of autonomy within the kingdom of Scotland. At the forefront … Read more
by Nicholas Canny It is a commonplace that the merit of any piece of historical investigation can be judged by the sources employed and by the questions asked by the historians of those sources. One of my silent criticisms of the work of the earlier generation of historians who had studied early modern Ireland was … Read more
by Billy Kelly Even today, over three hundred years since the death of the Duke of Ormond in 1688, the legacy of his viceroyalty is magnificently apparent in the capital city of Ireland. The Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, built in 1677 on Ormond’s orders, was constructed to house the pensioners of the long Irish wars. … Read more