Dictionary:

Ireland¹

  (īr'lənd)

An island in the northern Atlantic Ocean west of Great Britain, divided between the independent Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is a part of the United Kingdom. The island was invaded by Celts c. 500 B.C. and converted to Christianity by Saint Patrick in the fifth century A.D. Ireland came under English control in the 17th century and was joined with Great Britain by the Act of Union in 1801. After the Easter Rebellion (1916) and a war of independence (1919–1921) the island was split into the independent Irish Free State (now Ireland) and Northern Ireland, which is still part of Great Britain.

Ireland's earliest photographer was Francis Stewart Beatty, a Belfast engraver, in September 1839. Its first commercial studio opened in Dublin's Rotunda building in 1841 and was soon joined by those of a motley band of entrepreneurs in a country where the daguerreotype did not enjoy patent protection. Leone Glukman opened a particularly successful studio in Dublin in the 1840s, and his lithographs of daguerreotypes of the Young Irelanders, including William Smith O'Brien, the leader of the 1848 Rebellion, were a great success.

Irish experimenters with the calotype process included William Holland Furlong and Michael Packenham Edgeworth, a half-brother of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. John Shaw Smith took an extensive series of calotypes on his travels to Italy and the Middle East in the early 1850s. The Dublin Photographic Society was established in 1854, becoming the Photographic Society of Ireland in 1858.

The ‘Big Houses’ in the country were associated with many fine photographers in the 1850s and 1860s. Francis Edmund Currey at Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford; Lady Augusta Dillon (née Crofton) and the Hon. Luke Dillon of Clonbrock House, Co. Galway; Edward King Tenison of Kilronan Castle, Co. Roscommon; and Mary, Countess of Rosse, at Birr Castle, Co. Offaly. The albums of Hugh Annesley of Castlewellan, Co. Down, date from the mid-1850s to the late 1870s. William Despard Hemphill, a Tipperary surgeon, published The Abbeys and Castles of Clonmel (1860), illustrated with his mounted stereographs.

Meanwhile, professional photographers were making their mark. James Robinson, who ran a studio in Dublin, made legal history in 1859 when his stereoscopic pair The Death of Chatterton, modelled after the painting of the same name by Henry Wallis, was deemed to have infringed copyright law. Commercial studios in the 1850s had begun taking an interest in topographical views. By 1857 the London Stereoscopic Company had sent employees to capture Ireland's scenery on camera. Frederick Holland Mares, who was deeply influenced by ideas of the picturesque, created a widely known series of scenic views in the 1860s, the negatives of which were bought by William Mervyn Lawrence (1840-1932) in the 1870s. Lawrence became the leading name in Irish topographical photography, with Robert French the best known of his photographers.

Landscape has remained the dominant genre in Irish photography, appearing in many guises, from topographical views and postcards to late 20th-century documents of the troubles in the North. Interpretations of the landscape, as fantasy, memento, nightmare, or boundary, continue to be varied.

The Lauder family, through Lauder Brothers (est. 1853), and Lafayette's, dominated the studio business in Dublin; Alfred Werner was a successful society portraitist in the 1880s and 1890s. Other firms included Edward Harding in Cork, Thomas Wynne (1838-93) in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, and A. H. Poole in Waterford. Alexander Ayton had a studio in Derry in the early 1860s and published Sights and Scenes in Ireland in the late 1890s, which included remarkable images of rural poverty in Donegal in the 1860s. In Belfast, E. T. Church ran a successful studio in the 1870s and 1880s. Robert Welch (1859-1936) established a studio there in 1883, and his knowledge of the scenery, antiquities, botany, and geology of Ulster is reflected in his work. Welch was official photographer of the Harland & Wolff shipbuilding company, and in 1914 also photographed impoverished western communities for the Congested Districts Board. Other notable Ulster photographers include Francis Bigger, Alexander Hogg, and William Green.

In 1894 Professor John Joly of Trinity College, Dublin, patented a single-shot colour process, and in 1895 exhibited transparencies at the Royal Dublin Society. However, the invention failed commercially and was rendered obsolete by the autochrome process.

Ireland's early 20th-century cultural revival was largely driven by literature. However, both George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Synge (1871-1909) were keen photographers, and Synge recorded life on the Aran Islands on his visits there in 1898-1902. The Camera in the 1920s proved to be an influential journal. Father Frank Browne, SJ, who had taken up photography in 1897, became renowned for his pictures of the Titanic leaving on her maiden voyage; on his death in 1960 he left over 40, 000 images, now in the Jesuit Archive in Dublin.

Many surviving photographs relate to Ireland's political history. The National Library of Ireland's collection alone includes police photographs of nationalist conspirators and suspects; pictures of evicted families, including the remarkable Coolgreany Evictions Album (1887); and many images of the events and personalities of 1916-22. Political violence in Northern Ireland has inspired much documentary photography. During the emergency that began in 1969, photojournalists converged on Ulster from all over the world. Willie Doherty, Victor Sloan, and David Farrell, among others, created more avowedly artistic work. Since 1980 Brian Hughes has documented Belfast's street life and political murals. Here too, the landscape tradition persists, as evidenced by Paul Seawright's unsettling and enigmatic photographs of places where murder victims were discovered.

The postcard industry reached its zenith in the work of John Hinde, whose idealized and retouched images dominated the business in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, Hinde's images have been an enduring source of ironic homage, most notably in the work of Anthony Haughey. Liam Blake, Walter Pfeiffer, Tom Kelly, and Peter Zoller's romanticized landscape images have also proved popular.

Photography was only gradually accorded an honoured place in Ireland's artistic life. The Irish Gallery of Photography, founded in 1978, provided a venue in Dublin for photographers to exhibit work increasingly informed by international trends. Similarly, the Press Photographers' Association of Ireland has championed photojournalism, with the Irish Times, in particular, leading the way.

The history of photography on the island was relatively neglected until the work of such pioneers as Edward Chandler. There is an increasing interest in Ireland's photographic heritage in universities and colleges of higher education. Archives include that of the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, with c.300, 000 images; the Irish Architectural Archive; the Ulster Museum; the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum; and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

William Mervyn Lawrence: Ross Castle, Co. Killarney, Ireland, late 19th century. Albumen print

Anon.: The prince of Wales and his entourage on the Giant's Causeway, Co. Antrim, Ireland, late 19th century. Albumen print

— Louise Kavanagh/<auth init="DO'M">Donncha O'Muirithe

Bibliography

• Rouse, S., Into the Light: An Illustrated Guide to the Photographic Collections of the National Library of Ireland (1998).
• Kavanagh, L., ‘Photography and Ireland: A Select Bibliography’, History of Photography, 23 (1999).
• Maguire, W. A., A Century in Focus: Photographers and Photography in the North of Ireland (2000).
• Chandler, E., Photography in Ireland: The Nineteenth Century (2001)

Second largest of the British Isles, 32,595 square metres in area, largest of all Celtic lands; its modern population, between 4 and 5 million, is smaller than that of Scotland, although the island may have contained more than 9 million in 1840. Ireland was divided into thirty-two counties in the 17th century, twenty-six of which formed an independent nation in 1922, first as the Irish Free State and, after 1949, as the Republic of Ireland, occupying 26,601 square metres, or 81.6 per cent of the total. Six counties remained a part of the UK in 1922 and were partitioned from the rest as Northern Ireland, a name with no currency before that time; all six, however, are coextensive with the ancient province of Ulster, whose full borders embrace three more counties, now in the Republic.

According to widely known literary tradition, the Irish name for Ireland, Éire, derives from Ériu, one of many feminine personifications of the country (see below); the dative and genitive forms of the name are Érinn, Érenn. At the same time the name is strikingly similar to that of the Érainn, a people of early southern Ireland. According to the late medieval, biblicized pseudo-history Lebor Gabála, Ireland is named for Ír, the first of the Milesians. The Greek forms for Ireland as recorded in Ptolemy (2nd cent. AD), Ierna, Iernē (elsewhere Ivernē), were latinized into Hibernia (also Iverna, Ivernia). Modern commentators have identified the Iverni with the Érainn of early Ireland, specifically the subdivision known as Corcu Loígde. For a period in the early 20th century the anglicized term ‘Ivernian’ was coined to denote all the population of early Ireland. From Latin also come the terms Scotia for the island and Scotti for its inhabitants, especially those in the north-east. When people from the north-east of Ireland invaded what they then called Alba in the 4th century, that country came to be called Scotland after them. Additionally, the ancient people known as the Attecotti may also have been in fact from Ireland.

Celtic-speaking peoples were by no means the earliest inhabitants of Ireland. Radiocarbon dating indicates human habitation in what is now Co. Sligo as early as c.7500 BC, but the Celts did not arrive until the first millennium BC, specific dates for which are still under contention. This means that most of the best-known archaeological remains in Ireland, e.g. Newgrange (c.3200 BC), Dowth, and Knowth, were built by pre-Celtic peoples, even though they are frequently cited in Celtic tradition. Among the earliest Celtic-speaking peoples may have been the Priteni (or Picts), who migrated west from Britain; the Belgae, also found on the Continent and in Britain; the Lagin, perhaps from Armorica [Brittany] who may have invaded both Ireland and Britain simultaneously; and finally the Gaels or Goidelic-speakers. The language inherited from these invaders, Irish, is the most prominent of the Q-Celtic family. T. F. O'Rahilly argued in Early Irish History and Mythology (1946) that only the last invaders, the Goidelic-speakers, were Q-Celts and that all the earlier peoples were P-Celts, a controversial assertion that has little or no acceptance despite the enormous influence of his study. Shadowy parallels for the early populations of Ireland are found in the Lebor Gabála, which applies the name Milesian to the Q-Celtic ancestors of the modern Irish.

Unique among Celtic countries are Ireland's many poetic personifications and characterizations, most of them female. Among the oldest is iath nAnann [land of Ana], in the 10th-century Sanas Cormaic [Cormac's Glossary], alluding to Ana, the pre-Christian earth-goddess. Perhaps as old are the three beautiful divinities of the Lebor Gabála, Ériu, Banba, and Fódla. Also from the Lebor Gabála is the first invader, Cesair, a woman whose name can be a poetic synonym for Ireland. Two early modern personae, Cáit Ní Dhuibhir and Róisín Dubh [Dark Rosaleen], depict a lovely maiden in distress. Not all personifications have radiated sexual allure, however. The loathsome Cailleach Bhéirre [hag of Beare] proffers the forbidding face of sovereignty; she appears reincarnated in Sean-bhean Bhocht/Shan Van Vocht, ‘the Poor Old Woman’, an emblem of the United Irishmen's rising in 1798 and frequently cited since then. A weakened Ireland could still be nurturing as in Druimin Donn Dílis [faithful, brown, white-backed cow]. Yet other female figures are powerful and commanding, like Granuaile, based on the historical 16th-century Mayo coast pirate, Gráinne Mhaol NíMháille, and Caitlín Ní hUallacháin [Cathleen Ni Houlihan], much evoked by 19th- and 20th-century nationalists. The two most important non-female metaphors for Ireland are Fál or Lia Fáil, the phallic stone of Tara, and Claidheamh Soluis [sword of light; reformed spelling Claíomh Solais]. Two common poetic nicknames are Inis Ealga [noble isle] and Inis Fáil [island of destiny], alluding to the stone Fál. In Geoffrey Keating's history (17th cent.) Ireland is Muicinis [pig island].

Although Ireland is nearly bisected on an east-west axis by the Shannon River, the historical imagination has favoured a north-south division along a nearly invisible line called the Eiscir Riada that runs from outside Galway City into what is today Dublin. Two stories explain this bifurcation. In the better-known version, Conn Cétchathach [of the Hundred Battles] claimed the land north of Eiscir Riada, while Eogan Mór (also known as Mug Nuadat) took the south; all territory was consequently either Leth Cuinn [Conn's half] or Leth Moga [Mug's half]. A division along the same line, Eiscir Riada, is made in the Lebor Gabála, with Éber Finn taking the north and Éremón taking the south. The north-south division persists in the alignment of Ireland's five provinces. Initially Ulster (earlier Ulaid) and Connacht are mostly north of the Eiscir Riada, while Leinster (Lagin) and Munster (Mumu), so large as to be counted as two-east and west- are south. When Mide is counted as the fifth province (and thus Munster as one), it also lies north of Eiscir Riada. Although the composition of each province reflects centuries of migration and settlement patterns, part 2 of the Welsh Mabinogi offers a different origin story: all the men of Ireland are slain except for five pregnant women whose sons establish the five provinces of Ireland.

While Ireland was not conquered by the Romans, it drew closer to the rest of Europe with Christian evangelization, putatively led by St Patrick, beginning in the 5th century. Subsequently, early Irish writing was expressed in an adaptation of the Roman alphabet. As well as being the oldest written vernacular in Europe, the Irish language [Old Irish Goídelc; Modern Irish Gaedhealg; reformed Modern Irish Gaeilge] survives in the largest volume of early texts of any early European language, more than 600, many of which have never been edited or translated. Some, not all, are bound in great early codices like the Book of the Dun Cow [Lebor na hUidre] (c.1100), Book of Leinster [Lebor Laignech/na Núachongbála] (c.1160), and Yellow Book of Lecan [Lebor Buide Lecáin (c.1390). From the advent of Christianity in the 5th century until the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1169, writing, in Irish or Latin, was largely an ecclesiastical franchise. Native-born clergymen absorbed pre-Christian narratives and in time made their own use of them.

Thus much of what is called ‘Celtic mythology’ in this volume has been transmitted to us by scribes unsympathetic with, if not hostile to, the religious traditions that had fostered the original traditions. Not surprisingly, some 19th- and early 20th-century commentators argued that heroic stories from early Irish literature did not constitute a ‘mythology’ because they had been compromised in transmission. Clearly, the characters of some divinities, notably Ana for whom the Tuatha Dé Danann are named, are nearly lost. Some heroes, such as Lug Lámfhota and Fionn mac Cumhaill, were certainly originally divinities. Yet much of the unwritten pre-Christian original tradition has been retained, as is implied by the numerous parallels between Old Irish literature, ‘Celtic Mythology’, and classical, Norse, Slavic, Indian, and other Indo-European mythologies. Additionally, more recent archaeological finds in the British Isles and elsewhere co-ordinate many aspects of the milieu depicted in the four major cycles of early Irish literature, the Mythological, the Ulster, the Fenian, and the Cycle of Kings.

Written tradition in Irish survived the 12th-century reform of the Irish Church, which brought with it the introduction of orders of Continental monasticism, like the Benedictines and the Cistercians, and ended the native monasticism of Celtic Christianity. Prominent families, including gaelicized Normans, acted as patrons in the transmission of manuscripts down the departure of the native aristocracy, the ‘Flight of the Earls’, at the beginning of the 17th century. Increased anglicization diminished Irish literary tradition, yet manuscripts continued to be produced in large numbers, sometimes abroad, e.g. Duanaire Finn at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands, through the 18th century and up to the middle of the 19th.

Proscription of the Irish language in commerce and legal affairs meant that its speakers, though they were still a majority of the population as late as 1800, were often illiterate and powerless. Lack of the ability to write did not prevent the survival of an enormously rich oral tradition, which began to be collected, translated, and published in the 19th century. T. Crofton Croker's first volumes, Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) and Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), attracted European attention, including that of the Brothers Grimm and Sir Walter Scott. Over the next two centuries hundreds of other collectors would fill libraries with narratives, many of which are rooted in the oldest documents of Irish literary tradition. The voluminous files of the Irish Folklore Commission, compiled in the 20th century, are more extensive than collections from any other western European country. At the end of the 20th century, the wellsprings of this oral tradition had by no means been exhausted. Oral tradition has survived the calamitous decline of the Irish language. The 1911 census recorded that only 17.6 per cent of the population could speak Irish to any degree, certainly a smaller number at independence eleven years later. The Free State Government (which became the Republic of Ireland, 1949) made a knowledge of Irish a requirement for schools and for applications to civil service positions, a policy that continued until 1973, and also created financial and other incentives to native speakers to remain in the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking regions. With the 21st century approaching, more than 1 million persons had some knowledge of Irish while no more than 100,000, about 3.3 per cent of the population of the Republic, spoke Irish as a primary language. Irish Éire; Scottish Gaelic Éirinn; Manx Nerin, Yn Erin; Welsh Iwerddon; Cornish Ywerdhon; Breton Iwerzhon, Iwerzon, Iverdon. See also Bibliography under ‘Irish’.

Ireland's history has been shaped by the inescapable facts of geography. A small island at the western edge of Europe, barely within the mainstream of Continental experience, it lay beyond the reach of the Roman Empire (with all that that entailed for the development of law and modes of administration) yet would later become one of the great depositories of Christian art, spirituality, and learning. The European context is crucial to an understanding of Ireland's past, but the critical geographical fact is the island's proximity to Britain. On a clear day, the Mull of Kintyre in southwest Scotland is visible from the Antrim coast in northeast Ireland. Gaelic civilization, moreover, extended like an arc along the western and northern coasts of Ireland into the Scottish Highlands. Scottish Lowlanders and the English referred to Scots Gaelic as the "Irish language." From the importation by Gaelic lords of Highland mercenary soldiers—the gallowglass and the redshanks—to the role of Scots settlers in the Ulster plantation and the Scots army in the North in the 1640s, a strong Scottish dimension runs through early modern Irish history, though ultimately Ireland's troubled relationship with its larger neighbor, England, would have the greater impact.

The Fall of the House of Kildare

In 1450 Ireland was a lordship, and the king of England its lord. The English crown's claim to sovereignty over the whole island had never been vindicated in practice, however, and during the later Middle Ages English power and jurisdiction were in retreat. Effectively, the king's writ and the common law were confined to the Pale, the area of English settlement around Dublin, capital city and seat of royal authority. Beyond the Pale and the towns, the great Anglo-Norman magnates negotiated the shifting frontiers of Gaeldom through "march law," a bastardized amalgam of common and Irish brehon (native) laws and customs. Even the levers of royal authority began to slip from the king's grasp. The crown in Ireland was represented either by a lord lieutenant, a lord deputy, or, in the absence of one or the other, by lords justices. Between 1447 and 1460, Richard of York's (1411–1460) political standing conferred stature upon the lord lieutenancy and, equally important, kept it within the orbit of the court. Then, between the 1470s and 1520, successive earls of Kildare virtually monopolized the office, using it as a source of patronage to extend their local power base and network of alliances.

The local autonomy enjoyed by the "Kildare ascendancy" has struck some historians of the old nationalist school as part of a wider pattern of incipient Anglo-Irish separatism. But it is surely anachronistic to attribute proto-nationalist ambitions to a political community, the descendants of the original Anglo-Norman settlers, that had no concept of an Irish "nation" in the modern sense. It did, however, have a strong sense of English identity, albeit "English by blood" rather than by birth. Nevertheless, from Parliament's declaration that Ireland was "corporate of itself" (1460) to its declaration of legislative independence in 1782, Anglo-Irish constitutional relations provides a major framework for Irish political history. Subordination of Ireland to England (and, after 1707, Great Britain) and Irish resistance to subordination, though rarely rising to outright separatist aspirations, runs like a leitmotiv through these centuries.

The ascendancy of the earls of Kildare entailed a sometimes spectacular loss of royal control over Irish affairs, most vividly in 1487 when the Yorkist eighth earl, Garrett Mor, crowned the pretender, Lambert Simnel (c. 1475–1535), king of England in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Kildare's survival in office, despite his treason, underlines the weakness of the English crown in the fifteenth century. From a position of greater strength and internal stability, however, Henry VIII would not countenance such overmighty subjects anywhere within his realm. Thus, when the ninth earl was summoned to London under the shadow of the executioner in 1534, his son, Lord Offaly, "Silken Thomas," led his followers in the Geraldine League into rebellion. The Geraldine revolt, which lasted until 1540, opened a new, blood-drenched chapter in Irish history. The advent of a new era was signaled by the first ever use of artillery—against the Kildare stronghold of Maynooth—by the ruthless suppression of the rebellion, and by the first stirrings of anti-Reformation Catholicism among the rebels.

The fall of the house of Kildare also inaugurated a prolonged phase of direct rule from London. That practice became the sine qua non of England's Irish policy, and several illustrious names among England's governing elite occupied Dublin Castle, namely the earls of Essex (1599), Strafford (1633–1640), and Chesterfield (1745–1747). There were notable exceptions to the rule: the Irish-born Protestant first duke of Ormond served as lord lieutenant under both Charles I and Charles II, while the Irish-born old English Catholic, the earl of Tyrconnell, held the office under James II in the 1680s. But after the first decade of the eighteenth century (when the second duke, Ormond's grandson, served) occupation of Dublin Castle was reserved for Englishmen. Until the very end of that century, and the appointments of John Fitzgibbon as lord chancellor and Viscount Castlereagh as chief secretary, Englishmen monopolized all senior executive posts, including the lord lieutenancy, chief secretaryship, lord chancellery, and the archbishopric of Armagh. On one level, official Ireland, especially its established church, functioned merely as a patronage outpost for a British political system oiled by the disbursement of places, preferments, pensions, promotions, titles, and favors. On another level, control of the executive rested on British security considerations.

England's Difficulty, Ireland's Opportunity

Security underpinned England's Irish policy. In essence, the concern was strategic. As Thomas Waring put it in the wake of the Cromwellian reconquest of 1649–1650, "humane reason and policie dictate's that the hous cannot bee safe so long as the back door is open." Ireland served as England's "back door" as early as 1497, when another Yorkist pretender, Perkin Warbeck, landed at Cornwall with a retinue of Irish supporters. Then, as Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe split into warring camps, the vulnerability of Protestant England's western seaboard (and the dangers of Spain's sponsorship of Irish Catholic rebels) concentrated the Tudor mind. Spain (and the papacy) twice intervened in Ireland, landing troops at Smerwick, County Kerry (1580), and, in greater force, at Kinsale, County Cork (1601). Strategic necessity lent urgency to the Tudor reconquest of the sixteenth century and galvanized English determination to hold onto Ireland thereafter. Enemies changed, geography did not: French soldiers fought in Ireland in 1690 and 1798.

England's dominance depended, at bottom, on coercive force. Beyond that, Whitehall and Westminster exercised an array of political, legislative, and administrative controls. These included the retention in English hands of key public offices and the imposition of restrictive laws limiting the autonomy of the Irish Parliament and regulating Irish trade. A few legislative landmarks plot the troubled course of Anglo-Irish relations. First, "Poynings's Law" (1494), aimed originally at too-powerful lord deputies of the Kildare type, evolved into a procedure whereby all Irish parliamentary bills were subject to amendment—amounting to a veto—by the English Privy Council. The repeal of Poynings's Law constitutes the so-called revolution of 1782. Second, the Irish Parliament's subordinate status, institutionalized under Poynings, received confirmation in the Declaratory Act of 1720, a forthright assertion of Westminster's supremacy in the Kingdom of Ireland. Finally, Westminster used its claim of jurisdiction to impose laws prohibiting the import of Irish cattle to England (1667) and the export of Irish wool (1699). Both laws long caused bitter resentment in Ireland, the preliminary controversy surrounding the latter provoking the classic defense of Ireland's historic right to legislative independence, William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (London, 1698).

The roots of England's perennial "Irish problem" lay in the failures of England's Irish policies. By 1450, although the territory of the Pale had contracted, it still boasted the most densely populated, intensively cultivated, and economically diverse region of the country. Yet Gaeldom had also demonstrated its military and cultural vitality. And, as Sir John Davies recognized in his Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (1612), the Irish problem would remain intractable for so long as the Gael remained outside—and indeed resistant to—the boon of common law, civility, and, by Davies's time, Protestantism or "true religion." "All the world knows their barbarism," Cromwell remarked of his Irish enemies. Only the adoption of English customs, Reformed religion, language, and law—in a word, anglicization—could save them from their wretched condition.

Gaelic Ireland

The Gaelic Irish saw matters differently, and while the story of English-Irish conflict supplies the historian with a ready, dramatic, and compelling narrative structure, it is vital that historians not view the past solely in terms of that conflict. Early modern Ireland, viewed from the Atlantic shores of Donegal, looks rather different from the anglophone Ireland mapped and preserved in the Public Record Office. For the historian, the question of perspective is precisely about rescuing the Gaelic-speaking O'Donnell retainer and Mac Sweeny swordsman from the enormous condescension of the state papers. Gaelic politics, economy, and society are more difficult to reconstruct than Anglo-Ireland because they never generated the sorts of records—tax rolls, bureaucratic memoranda, even paintings—upon which historians usually rely. The Gaelic world has thus either remained hidden, or, as recently as 1988, been caricatured on the basis of the naive or hostile reportage of outsiders. Fortunately, the dearth of conventional sources has been circumvented somewhat by the mining of a rich, if tricky, lode of nontraditional evidence: Irish-language poetry. Excavations (and cataloguing) are still in the heroic phase, but already the findings of scholars working with these hitherto underused sources have altered and enhanced our understanding of, for example, the depth and range of Irish Jacobite sentiment in the eighteenth century.

English late medieval society, including the Irish Pale, was organized around legally binding principles of mutual obligation and services based on land tenures. In contrast, in Gaelic society land ownership and inheritance, obligation, and political succession were determined by kinship. A chief's power rested on his ability to enforce it, and under the system of "tanistry" his designated heir was as likely a brother or cousin as an eldest son. Kinship, alliances through marriage and fosterage and the receipt of tribute from lesser clans defined a great chief's status more than territory or even cattle—the staple of the Gaelic pastoral economy. Certain families, notably the O'Neills and O'Donnells in Ulster, the O'Connors in Connacht, and the Mac Carthys and O'Briens in Munster, predominated. They inhabited a world of insistent, lowintensity warfare and comparative political instability. Exactions of tribute—in kind, or in military or labor services—lacked regulation, and by the early modern period were epitomized by the abuses of "coign and livery"—the billeting at free quarters by a chief of his dependants on his tenants.

The crown and the Dublin administration were not prepared to leave the natives to their own ways for three reasons. First, the inevitable processes of intermarriage, cultural interaction, and linguistic borrowings (in both directions) of the Gaedhil (or Irish) and the Gaill (or foreigners)—which historians call gaelicization but which the English called degeneracy—could not be permitted to continue. Second, the English "common law mind" embraced legal uniformity and abhorred local particularism. Ireland, reported an early-sixteenth-century English observer, comprised a patchwork of over sixty "countries" ruled by captains, each of whom "maketh war and peace for himself, and holdeth by the sword, and hath imperial jurisdiction within his room, and obeyeth to no other person." Worse still, degenerate "captains of English noble family . . . folloeth the same Irish order." The gaelicized Anglo-Norman House of Desmond cast its shadow across the common law mind. Finally, particularistic march law and Gaelic custom rooted in local power bases challenged royal sovereignty as well as legal uniformity.

"Conquest and Reform"

Whereas conventional nationalist histories of sixteenth-century Ireland focused on reconquest, revisionist historians have recovered the Tudor commitment to reform, although conquest and, in Brendan Bradshaw's terminology, "the catastrophic dimension of Irish history" are now being reintroduced to a more complicated picture. The set pieces of reform are the Act of Kingly Title (1541), which upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a kingdom, and "surrender and regrant," under which Gaelic chieftains surrendered their titles to the crown and were regranted them in English law. Several leading figures were ennobled, for example "the O'Neill" now became Earl of Tyrone, and succession and inheritance were at least theoretically stabilized by the extension of primogeniture. In the longer run, however, the prospects for reform were dashed by the rise of confessional conflict.

In Ireland, the Protestant Reformation assumed the character of an alien imposition. Decisively, the old English, as well as the native Irish, remained Catholic. Protestants were—and remained—a minority. When the Tudors completed the reconquest by the subjugation of Hugh O'Neill (1603), Gaelic Ireland had suffered military defeat but retained its cultural identity. Ethnic origin divided the Gael from his fellow Catholic old English almost as much as from the Protestant new English, yet shared adversity during the first decades of the seventeenth century conspired to forge a common Catholic identity. The defeat of O'Neill was followed by "the flight of the Earls" (1607) when O'Neill and others fled to Catholic Europe. Interpreted as an act of rebellion, the fugitives' lands escheated to the crown and were redistributed to English and Scottish settlers in the plantation of Ulster. The last bastion of Gaelic civilization thereby became the beachhead of British Protestantism in Ireland. The Scottish communities, moreover, laid the seedbed for Presbyterianism.

Stuart Ireland thus hosted four major ethno-religious groups: native Irish Catholics, old English Catholics, new English Protestants of the established church, and (before 1642, informally) Scots Presbyterians. Intra-denominational relations, already tense, strained to breaking point with the crisis of the Stuart monarchies in the late 1630s. Ireland, in fact, helped detonate the wars of the three kingdoms with the Ulster rebellion of 1641. Many Protestant planters were killed by insurgents, and lurid tales of massacre swept England, deepening the rage against popery and suspicion of the king, in whose defense the rebels claimed to act. Ireland, like England and Scotland, experienced the trauma of civil war in the 1640s. Alliances and allegiances shifted bewilderingly but, crucially, the old English were forced into military coalition with their Gaelic coreligionists. When Cromwell arrived in 1649 once more to subjugate the Irish and to revenge 1641, he made no ethnic distinctions among his papist enemies.

The land confiscations begun in the Tudor era and continued by the Ulster plantation reached unprecedented levels with the Cromwellian settlement. In 1603 Catholics owned more than 60 percent of the land; by 1659 that figure had been reduced to about 9 percent. During the reign of Charles II, Catholic ownership climbed back to around 25 percent, thanks to successful pleas in the court of claims, but fell again to 14 percent by the end of the century as a result of the forfeitures that followed the second defeat of Catholic Ireland in 1691. This time there would be no court of claims, but rather a relentless chipping away, by the implementation of penal laws, at the remaining Catholic-owned land. By 1775 it stood at 5 percent. The political nation, like the landowning elite, of eighteenth-century Ireland was Protestant. But the Protestants were a minority, and if anything is inevitable in history, the Catholics could not be excluded from public life and political power forever. A rising Catholic mercantile class had already begun to articulate its grievances by the 1780s, but once more it was events outside the island that catalyzed Irish politics, including the "Catholic question." With the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a new epoch opened in European—and Irish—history.

Bibliography

Brady, Ciaran, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641. Dublin, 1986.

Connolly, Sean J. Law, Religion and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760. Oxford, 1992.

Ellis, Steven G. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule. London and New York, 1998.

Moody, T. W., F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds. A New History of Ireland III: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691. Oxford, 1976.

—JIM SMYTH

Island in the Atlantic Ocean separated from Great Britain by the Irish Sea. It is divided into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

• It is called the “Emerald Isle” because of its lush green countryside.