Irish Economic and Social History

The English conquest and colonisation of Ireland, which began in the years around 1170 was accompanied by the introduction of an administrative system based on English models. From the point of view of the crown, perhaps the most important of the new offices of government that it established was the exchequer, which coordinated the financial exploitation of its Irish lordship. The exchequer generated a vast quantity of written documents recording its operations. This paper subjects one such document, detailing the sums received at the exchequer for the year 1301–2, to data science techniques in order to gain added insight into the routine functioning of the financial arm of English government in its oldest colony. It thereby also reveals previously unrecognised patterns in the nature of English power in Ireland. The purpose of the paper is not to assess the state of Irish finances in the early fourteenth century, but rather to argue that a deep reading of a single document produced by an elaborate bureaucratic system, combined with data science visualizations, can help to generate new research questions in relation to a substantial body of financial records which are soon to become more widely available to both scholars and the general public.

The closing years of the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) saw a hardening of attitudes among many of the New English in Ireland towards the Irish and Old English communities there. Historians have concentrated on a number of works which exemplify this attitude, notably Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. This article focuses on an earlier proponent of this outlook, a wandering lawyer, Andrew Trollope. In the 1580s, Trollope composed two extensive treatises on Ireland which contain some of the most vituperative attacks written by a Tudor commentator on the Irish, their character, religion and society. Often commented upon, though never examined in detail, this article provides the first in-depth assessment of Trollope’s writings.

Since the Great Irish Famine a debate has raged concerning the culpability of the British government, especially in the person of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan, and its failure to come to the aid of the starving Irish. On one end of the debate, Trevelyan is accused of severe prejudice against the Irish, with some ultra-nationalists even accusing him of genocide. On the other end, Trevelyan is viewed simply as an ideologue intent on enforcing the Whig view of laissez-faire economics. However, a study of government involvement in the Irish and Scottish fishing industries shows that the political situation before and during the Famine was more complex than the traditional debate indicates. This paper argues that the government’s treatment of the Irish fisheries, which were in a dismal state compared to the Scots, had more to do with political realities that Trevelyan inherited and could not ignore.

In 1924 Tex Austin, an American showman, brought his world travelling Rodeo to Croke Park in Dublin. Coming at a time of significant social and political upheaval in Ireland, Austin's rodeo promised an entirely new kind of spectacle which was free from imperial or British connotations. Austin's rodeo, and cowboy paraphernalia in general, seemed largely immune from cultural suspicions despite the fact that few citizens knew what a rodeo actually entailed. The purpose of the present article is twofold. First it provides a detailed examination of Tex Austin's Dublin Rodeo, and a growing proliferation of cowboy culture in interwar Ireland. Second, it uses Austin's Rodeo and its aftermath, to discuss the rise of cowboy masculinities in Ireland. Done to highlight the multiplicity of masculine identities in the Free State, the article discusses the appeal of cowboy inspired masculinity in Ireland, as well as the mediums through which it passed. Such an identity was not all encompassing but it did exist, and was sustained by the entertainment and leisure industry. Its study reiterates the need for more work on the various pressures and influences brought to bear on Irish masculinity.

This article sets out to explore the emergence of reading and print cultures in Waterford over the period from the opening of the city’s Free Public Library to the outbreak of the Second World War in the twentieth century. It is intended to add to the growing body of writing emerging on reading and books in Ireland by honing in on the development of a local reading culture in an era of more democratic access to books, periodicals and other printed matter. By surveying the development of various lending and circulation libraries up to the establishment of the Waterford Free Public Library in 1896 and beyond into the Free State era, the argument will be made that many of the concerns around self-improvement and literacy remained constant despite the shift from member-run libraries to municipal libraries and from Victorian concerns about moral self-improvement to early Irish state concerns about nation-building and Catholic morality in the 1920s and 1930s. The article will also explore the publishing and book trade in the city throughout the same period. This small but significant industry provided employment for some of the very people who were the target of self-improvement and concerns about their ability to consume ‘morally dubious’ literature.

This article explores the role and impact of Gay Health Action (GHA), a voluntary AIDS organisation that operated in the Republic of Ireland between 1985 and 1989. Drawing on their publications and media engagement, it argues that GHA played a significant role in educating the general public about AIDS, while this group also challenged ideas about sexual health and dispelled negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. In doing so, the activities of GHA begin to outline the initial public response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, while also contributing towards an emergent body of research on the changing nature of Irish society during the late-twentieth century. It suggests ways in which attitudes to the gay community were evolving and highlights the need for further research on AIDS, examinations of which can contribute towards the emergent histories of social change and health policy in this period.

When the Economic Cooperation Administration (E.C.A.), the American agency in charge of the implementation of the Marshall Plan, was faced with an increasing balance of payments deficit in Ireland, it focused on the development of dollar tourism to bridge it. But at the beginning of the 1950s, tourism development had become an extremely sensitive topic in Irish political and government circles as well as in public opinion. Thus, from the start, the ECA's efforts were bound to meet some opposition even though the American agency had the active support of the Minister of External Affairs of the First Inter-Party Government (1948–1951). Based on unpublished American archive documents, this paper reveals the backdoor tactics used by the E.C.A. mission in Ireland to circumvent the resistance of part of the Irish government. The E.C.A.'s ruses did not succeed. However, by facilitating the exposure of some forward-looking hoteliers to the ‘American way’, familiarisation trips to the U.S. organised under the aegis of the Marshall Plan helped set a dynamic in motion. This exposure was instrumental in the development of several innovations in Irish tourism and the economic sector which attracted the attention of powerful Irish-American businessmen. The latter were subsequently to collaborate closely with the Irish government to attract strategic American investments to the country from the 1960s onwards.