Rest Of Ireland Research Articles

P58 Sustained improvement in malignant melanoma prognosis at a consultant-delivered multidisciplinary pigmented lesion clinic: a follow-up study

Abstract Rapid-access clinics are designed to improve the early detection and prognosis of melanoma, but there is little hard evidence in the literature of their effectiveness. We established a pigmented lesion clinic (PLC) in 2002 and have previously demonstrated a subsequent reduction in melanoma thickness at our hospital. We undertook a retrospective cohort study to assess the long-term effects. Data for all melanomas diagnosed in the Republic of Ireland between 1 January 1998 and 31 December 2019 were provided by the National Cancer Registry Ireland (n = 15 619). We excluded T0 and Tis and unknown T melanomas. Our PLC was found to have a higher proportion of tumours diagnosed at an earlier stage of T1 (51.6%) vs. the region/county where the PLC is based (37.8%) and Ireland (40.3%). Following the introduction of the PLC, from 2003 to 2007, a significant difference was noted between our PLC and the rest of Ireland, with a higher proportion of T1 tumours diagnosed (41.6% vs. 29.7%; P < 0.001). For the region, the percentage of T1 tumours was lower than for the rest of the country, but this difference fell short of significance (34.5%; P = 0.057). In the two 5-year periods following this (2008–2013 and 2014–2019), our PLC had significantly more early tumours (44.4% and 62.1%, respectively) than the rest of Ireland (35.9% and 52.2%, respectively; P < 0.001 for both time periods). More PLCs have been established across the country, probably accounting for the higher proportion of early-stage melanomas diagnosed in 2014–2019. The figures for the region were also significantly better than those for the rest of the country [40.7% and 55.7% (P = 0.008 and P = 0.039), respectively], suggesting that the PLC has had an effect on prognosis, resulting in a greater proportion of early melanomas in the region vs. Ireland. Preliminary analysis found a hazard ratio (HR) of 0.78, or a 22% reduced risk death, at 5 years (unadjusted Cox proportional hazard regression on all nonmetastatic melanoma with known T diagnosed 1998–2019, n = 16,489) for those attending the PLC vs. the rest of Ireland. Patients in the rest of the region were found to have a higher HR (1.15) vs. the rest of Ireland. The PLC appears to have contributed to improved prognosis in the region in the years following its establishment. This study supports the long-term benefits of a PLC over the course of more than 20 years.

The Borderlands

The Borderlands

The Border, the Laggan and the Professor

The physical boundary (‘the border’) between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland has featured as a crucial part in relationships across the island, not least in the negotiations between the UK and the EU over Brexit. 
 Under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, a Boundary Commission was established with Professor Eoin MacNeill as the representative of the Irish Free State. It started its work after the civil war in the Irish Free State (1922-23) had ceased. It almost achieved its objective of a revised border. 
 With the agreement of all sides, the major source of data was religion in the 1911 Census, but individual returns were not made available to the Commission. The areas agreed for transfer involved large majorities of Catholics to the Free State and large majorities of Protestants to the North. The only exception was the Laggan in northeast Donegal, an area with a small Protestant majority. 
 At the last moment MacNeill withdrew, the Commission could not produce a unanimous report, therefore its report was unenforceable and it remained secret for over 40 years. The 1911 Census forms became available in the new millennium permitting detailed examination of the Laggan. 
 This paper addresses the outcomes of the Commission’s work and questions whether there was a particular problem which caused MacNeill to withdraw. Speculation on MacNeill’s activity in this exercise is offered and related to his official reasons for sinking the Commission.

Sense making of Brexit for economic citizenship in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTNorthern Ireland appears to be the keystone for building a sustainable outcome for Brexit for the whole of the United Kingdom and its future relationship with the other Member States of the European Union, especially the Republic of Ireland. The complex constitutional, political, socio-economic, geographical and cultural position of Northern Ireland means that resolving the current negotiating difficulties rests on a wider set of considerations. These include the scale and scope of cross-border corporation with the rest of Ireland so that there is effectively an all – Ireland single market to which the Single European Market and Customs Union is presently essential. In this context, there is a significant challenge for economic citizenship in Northern Ireland and its governance arrangements. This paper sets to analyse the challenges to economic citizenship in Northern Ireland by examining the case of the key Agrifood sector for whom cross-border transactions and co-operation are crucial. It does so in the general context of how the economics profession contributed to the weakness of its expertise in investigating the impact of Brexit.

Rate of involuntary admission in Dublin South West: a 5-year retrospective review.

International figures for involuntary admissions vary widely. Differences in legislation, professionals' ethics and public attitudes towards risk have been known to influence this rate. Comparing involuntary admission rates in different parts of the same country can help control for variability found between international studies. This study assessed the rates of involuntary admissions in the Dublin South West Mental Health Service compared with the rest of Ireland. We examined the demographic and clinical profiles of all involuntary patients admitted to the acute psychiatric inpatient unit in Tallaght Hospital between 2007 and 2011. We compared the rate of admission in Tallaght with the rest of Ireland. Data gathered included all patients detained on Form 6 and Form 13 (change of status) looking at age, gender, diagnosis and number of patients who had a Mental Health Tribunal. Form 7 (renewal orders) was also examined We calculated the rate per 100 000 population per year of Form 6 admissions, Form 13 and Form 7 (certificate and renewal order by responsible consultant psychiatrist) using figures from the 2006 Census. All data were analysed using SPSS. The rate of involuntary admission in Tallaght Hospital was significantly lower compared with the rest of Ireland (Form 6: t=-11.2; p<0.001, Form 13: t=-3.1; p=0.04, Form 7: t=-13.9; p=0.001). This difference was evident for all methods of involuntary detention and was also the case for Form 7 (renewal orders). Mental Health Tribunals were held for 59% of patients, a rate comparable with earlier findings described in publications, following the introduction of the new Mental Health Act. Rates per 100 000 population were lower in Dublin South West compared with the rest of Ireland. The reasons for this are not clear. Further research comparing similar services in Ireland could explain these findings.

The Fractured Island: Divided Sovereignty, Identity and Politics in Ireland

Since the final conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 the violent conflict and military operations convulsing the state of Northern Ireland since 1969 appeared over and peace restored. Despite this, profound mistrust and division remains. This paper examines the factors influencing historic conflict in Ireland with reference to the acceptable forms of governance in a deeply divided society with antagonistic and diametrically opposed concepts of citizenship, allegiance and sovereignty present in the population. The changes have been fundamental and profound: absence of military occupation models, entry into public life and political responsibility of former combatants, development of power-sharing governmental structures and progress of civil society. The fact remains that the Good Friday Agreement was seen by the majority community - the unionist population – as a guarantee to assert its intention and desire to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom (to remain British). In the same manner and in the same way the Agreement was seen by the minority community – the nationalist population – as a guarantee to assert its intention to leave the United Kingdom and to re-unite with the rest of Ireland (to remain Irish). Ireland has never been a uniform or agreed socio-political entity. The nature of Irish society has been a fragmented, divided and polyglot one. The fractured States that emerged from the forced partition of Ireland in 1922 epitomized the crises and issues around sovereignty and identity. Disputed sovereignty in Ireland is analyzed in relation to three key associated factors: ownership, legacies of colonial power and the dynamics of changing demographics.

Assessing the extent to which temporal changes in waterbird community composition are driven by either local, regional or global factors

ABSTRACT Lough Neagh and Lough Beg Special Protection Area (SPA, hereafter Lough Neagh) is an important non‐estuarine site in Britain and Ireland for overwintering wildfowl. Multivariate analysis of the winter counts showed a state‐shift in the waterbird community following winter 2000/2001, mostly due to rapid declines in abundance (46–57% declines in the mean mid‐winter January counts between 1993–2000 and 2002–2009) of members of the diving duck guild (pochard Aythya ferina, tufted duck Aythya fuligula and goldeneye Bucephala clangula) and coot (Fulica atra), a submerged macrophyte feeder. Only pochard showed correlations between declines at Lough Neagh and those of overall species flyway population indices to suggest that global changes could contribute to declines at the site. However, indices from the Republic of Ireland showed no overall decline in the rest of Ireland. Tufted duck indices at the site were inversely related to indices in Great Britain. Lough Neagh goldeneye indices were positively correlated with indices in the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, suggesting that short‐stopping could contribute to declines at the site. Coot declines at Lough Neagh did not correlate with trends elsewhere, suggesting local factors involved in the decline. These analyses indicate that although there are potentially different explanations for the dramatic declines in these four waterbird species at this site, the simultaneous nature of the declines across two feeding guilds strongly suggest that local factors (such as loss of submerged macrophytes and benthic invertebrates) were involved. An assessment of the food supply, local disturbance and other factors at Lough Neagh is required to find an explanation for the observed adverse trends in wintering numbers of the affected species. This study highlights the potential of waterbird community structure to reflect the status of aquatic systems, but confirms the need to establish site‐specific factors responsible for the observed changes in abundance of key waterbird species at a site.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1878–1960 (review)

Reviewed by: The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1878–1960 Mary McCulley The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1878–1960, by Olwen Purdue, pp. 297. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009. $105 (cloth) $50; (paper). Distributed by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, PA. Olwen Purdue’s The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power, and Social Elites, 1878–1960 adds to the ongoing recent critical work that has begun to uncover differences (though sometimes subtle ones) between the Six Counties and the rest of Ireland. Purdue seeks to rectify a historical perspective that fails to distinguish the extent of devastation to the homes of the Ascendancy between most of Ireland and the large estates in northeast Ireland, which have for the most part been ignored in previous studies of the Big Houses as exceptions to the story. The book does not construct a divergent history of the decline of the landed elite in Northern Ireland; in fact, much of Purdue’s research supports the conclusion that the Northern experience was a pattern of decline parallel to that occurring elsewhere in Ireland. But Purdue does argue, with attentive use of primary sources, for a more sympathetic view of the northeastern landlords. Her research undoes a sweeping vilification of Irish landlords, traditionally seen as powerful absentees who mismanaged their estates, and describes Ulster landlords as determined, noble survivors. Each chapter traces one major force in the economic and political decline of the Irish landed elite, including the Land Acts, the tenant rights movement, the government’s purchase of lands, the struggles against Home Rule, and the rise of a mercantile middle class. In the North, however, many of the landowners managed to retain their estates through 1960. The northeastern landlords faced the same political and economic turmoil that affected their counterparts elsewhere; Purdue attributes their prolonged survival to several factors. She argues first, that in the northeast the landed class and the rising middle class tended to be linked by shared Protestant and Unionist sympathies, which enabled the landlords to keep much of their prestige and social influence even as their economic and political influence dwindled. She also notes that many of the land owners of large estates were successful because of careful management and creative economic ventures, including mining and sea exploits. The upper class’s insistence on maintaining an active social life, and on preserving key places in the political [End Page 152] and social organization, helped the landlords to save their name and prestige—even as the demands of survival forced them to sell off more and more of their belongings and to change their lifestyles drastically. If Purdue’s project is in part to rescue those residents of the North’s Big Houses from a large-scale demonization of landlords, then Chapter Five is the most successful in accomplishing this goal. There, Purdue introduces the most human of her arguments as she tells the story of one “determined survivor,” Lady Mabel Annesley, who inherited her property and retained the estate through economic decline, a commitment stemming from a clear emotional attachment. Purdue details her fiery determination in excerpts from letters and journals in which Lady Annesley discusses in detail how she altered her routines and habits, including the symbolically charged measure of eating only potatoes for supper—a measure that might have been more than familiar for her tenants, but which to Annesley appeared draconian. Purdue employs extensive and detailed charts and figures throughout the book to set up, objectively, the difference in the extent of decline between the northeastern landlords and the rest of Ireland. But the appeal of the book lies in the small anecdotes from letters and journals which offer insight into both the mindset and the rhetoric of the upper class. Purdue’s project might well spawn feminist rhetorical recovery, as she documents the ways in which women were involved in social activities and organizations. These activities played a large part in sustaining the resilience of the upper class’s symbolic prestige, enabling them to foster the respect of the rising mercantile class in the midst of economic downfall...

Political Economy, Tourism, and the Future of Ireland in Joyce’s Ulysses

Writing to brother Stanislaus from Rome in November of 1906, James Joyce expressed belief that the nascent Sinn Fein party would best advance the cause of independence in the post-Parnell era. You ask me what I Would substitute f r parliamentary agitation in Ireland. I think the Sinn Fein policy would be more effective. Of course I see that its success would be to substitute for English capital but no-one, I suppose, denies that capitalism is a stage of progress. The proletariat has yet to be created. A feudal peasantry exists, scraping the soil but this Would with a national revival or with a definite preponderance of England surely disappear. (Selected Letters 125) The letter registers understanding of the centrality of economics to the so-called Irish Question. As Dominic Manganiello argues, by endorsing Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein movement, which sought to counter British hegemony in Ireland through the non-violent tactics of economic resistance, Jovice voices frustration with a parliamentary party that he regarded as compromised by its connection to both Church and State (126-28). Joyce goes on to write that he would call himself a nationalist were it not for the Sinn Fein movement's support of the language revival, and, distancing himself from the nationalist cause, he ironically declares himself an exile: and prophetically, a repudiated one (125). Joseph Valente argues that Joyce's identification of the language question as the point of rupture with Griffith's Sinn Hill program registers Joyce's ambivalence about the project of decolonization and suggests his own place in a embodied in the English tongue (66).Yet if it suggests identification with the Symbolic order of England at moment of self-exile from Ireland, Joyce's objection to reviving might also be regarded as evincing a pragmatic understanding of English as the established language of economic exchange both within and beyond the British empire. Joyce's letter to brother, then, invites us to read within the broader context of cultural and economic conditions at the time of departure. Indeed, the immediate cause of Joyce's leaving Ireland appears to have been the financial demands of medical studies. Writing to Lady Gregory in November of 1902, the twenty-two year old Joyce declared intention to leave Dublin for the Continent, and planned to fund medical studies at the University of Paris by teaching English after the Royal College authorities refused to provide him with financial aid (Letters 8). After abandoning medical studies, he wrote to father hoping to land a position as a foreign correspondent for the Times. Joyce's leaving Ireland thus markedly contrasts with Stephen Dedalus's idealistic view of exile in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's own state when leaving Ireland is more aptly expressed in Stephen's ironic mention in diary of the new secondhand (221-22) packed by mother. New only in the sense that they are unknown, the clothes serve as a metonym for the young artist's impoverished inheritance and figure the tenuousness of project of artistic self-fashioning. On the Rocks in Ulysses Joyce's advocacy for Sinn Fein in letter to brother calls attention to the absence of economic base in Edwardian Ireland upon which independent economy might have been built. Large working-class populations existed in the Ireland of Joyce's day only in the industrialized cities of the North, and, as F. S. Lyons has suggested, cities such as Belfast had more in common with Liverpool or Glasgow in their economic integration with the British economy than with the rest of Ireland (Lyons 7). In Ulysses the economic hegemony of Northern Ireland is personified by the authoritarian Mr. Deasy, the Ulsterman who tells Stephen that Money is power and who brandishes a savings box that organizes coins, including sovereigns that bear the image of Edward VII. …

The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (review)

Reviewed by: The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival Richard Rankin Russell Eugene Mcnulty . The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival. Cork: Cork University Press, 2008. Pp. 272, illustrated. $60.00 (Hb). Scholarship on drama from the North of Ireland and then Northern Ireland (beginning in 1922) has long languished in the shadow of scholarship on drama in the rest of the country. Sam Hanna Bell's pioneering study The Theatre in Ulster (1972), which covers Northern theatre from the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre through 1971, is now badly outdated. Ophelia Byrne's pamphlet The Stage in Ulster from the Eighteenth Century (1997) is more comprehensive than Bell's study, but its range makes its individual discussions relatively brief. Marilynn Richtarik's Acting between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics, 1980–1984 (1994) provides a thorough account, focused on one of the major Northern Irish theatre companies after World War II, while Anthony Roche wrote a very fine long chapter on recent Northern Irish drama in his Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994). Christopher Murray contributed a helpful overview of contemporary Northern Irish drama in his Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (1997). Finally, Bernard McKenna's Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969– 1994 (2003) and Tom Maguire's Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and beyond the Troubles (2006) are welcome full-length studies of recent Northern Irish drama in relation to the so-called "Troubles," but their appearance has made the absence of a book-length study focusing on the theatre of the Northern revival in the early-twentieth century all the more embarrassing. Eugene McNulty's new book fills this critical lacuna with a deft, sure-footed discussion of cultural revival in the North of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries against the backdrop of the gathering Home Rule movement and resistance to that movement in unionist areas of the North. Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill – founders of the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Northern "answer" to the Abbey Theatre – were some of the prime proponents of a distinctively Northern identity that was also identifiably Irish. Herein, of course, lay the problem for the ULT's dramatists and for other Northern revivalists, such as the radical poet, journalist, and playwright Alice Milligan: how to articulate the North as a site of Irish nationalism in the spirit of the ecumenical 1798 rising that brought together Protestants and Catholics, yet also to suggest the North's peculiar cultural attributes. McNulty's first two chapters set the idea of the North of Ireland in two contexts: the revival taking place in the rest of Ireland and the increasing [End Page 250] religious division in the North because of the gathering momentum for Home Rule in the other provinces in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first chapter discusses the advocacy for a revived nationalism by a whole cluster of Northern nationalist intellectuals including the Protestant Milligan. In her literary work, Milligan began reclaiming Irish heroes such as Cuchulain as essential to an Ulster-centric nationalism, a manoeuvre that laid the foundation for similarly Northern-centred mythic plays once the Ulster Literary Theatre began operating. A fascinating account of the founding of the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society in 1895 and its subsequent promulgation of an ecumenical Northern nationalism in the run-up to the centenary of 1798, occupies much of chapter two. Chapter three's close account of the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre is especially strong, attending as it does to the notion of identity as performance, the interaction between the forerunners of the Abbey Theatre and the founders of the ULT, and the Feis of the Nine Glens in Country Antrim in 1904, which last event enabled the ULT to posit an area of rural, Gaelic Ulster as a counterpart to the valorized West of Ireland in the Abbey repertoire. In this chapter and throughout the study, Yeats is a favourite whipping boy, characterized as haughty and grudging: for example, he refused, at first, to let the ULT perform his and...

Avian influenza viruses detected by surveillance of waterfowl in Ireland during 2003–2007

Specimens for the detection of avian influenza virus (AIV) were collected from 1937 waterfowl on the Wexford Sloblands, a major wetland reserve in southeast Ireland, between January 2003 and September 2007. During the same period, 1404 waterfowl were sampled at other locations in Ireland. Specimens were tested either by virus isolation or real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rtRT-PCR). A total of 32 isolates of AIV, comprising nine subtypes, was obtained from specimens from the Sloblands compared with just one isolate from elsewhere in Ireland. Samples from nine other waterfowl, five of which were from the Sloblands, tested positive for AIV by rtRT-PCR. Ecological factors are likely to have contributed to the higher detection rate of AIV at the Sloblands compared with the rest of Ireland. It was concluded that targeted surveillance at such sites is a cost-effective means of monitoring the circulation of new AIVs in waterfowl, whereas widespread opportunistic sampling is unproductive and wasteful of resources.

The Big Ban on Bituminous Coal Sales Revisited: Serious Epidemics and Pronounced Trends Feign Excess Mortality Previously Attributed to Heavy Black-Smoke Exposure

The effect of banning bituminous coal sales on the black-smoke concentration and the mortality rates in Dublin, Ireland, has been analyzed recently. Based on the application of standard epidemiological procedures, the authors concluded that, as a result of the ban, the total nontrauma death rate was reduced strongly (−8.0% unadjusted, −5.7% adjusted). The purpose of this study was to reanalyze the original data with the aim of clarifying the three most important aspects of the study, (a) the effect of epidemics, (b) the trends in mortality rates due to advances in public health care, and (c) the correlation between mortality rates and black-smoke concentrations. Particular attention has been devoted to a detailed evaluation of the time dependence of mortality rates, stratified by season. Death rates were found to be strongly enhanced during three severe pre-ban winter–spring epidemics. The cardiovascular mortality rates exhibited a continuous decrease over the whole study period, in general accordance with trends in the rest of Ireland. These two effects can fully account for the previously identified apparent correlation between reduced mortality and the very pronounced ban-related lowering of the black-smoke concentration. The third important finding was that in nonepidemic pre-ban seasons even large changes in the concentration of black smoke had no detectable effect on mortality rates. The reanalysis suggests that epidemiological studies exploring the effect of ambient particulate matter on mortality require improved tools allowing proper adjustment for epidemics and trends. Aspects of harvesting and more recent results derived from a distributed lag model covering the effects of black smoke and temperature are also discussed.

Northern Ireland

Summary Maintained by the desires of the Catholic community to see Northern Ireland unified with the rest of Ireland and the Protestants' desire to remain part of the United Kingdom, violence in Northern Ireland lasted for 30 years, causing 3,585 deaths. This violence impacted people's lives through mental health and intergroup relations. While some individuals were deeply scarred by “the troubles,” most learned to cope partly by habituation, distancing, and/or denial. The impact on intergroup relations has been subtler but more damaging. Segregation in housing and education is widespread. This in turn has made it harder to reach a long-term settlement.

A Cross-National Perspective on School Bullying in Northern Ireland: A Supplement to Smith, et al. (1999)

There is great value in exploring the prevalence of school bullying from a cross-national perspective. Smith, Morita, Junger-Tas, Olweus, Catalano, and Slee in 1999 presented a cross-national perspective on the nature, prevalence, and correlates of school bullying that encompassed a wide range of countries. However, Northern Ireland was not included, despite potentially being an important country to include, given its volatile social, ethnic, and religious history--leading to the concern that the population has become somewhat habituated to low level aggression. Thus, the present paper provides a review of the current literature on school bullying in the Northern Ireland school system. Evidence presented suggests that the incidence of school bullying in Northern Ireland may be higher than that in the rest of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Fertility Decline in Scotland, England and Wales, and Ireland: Comparisons from the 1911 Census of Fertility

Data on family size by year of marriage, age at marriage, and duration of marriage, from the 1911 Fertility Census, are compared between Scotland, England and Wales, Irish county boroughs, and the rest of Ireland. While means show significant intercountry differences, from the 1880s marked similarities are found across all the countries in the pattern of fertility decline, strongly suggesting significant fertility limitation in rural Ireland well before 1911. Noting the implications for the use of rural Ireland as a natural fertility population, the data are instead compared with the Coale-Trussell and Hinde-Woods schedules. The former provides more plausible results, which imply strong period rather than cohort effects in the fertility decline. Except in rural Ireland, little evidence is found for significant fertility limitation early in marriage among younger marrying couples, but many older marrying couples appear to have stopped childbearing at very low parities from an early date.

Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983 by Oliver P. Rafferty

BOOK REVIEWS 249 France and Spain (1598), in which the papacy played a significant role. These negotiations were carried on through other channels, especially the general of the Franciscans,who served as a mediator between the two parties. So the need for a wide consultation of sources is obvious, a fact, however,which does not at all diminish the importance ofthe publication ofthe Hauptinstruktionen. One wishes that one contributor had taken as a topic Clement's conception of the papal office itself as found in the instructions. Robert Bireley, SJ. Loyola University Chicago Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983- By Oliver P. Rafferty. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1994. Pp. xiv, 306. $3995.) "Ulster," as is well known, is an ambiguous term. The historic province of Ulster was shired into nine counties, but since 1920 the name is often used of the six partitioned from the rest of Ireland. In this book the word is used in the narrower sense in describing events since partition, but in the broader sense for events before it. The author is a Jesuit priest with his roots very much in the "Ulster" of the twentieth century. His work is a courageous, and to a great extent successful, attempt at panoramic history. He begins with the surrender ofthe chiefs of Gaelic Ulster in 1603. This, and even more the Plantation which followed it, is taken as the crucial point in the distinctiveness of the Ulster Catholic experience, though, as he himself says,"a note of caution should be sounded when using the term 'Ulster Catholicism.'" In some ways it is not easy to pin down what separated Ulster Catholics from their social equals elsewhere in Ireland, whether they came from the poor areas of Donegal or the Sperrin Mountains in County Deny, or from certain parts of County Down, where even at the worst of times some Catholics managed a comparatively comfortable existence. In fact, "Ulster "is neither homogeneous nor altogether distinctive. It would seem arguable that the "Ulster Catholics" are a substantially separate community only since the foundation of the state of Northern Ireland in 1920, and that what marks them off from other Irish Catholics is political as well as religious and cultural. Certainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "Ulster"was part ofthe political unit of Ireland, and in the nineteenth, part of the even larger unit of the United Kingdom. These facts impose a certain measure of untidiness on the book, but overall it is a very useful compendium of information on what has a genuine claim to being a distinctive culture. The author is widely read and uses his knowledge well. I do feel it is unfair to Blessed Conor O'Devany to describe him as "a close associate of [Hugh] O'Neill." He was arraigned and executed in 1612 on a charge of treason, but at that date and certainly in his case a trial for treason was a show trial, with the state not too nice in its handling of evidence. He himself claimed that he was in no way involved in war or politics, and what 250 BOOK REVIEWS evidence there is supports him. He was bishop of Down and Connor, more or less coterminous with O'Neill Clandeboye, a group less than enthusiastic in support of "the Great O'Neill" during the Nine Years' War. From time to time there is something which either the author or the copy-editor should have noticed —for example, the seventeenth-century bishop David Rothe would scarcely recognize himself as "Michael," and a very well-known bishop of the nineteenth century,James Warren Doyle ("J.K.L.") appears as "John." PatrickJ. Corish Si. Patrick's College, Maynooth L'Augustinisme à l'ancienne Faculté de théologie de Louvain. Edited by Mathijs Lamberigts. [Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, CXL] (Leuven: Leuven University Press. Uitgeverij Peeters. 1994. Pp. vi, 455. B.F. 2400,-.) This book reproduces most of the papers presented in November, 1990, at a conference organized by the Center for the Study ofJansenism at the Catholic University in Leuven. The occasion was the 350th anniversary of the publication of CorneliusJansenius' famedAugustinus. The goal was to study more precisely the theological components ofJansenism...

Scenarios of Disaster and Hope for Northern Ireland

Nine months ago the way ahead in Northern Ireland seemed clear. Perhaps for the first time in many years. Representatives of parries elected six months earlier to the Northern Ireland Assembly, holding between them a clear overall majority of the seats in that body, had agreed with the Irish Government and the United Kingdom Government at the Sunningdale Conference on a common program for the future government of the Province. And for its future relations with the rest of Ireland.

Daniel O’Connell: income, expenditure and despair

The barony of Iveragh in County Kerry forms the extreme western part of the peninsula that runs out from Killarney. It is mountainous and weather-beaten tourist country, facing the Atlantic and separated from the rest of Ireland by a range of mountains. The O’Connells had been the principal family in the barony for some centuries before Daniel O’Connell was born in 1775. Several branches of his family along with other Gaelic families—McCarthys, O’Mahonys, O’Sullivans and Sugrues—had survived the turmoil and confiscations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the penal laws of the eighteenth. By the time of O’Connell’s birth these families were small landlords—frequently middlemen—whose distinction owed more to lineage and ‘following’ than to landed wealth. The one substantial landlord among them was Maurice O’Connell of Derrynane, usually known as Hunting-Cap, the head of the senior branch of the O’Connells. As a smuggler, farmer and landlord, by lending money to landlords and by thrift, he had greatly increased his inherited property so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century he could be described as a rich man. A childless widower, he adopted his nephew Daniel as his heir.

The Belfast Letters, the Irish Volunteers 1778–79 and the Catholics

A Distinguished contemporary historian of eighteenthcentury Ireland has observed that “the early history of the Volunteers has never been written.” This is not to say that the Volunteers have not been written about, for no subject has urged Irish pens to greater industry than have the Volunteers. Yet, during the past one hundred and fifty years historians of each generation have been content for the most part to rely upon the research and repeat the generalizations of the previous generation. Consequently, the circumstances surrounding the raising of independent companies in Belfast and the reasons for the spread of that institution over the rest of Ireland in 1778–79 remain obscured and confused.

Connacht in the eighteenth century

Connacht in the eighteenth century was regarded as the most remote and the most catholic part of Ireland. These two qualities gave the region a very individual character, and the few travellers who ventured to cross the Shannon had the sensation of entering another world. This did not apply to two of the five counties—Leitrim and Sligo, which had been allotted tothe soldiers of the parliamentary army in the Cromwellian settlement and for this reason were not typical of the province. The essential Connacht lay beyond the Shannon in the counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, the greater part of which had been reserved for catholic landowners in the Cromwellian settlement. The result of this arrangement was to leave the catholic gentry in a much stronger position in Connacht than in the rest of Ireland. This position remained largely unshaken by the Jacobite war, as the treaty of Limerick, the terms of the surrender of Galway, and their own solidarity protected most of the Connacht landholders from confiscation at the end of the war.When the eighteenth century began, several hundred catholic landholders were in occupation of a substantial part of Galway and Mayo and, to a lesser degree, of Roscommon. This situation was a constant source of anxiety to the authorities, who from time to time were alarmed about the prospect of a French landing in the west supported by catholic landlords and catholic peasants. It was said that catholics in Connacht outnumbered protestants by fifty to one and that in some counties there were so few protestant freeholders to serve on juries that the region could scarcely be held to acknowledge the authority of the government.