Irish Political History: Guidelines and Reflections

Abstract

The political history of modern Ireland has been dominated by the challenge of how to achieve a stable political order whose legitimacy would be generally accepted. For most of the last three centuries it was believed that the struggle for control of the state, and the actions of those who actually controlled it, were the central determinants of the Irish experience. Historians and politicians debated whether the story of the Kingdom of Ireland revolved around the extension of the authority of Crown jurisdiction over the whole island, or whether it was the assertion of legislative independence culminating, for what became the dominant Irish political tradition, in the Republic? For conservatives, Irish problems stemmed from barbaric anarchic resistance to law as such, thereby promoting violence and ignorance and paralysing commerce; if this resistance were ever to prevail, anarchy and tyranny would ensue. Liberals and nationalists, who were overlapping but not identical in their thinking, asked whose law was being resisted and whether the ‘barbarians’ opposed civilisation as such or rather the arbitrary rule of a self-aggrandising elite.¹ For Whigs or nationalists Ireland’s religious development was explicable in terms of the effects of state decisions.