Even though violent popular protest was a common feature of life in early eighteenth-century Dublin, the riots that broke out in 1729 were exceptionally severe and long-lasting and resulted in the worst disorder to occur in the capital in decades. Over a ten-month period rival gangs rioted against each other or against government forces, causing a considerable degree of destruction, injury and death. At the height of the disorder, in late spring and summer, ‘vast numbers’ of people were reportedly beaten and abused by rioters, and residents of the city became fearful for their personal safety. According to the Dublin Intelligence citizens moved ‘mostly in a kind of hurry’ on account of the riots; parts of the city became no-go areas, and gangs of ‘reprobates’ gathered on the outskirts of the city to rob travellers and rape women. The political elite voiced their concerns too, in particular at the length of time the disorder was lasting. The archbishop of Armagh, Hugh Boulter, wrote to the secretary of state, the duke of Newcastle, from Dublin in March 1730 complaining that they had ‘suffered very much from riots and tumults in this town last summer and even during the present sitting of the parliament’.

In May 1974 the Ulster Workers' Council (U.W.C.), comprising loyalist trade unionists, paramilitaries and politicians, mounted a general strike backed by widespread intimidation. Their target was the Sunningdale Agreement, which produced a power-sharing executive for Northern Ireland and proposed a crossborder institution with the Republic of Ireland. After a fortnight the U.W.C. successfully brought Northern Ireland to a halt and the Executive collapsed, leading to the restoration of direct rule from Westminster. Three years later the United Unionist Action Council (U.U.A.C.) adopted the same strategy, demanding a return to devolution with majority rule and the repression of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (P.I.R.A.). This second strike was defeated. Many contemporary politicians were critical of the Labour government's failure to put down the U.W.C. strike. William Whitelaw, formerly secretary of state for Northern Ireland in Edward Heath's Conservative administration and the minister responsible for the bulk of the negotiations prior to Sunningdale, believed that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, did not have the same attachment to the political settlement and were less willing to support the Northern Ireland Executive in its hour of need. Paddy Devlin of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.) argued that the unwillingness to arrest those involved, ‘more than any other single action by the authorities ... caused thousands of law-abiding people who had earlier given support to the executive to switch loyalties’.

The title of this article is consciously provocative, and thus cries out for immediate explanation and perhaps, in some sense, for the provocation to be disarmed. Why, then, is ‘Was Ireland a colony?’ a bad question - or rather, a question often badly posed? Reasons include the fact that the question is so intertwined with other disputes, including directly political ones, and because there are problems with the term ‘colony’ itself, which has in so many varied contexts been overworked, under-theorised and even under-defined. The oversimplified, stark ‘either/or’ nature of the question is also problematic, when it would be more productive, and perhaps more precise, to think in terms of colonial features in combination with others, if not, indeed, of graduations and degrees of coloniality.

Many strands of the complex story of Irish migration to Europe in the early modern period are currently the focus of active research by historians both at home and abroad. The traditional emphasis on researching the Catholic Irish who travelled to Europe to further their education is now less pronounced, as researchers move beyond the archives of religious orders and academic institutions into the secular archives of France, Spain and other regions of western Europe. This changing trend is probably dictated more by economic and social considerations than by ideology.

The late Peter Hart's tentative yet provocative application of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the Irish revolution, especially as practised in Co. Cork, continues to arouse widespread indignation and incredulity. Two associated issues have dominated the debate: the influence of sectarian hatred on the conduct of the I.R.A., and the extent to which Protestants were actually forced out of their homes by intimidation or fear. Though a few historians have endorsed Hart's claim that a substantial number of Protestants were murdered or expelled because of their religion, most argue that such attacks were primarily motivated by political or economic rather than sectarian motives. Similar points have been made, from the revolutionary epoch onwards, by liberal Protestants as well as republican sympathisers, whose rejection of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ hypothesis has sometimes degenerated into vicious ad hominem attacks on Hart and his allies. The issue of motivation is notoriously resistant to historical analysis: all motives are mixed, some are deliberately concealed, and others are unconscious. Little would be gained by making yet another attempt to disentangle the often contradictory hopes, fears, resentments, and rationalisations underlying republican conduct in the revolutionary years.