Search results

The developments and achievements of the Irish administration, overshadowed by the more spectacular aspects of Irish history have received comparatively little attention. But Irish conditions in the 19th Century encouraged and compelled the state to exert itself on a more extensive front than in contemporary England and a number of government departments played a very active and often creative part in Irish social and economic life. In this work, originally published in 1964, and based on a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, the author shows how the administrative structure was drastically rationalised and modernised. The author is also interested both in the work the administration performed and the men who staffed it. The Irish administration during the century came into contact with many different aspects of Irish society.

Although largely regarded as a failure, the Irish Convention of 1917, might, had it been successful, have resulted in a totally different Ireland to the one which has emerged. It was an attempt to solve the apparently intractable Irish Question. This book, originally published in 1970, describes the debates which took place. These debates provide an anthology of Irish political thinking, and the committee proceedings offer interesting examples of negotiating techniques, Lloyd George intervening with consummate skill. The author concludes that the Convention may be dismissed as a failure, but that its work formed a stage in the evolution of the Irish settlement of the early 1920s.