Introduction
The Irish collection remains one of the library’s most used, and includes materials on Ireland’s history from the early medieval period to the present day. The strengths of the collection include: an extensive bibliographic sub-collection, including archive guides, bibliographies and manuscript catalogues; an array of biographical reference works; holdings of published sources concerning Ireland’s political and administrative history especially from the twelfth to the early nineteenth century; published religious sources of the medieval and early modern periods; and a growing collection of works on Irish local history.
Highlights from the Collections
Guides to Sources
- Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland
- Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy
- Clavis litterarum Hibernensium: medieval Irish books and texts (c.400-c.1600)
- Directory of Irish Archives
- Ireland in the nineteenth century : a breviate of official publications
- Irish family history on the web : a directory
- Irish family history research
- Irish Libraries, Archives, Museums and Genealogical Centres
- Medieval Gaelic Sources
- Medieval record sources
- Northern Ireland 1921-1974 : a select bibliography
- The public record : sources for local studies in the Public Record Office of Ireland
- Records of the Irish Catholic Church
- Records of the Irish Famine : a guide to local archives, 1840-1855
- Sources for early modern Irish history, 1534-1641
- Tracing your Irish ancestors : the complete guide
Historiography and Memory
- Commemorating Ireland : history, politics, culture
- Doing Irish local history : pursuit and practice
- Forgetful remembrance: social forgetting and vernacular historiography of a rebellion in Ulster
- The making of modern Irish history : revisionism and the revisionist controversy
- The politics of memoir and the Northern Ireland conflict
- The present and the past in medieval Irish chronicles
- Reconstructing Ireland’s past : a history of the Irish Manuscripts Commission
- Remembering 1916: the Easter Rising, the Somme and the politics of memory in Ireland
- Remembering the Troubles: contesting the recent past in Northern Ireland
- The shadow of a year : the 1641 rebellion in Irish history and memory
- Talking stones: the politics of memorialization in post-conflict Northern Ireland
- Who’s afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016
Biographical Reference Works
- Burke’s genealogical and heraldic history of the landed gentry of Ireland
- Dictionary of Irish biography : from the earliest times to the year 2002
- A dictionary of the print trade in Ireland, 1550-1775
- Dictionary of Ulster biography
- History of the Irish parliament, 1692-1800 : Commons, constituencies and statutes
- The peerage of Ireland : or, a genealogical history of the present nobility of that kingdom
- Royal Irish Constabulary officers : a biographical dictionary and genealogical guide, 1816-1922
To c. 1540
- Ancient laws of Ireland
- The annals of Clonmacnoise
- The annals of Ireland
- The annals of Loch Cé : a chronicle of Irish affairs from A.D. 1014 to A.D. 1590
- The annals of Ulster
- Calendar of documents relating to Ireland : preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London
- Cath Cluana Tarbh
- Documents on the affairs of Ireland before the King’s Council
- Expugnatio Hibernica
- Historic and municipal documents of Ireland, A.D. 1172-1320 from the archives of the city of Dublin, etc.
- Irish exchequer payments 1270-1446
- Liber epistolarum sancti Patricii episcopi
- Marriage disputes : a fragmentary Old Irish law-text
- Materials for the history of the Franciscan province of Ireland, A.D. 1230-1450
- Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae partim hactenus ineditae
1540-1801
- The 1641 depositions
- Arthur Young’s tour in Ireland (1776-1779)
- Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, Tudor period (1547-1553), (1566-1567) & (1568-1571)
- Campaign journals of the Elizabethan Irish wars
- Extents of Irish monastic possessions, 1540-1541 : from manuscripts in the Public Record Office, London
- The formation of the Orange Order, 1795-1798 : the edited papers of Colonel William Blacker and Colonel Robert H. Wallace
- Franco-Irish correspondence, December 1688-February 1692
- The history of the rebellion and civil wars in Ireland
- Ireland in the age of revolution, 1760-1805
- The journals of the House of Commons of Ireland 1613-1776
- Original letters and papers in illustration of the history of the church in Ireland during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth
- Proceedings of the Irish House of Lords, 1771-1800
- The proclamations of Ireland : 1660-1820
- Records of the General Synod of Ulster from 1691 to 1820
- The Tanner letters : original documents and notices of Irish affairs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- Turas na dTaoiseach nUltach as Éirinn
- The writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763-98
1801-1921
- The Catholic question in Ireland and England, 1798-1822 : the papers of Denys Scully
- The correspondence of Daniel O’Connell
- The famine decade : contemporary accounts, 1841-1851
- The framework of home rule
- Ireland : 1841/1851 census abstracts (Republic of Ireland) & (Northern Ireland)
- Irish political documents : 1869-1916
- James Connolly: selected writings
- Letters from Dublin, Easter 1916 : Alfred Fannin’s diary of the rising
- Letters from Ireland during the famine of 1847
- Letters of a great Irish landlord : a selection from the estate correspondence of the third Marquis of Downshire, 1809-45
- Maud Gonne’s Irish nationalist writings, 1895-1946
- Miontuairisc an chead Dala, 1919-1921 = Minutes of proceedings of the first parliament of the Republic of Ireland 1919-1921
- Witnesses : inside the Easter Rising
- Women in Ireland, 1800-1918 : a documentary history
- Words of the dead chief : being extracts from the public speeches and other pronouncements of Charles Stewart Parnell
Ireland since 1921
- The American Commission on Irish Independence, 1919 : the diary, correspondence, and report
- Aspirations and realities : a documentary history of economic development policy in Ireland since 1922
- Everybody matters : a memoir
- His Grace is displeased : the select correspondence of John Charles McQuaid
- In great haste : the letters of Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan
- Irish political documents : 1916-1949
- The memoirs of Senator James G. Douglas (1887-1953)
- Parliamentary election results in Ireland, 1918-92
- Prisoners : the civil war letters of Ernie O’Malley
Northern Ireland 1960s-1998
- An archaeology of the Troubles: the dark heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison
- Bloody Sunday 1972: Lord Widgery's report of the events in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 30 January 1972
- Bobby Sands: writings from prison
- Great hatred, little room: making peace in Northern Ireland
- A long long war : voices from the British Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-98
- Memoirs of a revolutionary
- Northern Ireland : a political directory, 1968-1999
- Peace in Ireland: the war of ideas
- A place apart: Northern Ireland in the 1970s
- Reporting the Troubles: journalists tell their stories of the Northern Ireland conflict
- Voices from the grave: two men's war in Ireland
Irish Local History
- The black book of Limerick
- Calendar of ancient records of Dublin in the possession of the municipal corporation of that city
- Connemara after the famine : journal of a survey of the Martin Estate
- Defenders of the plantation of Ulster, 1641-1691 : muster roll of the garrison of Londonderry during the Rebellion of 1642-1643 ; defenders of Ireland during the Williamite War of 1689-1691
- The Dublin guild merchant roll, c. 1190-1265
- Dublin tenement life : an oral history
- General view of the agriculture and mineralogy, present state and circumstances of County Wicklow
- The great parchment book of Waterford
- Kilkenny city records : Liber primus Kilkenniensis : the earliest books of the Corporation of Kilkenny now extant
- Knights’ fees in counties Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny, 13th-15th century
- The letterbook of Richard Hare, merchant of Cork, 1771-1772
- The minutes of the Antrim ministers’ meetings, 1654-8
- Pathways to Ulster’s past : sources and resources for local studies
- Preaching in Belfast, 1747-54 : a selection of the sermons of James Saurin
- The Ulster port books 1612-15
Online Resources
Please note that access to the majority of these resources is available onsite at the IHR, or offsite for staff and students of the IHR only.
Periodicals
Theses
The library has an extensive collection of University of London PhD and MPhil history theses from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first. Some titles relevant to irish history include:
- The greenshirts : fascism in the Irish free state, 1935-45
- The medieval Irish parliament
- Policing the land war : the development of British government policy towards political and agrarian protest and crime in Ireland, 1879-1892
- Sir John Davies' "Law Reports" and the consolidation of the Tudor conquest of Ireland
- Tudor rule in Ireland in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII with special reference to Anglo-Irish financial information
Other Collections
Within the IHR Wohl Library
Browse collection guides to find material relevant to your particular area of interest. Other collections that may be relevant include:
Other libraries, archives, organisations
Further Help
Contact us if you would like help on finding or using our collections, or if you have any comments or suggestions about the content of this guide. We are happy to help.
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