Philip Bull's Cambridge Ph.D dissertation (1972) was, in part, an attempt to unravel the relationship of the land issue to nationalist politics in Ireland in the period 1895 to 1904. This was a decade in which both these phenomena became unstable variables. His exploration of the historical significance of this relationship in this period developed subsequently parallel to the unfolding of the crisis in Northern Ireland and of changes in the way in which the nineteenth and twentieth century history of Ireland came to be understood. In this chapter he develops and justifies the argument that the course of events in Ireland in the 1970s and up to the present has given a new context within which the working out of the Irish land question should now be understood.
The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. In eleven essays a group of authors including some of the most influential historians and social scientists of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explore Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents the current state of our understanding of the issue of land in Ireland in two survey essays that cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book's second section presents a series of reflections in which historians and social scientists look back on how they have approached the topic of land in Ireland in their earlier writings. A third section presents some innovative new research on various aspects of the Irish land question.