Descendancy

David Fitzpatrick is Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He graduated from the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge, which he revisited in 2013 as Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College. He is an acknowledged pioneer in diverse aspects of modern Irish history, including the Irish revolutionary experience as revealed in local sources, the transformative impact of the Great War, the underlying affinities between Ireland's Protestant and Catholic communities, the analysis of personal testimony to illuminate migration, the enduring appeal and influence of the Orange Order, and the use of historical evidence to reinterpret the work of Irish writers such as Yeats, Synge, and MacNeice. His works include Politics and Irish Life: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (1977), Irish Emigration, 1801-1921 (1984), Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Colonial Australia (1994), The Two Irelands, 1912-1939 (1998), Harry Boland's Irish Revolution (2003) and 'Solitary and Wild': Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland (2012). His most recent edited volume is Terror in Ireland, 1916-1923 (2012), produced by the Trinity History Workshop, which he founded in 1986.

'Historians sometimes explain the governance of eighteenth-century Ireland using the term Protestant Ascendancy. This compelling and accessible new book by David Fitzpatrick charts the decline in Protestant power afterwards, beginning in 1795 when the Orange Order formed. This was no uniform plunge into powerlessness. By exploring different facets of Protestantism, Fitzpatrick expertly reveals the dimensions of descent.' Allan Blackstock, University of Ulster

• 1. Prologue: Protestant descendancy in Ireland; Part I. Orangeism: 2. Orangeism and Irish military history; 3. The Orange Order and the border; 4. The gardener and the stable boy: Yeats, MacNeice, and the problem of Orangeism; 5. Methodism and the Orange Order; Part II. Covenant: 6. Ulster's covenanters; 7. Ulster's non-covenanters; Part III. Exodus?: 8. Protestant depopulation and the Irish revolution; 9. The spectre of 'ethnic cleansing' in revolutionary Ireland; Statistical appendix; Index.