Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.

A remarkable cluster of Irish town histories appeared in the early nineteenth century, coming after several generations of unprecedented urban growth. But that growth stalled and most Irish towns entered a long period of stagnation. Meanwhile, academic interest in the urban past became dormant. Urbanization in Ireland resumed in the twentieth century, but the study of urban history was late to develop and slow to move beyond the documentation of built heritage. However, public interest in medieval origins, official interest in urban heritage and the vision of a handful of medieval historians and historical geographers have helped transform the prospects for Irish urban history.

This article addresses efforts to reform market activity in pre-Famine Ireland, exploring Karl Polanyi's assertion that the ‘free market’ required ‘the intervention of the state in order to establish it’. It begins by rooting Ireland's alleged ‘social ills’ – over-population and subsistence agriculture – in terms of integration into international markets from the mid-eighteenth century. From the crisis of the 1820s, state actors came to see the extension of the cash economy as central to remedying these ‘ills’. Altering the physical fabric of exchange to encourage ‘rational’ market behaviour, I argue reformers aimed to ‘enclose’ commercial spaces economically and physically from non-market forces. Utilizing novel technologies of vision and precision, market space could thus operate according to a logic and ethics of its own, inculcating voluntary compliance through new standards of ‘trust’ and ‘fairness’. I conclude by asking, if indeed the state had come to operate as much through ‘freedom’ as force by 1845, how we might begin to reassess the course and context of the Irish Famine.

The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.