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In 1940 the war that the Irish state had hoped to hold at arm’s length became harder to regard as a distant continental struggle. Éire, as the state was named in the 1937 Constitution, remained neutral and its government called the wartime condition simply the Emergency. Yet Germany’s victories in the Low Countries and France during May and June transformed Ireland’s strategic position. The coast of occupied France now faced Ireland across the Celtic Sea; Britain feared an Atlantic invasion route and wanted the former treaty ports back in service; Dublin feared that surrendering neutrality would compromise sovereignty, inflame old divisions and expose an inadequately equipped country to attack.
The most conspicuous development within Ireland during 1859 was the Evangelical Protestant revival in Ulster. Its immediate roots lay before the calendar year. Prayer meetings involving young converts had begun at Kells, County Antrim, in late 1857, encouraged by the Presbyterian minister John Hamilton Moore. During 1858 and, especially, 1859, reports of conversions, intense religious feeling, prayer gatherings and crowded services travelled rapidly through Presbyterian networks, newspapers and personal testimony. It was therefore not an event that can responsibly be assigned to one day, but 1859 was unmistakably its year of greatest public visibility.
