Richard Davis born in India and educated at Trinity College Dublin, is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He is the editor of ‘To Solitude Consigned’: The Tasmanian Journal of William Smith O’Brien,1849-1853 (1994) and has previously published books on Young Ireland and Tasmania, Arthur Griffith and Sinn Féinn, the Tasmanian Labour Party, Irish influences in New Zealand and the ideological differences between paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.