More dangerous than any of these troubles was the attack made by Edward Bruce on the English power in Ireland.  That power had been on the wane during the last two generations.  Edward I. had formed schemes for the better administration of the country, but little had come of them.  The English government in Dublin gradually lost such control as it had possessed over the remoter parts of the island.  The shire organisation, set up in an earlier generation, became little more than nominal.  The constitutional movement of the thirteenth century extended to the island, and the Irish parliament, then growing up out of the old council, reflected in a blurred fashion the organisation of the English parliament of the three estates.  But royal lieutenants and councils, shires and sheriffs, parliaments and justices had only the most superficial influence on Irish life.  Real authority was divided between the Norman lords of the plain and the Celtic chieftains of the hills.  Each feudal lord hated his fellows, and bitter as were the feuds of Fitzgeralds and Burghs, they were mild as compared with the rancorous hereditary factions which divided the native septs from each other.  These divisions alone made it possible for the king’s officers to keep up some semblance of royal rule.  If they were seldom obeyed, the divisions in the enemies’ camps prevented any chance of their being overthrown.  Thus the Irish went on living a rude, turbulent life of perpetual purposeless war and bloodshed.  Ireland was a wilder, larger, more remote Welsh march, and the resemblance was heightened by the fact that many of the Anglo-Norman principalities were in the hands of great English or marcher families, and that the Irish foot-soldier played only a less important part than the Welsh archer and pikeman among the light-armed soldiers of the English crown.

The easiest way to keep up a show of English government was to form an alliance between the crown and some of the baronial houses.  Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, the most powerful of the feudal lords of Ireland, was the only one who at that period bore the title of earl.  He had long been interested in general English affairs, and his kinswomen had intermarried into great British houses.  One of his daughters married Robert Bruce when he was Earl of Carrick, and another was more recently wedded to Earl Gilbert of Gloucester.  Despite the Bruce connexion, the Earl of Ulster was still trusted by the English party, and the king gave him the command of an Irish army which he had intended to send against Scotland in 1314.  Richard was too busy fighting the Ulster clans of O’Donnell and O’Neil, and too jealous of the Fitzgeralds, his feudal rivals, to throw his heart into the hopeless task of gathering together the two nations and many clans of Ireland into a single host.  The death of Earl Gilbert at Bannockburn broke his nearest tie with England, and the release of Elizabeth Bruce in exchange for Hereford gave his daughter the actual enjoyment of the throne of Scotland.  His natural instincts as an Irishman and as a baron were to restrain the power of his overlord.  When the news of Bruce’s victory produced a great stir among the Irish clans, he stood aside and let events take their course.