The electoral debacle of 1874 removed only the least important aspect of Irish liberalism. The real strength of the liberal approach to Irish government continued to lie in the much less accessible, but much more important, official world of Dublin Castle which, in the early 1880s, was still confidently running Ireland as it thought best without too much reference to public opinion. The emergence of militant nationalism should not divert attention from the plain fact that the government of the country remained firmly in the hands of liberal-minded administrators, of whom very little is known. Dublin Castle, like Whitehall, guarded its secrets with care, the great scandal of 1884 marking the single departure from normal practice. The high value which the liberal establishment of 1880–85 placed on discretion is registered most forcibly through the lack of memoirs written by senior officials, whose competent management of affairs deserved a permanent literary memorial. No Boswell, or even Edward Hamilton (Downing Street's uncritical diarist at this time), came forward to describe the régime at work or at play. Unpublicised achievements are easily forgotten: and in this case the problem of penetrating a wall of silence is made more difficult by the absence of most of the appropriate archives. Apart from Spencer himself, only Thomas O'Hagan, the Irish lord chancellor (1880–81) and one of the least important figures in Forster's circle, seems to have preserved a substantial body of papers, though further discoveries may still be made.
The membership is the real strength of the BDA