‘Ulster's love in letter'd gold’: the Battle of the Somme and the Ulster Memorial Tower, 1918–1935

This paper employs ideas of distance and proximity in exploring the diverse meanings of the Ulster Memorial Tower at Thiepval, France, between 1918, when the idea of an Ulster memorial was first proposed, and 1935, when responsibility for its maintenance was passed to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Tower, erected in 1921 as a memorial to men from Ulster who died in the Great War, can be read in a number of different but not necessarily easily reconciled ways. The construction and subsequent life of the memorial is inseparable from the politics of Irish partition and the consolidation of a unionist state in Northern Ireland. It is argued that that the meanings of the Tower were constructed both internally within Northern Ireland as an identity marker but also externally directed as the prime symbol of Britain's debt to Protestant Ulster. The paper concludes that the Tower's geographical distance from the society which had erected it was crucial, both to the external statements it made and to its ultimate lack of internal relevance to Ulster.     

Not quite as British as Finchley: the failed attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In a previous issue of Irish Studies Review I examined the unanticipated emergence in the late 1980s of a series of Conservative associations in Northern Ireland. In this follow-up article, I will seek to account for the subsequent swift and ignominious decline in the early 1990s of the Northern Irish Conservatives. While the fortunes of the Ulster Tories were undermined by a number of contingencies – the vagaries of parliamentary arithmetic and their own lack of political judgement foremost among them – their fate was sealed primarily by certain rather more structural concerns. In particular, the rapid decline of the Conservative associations in Northern Ireland owes its origins to the historically “loveless marriage” between Ulster unionists and the British state. The unionist community simply refused to vote in meaningful numbers for a political party at the centre of a Westminster establishment deemed hostile to the cause of the Union. In addition, the Conservative hierarchy would inevitably prove unwilling to nurture their own party associations in Northern Ireland as this “integrationist” project ran precisely counter to their own longstanding political ambitions for the region. This conflict of interests and intentions would in short order ensure the demise in all but name of the Northern Irish Conservatives. There can be few more dramatic illustrations of the mutual distrust that conjoins Ulster unionists and the British state than the string of lost deposits incurred by Conservative candidates running for office in Northern Ireland.     

The pens of the defeated: John Hewitt,Sam Thompson and the Northern Ireland Labour Party

Telescoping the political lives and work of Sam Thompson and John Hewitt, this article demonstrates the importance of the Labour movement on both Belfast-born Protestant writers and how this inculcated a socialist conviction quite separate and antagonistic to Ulster unionism. Referencing Thompson's unpublished, largely unknown plays as well as newspapers and his trio of performed works, the article illuminates his public impact as well as the significance of the play Over the Bridge (1960). Hewitt's early political activities and regionalist outlook are explored, as is the controversy surrounding his 1957 move to Coventry. The underestimated importance of a class perspective within Northern Protestantism is addressed, the article arguing that questions of national identity are secondary to the writers' class and internationalist politics. With continuing resonance, literature and writing itself are shown as intrinsic to the Northern Ireland Labour Party, with which both were associated, fuelling resistance to both unionism and Irish nationalism.     

E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.     

‘Each fantasy chosen begin’: the music of The Divine Comedy

This article considers the cultural and social context for the music of the Northern Irish band The Divine Comedy. It focuses on three mid-1990s albums – Liberation (1993), Promenade (1994) and Casanova (1996) – and debates the significance of this performance of alternative Ulster masculinity during the peace process. It will detail the lyrical obsession with a very particular type of imagined Anglo-Irishness during the first two of these albums, and then consider the complicated uses of the ‘Britpop’ genre in Casanova. This music is baroque, literary and written by an Anglican bishop's son, Neil Hannon, who grew up in Enniskillen during the Troubles. It will consider how Hannon cobbles together an acceptable identity through the use of literary pretentiousness and a carefully crafted pop persona.     

The weird tales,spicy detectives,and startling stories of Irish-America: Irish characters in American pulp magazines

The pulp magazines that dominated early twentieth-century American popular culture helped shape popular understandings of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, masked hero) were defined in part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. They played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilisation and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic American century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the USA.     

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.     

The texted and textured construction of Irish identity in the theatrical world of Charleston,South Carolina

On the eve of the American Civil War, the Irish who had immigrated to the United States as a result of the Great Famine were in the process of constructing an Irish working-class identity in Charleston, South Carolina. A “legacy” for such construction had been created in the previous century: those who had come from Ireland then had used public displays of celebration and concomitant rhetorical devices to create the impression that they were willing and eager to assimilate. Their rituals at banquets and other public occasions “set the stage”, so to speak, for the next century's generation of immigrant Irish who also found it necessary to articulate publicly their claim to an ethnic American identity. Theatrical venues and staged performances served the Famine Irish well in this endeavour.     

Austerity and consociational government in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article examines the institutional crisis of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2015 as a case study on the impact of austerity on multiculturalism in Ireland. I make a case for viewing the Assembly as a multicultural institution through pointing to the historical role of community relations policy, which was directed at reconciling “sectarian” Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists. It did so through shifting from an understanding of the conflict as one based on the struggle for Irish national self-determination to one based on conflicting identities. I argue that Sinn Féin’s embracing of multiculturalism is a product of its accommodation to British rule in Ireland. Sinn Féin has made a virtue out of its political volte-face by becoming the strongest advocate of ethnic Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland. The ethnic power politics of Sinn Féin has found its unionist equivalent in the political manoeuvrings of the Democratic Unionist Party. Austerity measures imposed by the Westminster government have created problems for the parties in the power-sharing Assembly, problems that threaten the collapse of the Assembly. It is because of, rather than in spite of, the multicultural mechanisms embedded in the Assembly that the institution has got to crisis point. This is an institutional crisis, not a crisis of multiculturalism.     

Archaeological Explorations of Cultural Identity and Rural Economy in the North of Ireland: Goodland,County Antrim

Renewed examination of an enigmatic settlement site perched atop a cliff above Murlough Bay in Goodland Townland, County Antrim, Northern Ireland calls into question long held ideas about Gaelic rural economy on the eve of the Ulster Plantation by reintroducing the complex cultural and political relationships between the north of Ireland and the Scottish isles. Long interpreted as temporary post-medieval booley huts associated with seasonal transhumance, recent re-evaluation of the site suggests instead that Goodland represents a permanent seventeenth-century Highland Scottish village. Although the medieval linkages between the north of Ireland and the Scottish isles have long been acknowledged, twentieth-century sectarianism has subjugated awareness of the Highland (Roman Catholic) Scots focusing upon the legacy of the in-migration of Protestant Lowland Scots during the Ulster Plantation. Material evidence at Goodland re-introduces the Highland Scot to the contested landscape of contemporary Ulster identity, while also facilitating analysis of continuity, change, and cultural complexity in the rural economy of early modern Ireland.     

The Ulster Unionist Party and the U. S. Role in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1994–2000

Since the beginning of the "Troubles," Ulster unionists generally have viewed American involvement in Northern Ireland as biased towards nationalists and "unwanted interference" in their internal affairs. Yet despite vehement condemnations, unionists made virtually no attempt to counteract Irish-American perceptions or to explain unionism to U. S. audiences. But from 1994 onwards, mainly in response to the expanding involvement of the Clinton administration in the peace process, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) launched a sustained effort to engage the White House and get its views across in America. While some of these UUP initiatives got nowhere, others achieved a considerable degree of success, particularly the effort to convey unionist perspectives to the heart of White House policymaking.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

Discourses of nation among migrants from Northern Ireland: Irishness,Britishness and the spaces in‐between

Narratives of nation and identity are highly contested in Northern Ireland, with allegiance usually given to an Irish nation or a British nation, or located somewhere along a continuum between the two. The negotiation of one's identity along this continuum can become particularly complex once one migrates outside Northern Ireland. Adopting a sense of belonging to or exclusion from an Irish diasporic community is part of this process of negotiation. This paper explores these negotiations of identity among both Catholic and Protestant migrants from Northern Ireland to England. It utilises an oral history archive of interviews with individuals who migrated in the latter half of the 20th century, and focuses on narratives of nation and identity among these migrants. Drawing on the notion of England as a diaspora space, in order to make sense of these narratives, the intersections between diasporic Irishness and different British identities are untangled in an attempt to draw out the spaces ‘in‐between’ two, often polarised, narratives of nation.     

Patrick O’Farrell and the Irish History Wars, 1971–1993

While Patrick O’Farrell's achievements as an historian of the Irish and of Catholicism in Australia are well recognised, little attention has been paid to his significance as an historian of Ireland. This article takes his two major Irish monographs, published in 1971 and 1975, and considers how they influenced leading Irish political historians of the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the article examines the crisis created for historians by the Northern Ireland Troubles. It demonstrates that the work of O’Farrell, which called into question the primacy of politics and of the nation state, helped open up new avenues for the analysis of Irish culture and identity. Yet, at the same time, such an approach challenged the republican reading of Irish history as a struggle against colonialism, and thus O’Farrell's work attracted severe criticism.     

Heritage,identity and community engagement at Dunluce Castle,Northern Ireland

As Northern Ireland transitions out of conflict, increased attention is being paid to the role heritage can play in building peace across society and developing a more sustainable future. Recent archaeological investigations at Dunluce Castle have uncovered elements of the site’s Gaelic past and the remains of an early seventeenth-century town built immediately prior to the Crown-sponsored Plantation of Ulster. The project included a dynamic programme of community engagement and outreach that created opportunities to work as a group in the embodied act of recovering the physical past. This formed a space in which to challenge aspects of the region’s contested past and facilitated the renegotiation of accepted local histories and existing identity constructs.     

The I.H.S. Monogram as a Symbol of Catholic Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

It has been suggested that the presence of religious images and scenes in secular buildings of sixteenth-century date can be viewed as an expression of resistance by the native Irish to English colonial activity in the aftermath of the Munster Plantation (J. A. Delle, 1999, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3: 11–35). Such images, however, may merely represent a continuation into the early modern period of a Medieval tradition of adorning secular houses with devotional images. If a religious symbol of native Catholic resistance to English colonization and Protestantism in Munster is to be sought then perhaps a more appropriate image would be the I.H.S. monogram—a symbol associated with the Counter Reformation and the Jesuits. The paper presents an example of the monogram located within a tower house at Gortnetubbrid in County Limerick, Ireland.     

Between the devil and the deep blue sea: nationality,power and symbolic trade‐offs among evangelical Protestants in contemporary Northern Ireland1

ABSTRACT. National identity is a symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post‐conflict situation – Northern Ireland – among some of the most extreme of national actors – evangelical Protestants. In‐depth interviews reveal quite radical shifts in the content of their British identity and in their understanding of and relation to the Irish state, with implications for their future politics. The implications for understanding ethno‐religious nationalism, nationality shifts and the future of Northern Ireland are drawn out.     

“Celticism,ballad transmission,and the schizoid voice: Ossianic fragments in Owenson,Yeats, Joyce,and Beckett”

ABSTRACT

This essay surveys responses to Macpherson’s Ossian in Irish literature, alongside analysis of the development of literary Celticism. Despite being a key text behind the development of Celticism in Irish writing, Ossian is consciously rejected in Irish Romanticism and in the Celtic Revival. However, Ossian becomes a symbol of literary recycling and mental fragmentation in Irish Modernism. Texts studied in this essay include Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Beckett’s Murphy.     

C.S. Lewis: an Irish writer

This article examines the effect of C.S. Lewis's Irish background on his work. It attempts to contradict the assumption that this Belfast-born writer should be included in the English and not the Irish canon. It emphasises that Lewis saw himself as Irish, was seen by others as Irish, and that his Irish background, contrary to what some have written, was important to him throughout his lifetime. It goes on to demonstrate the ways in which his work was influenced by his youth in Ireland and by the Irish mythology that he loved. Furthermore, this article maintains that, as a child of pre-partition Ireland with roots throughout the island, Lewis was influenced by the country as a whole, not just his native Ulster. Finally, it attempts to understand why Lewis, a proud Irishman, did not do more to promote himself as an Irish writer.