The earls of Desmond and the Irish of south-western Munster

As a result of the incomplete English conquest, the relationship between the English in Ireland (the Anglo-Irish) and the native Irish is a major theme in the history of Ireland in the later middle ages. Since these connections were negotiated locally rather than centrally, each relationship is as individual as the Anglo-Irish lords and Irish leaders who negotiated them. This article explores the relationships between the Desmond Geraldines and two Irish dynasties which maintained semi-autonomous kingdoms to the north and southwest of the earldom of Desmond: the Uí Bhriain (O'Briens) and the Mic Charthaigh (Mac Carthys). The Desmond Geraldines developed relationships not just with the ruling lines but also with cadet branches of these dynasties. The connections which formed between the Desmond Geraldines and these Irish lineages demonstrate several of the key types of relationships which developed throughout Ireland as well as indicating the importance these associations played in both maintaining and disrupting the stability of the English lordship in Ireland.     

“Much the more political of the two”: Mabel FitzGerald and the Irish revolution

This article offers an assessment of the career and ideology of the Irish republican and Cumann na mBan activist Mabel FitzGerald, née McConnell (1884–1958). From a staunchly Unionist Belfast Presbyterian family, Mabel converted to republicanism while an undergraduate in the early 1900s. In 1911 she eloped with Desmond FitzGerald, a Catholic poet. The couple became prominent nationalist activists, and participated in the Easter Rising. In 1922 Desmond, now a minister in the provisional government, supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This caused a rift with Mabel, who remained a republican. Although she chose not to separate from her husband, she retained her republican sympathies; there is evidence that she continued to offer aid to the anti-Treaty side. After the Civil War, Mabel and Desmond were reconciled, and she strongly revised her political views, eventually coming to regret the Irish separatist project. Mabel FitzGerald’s career offers insight into the nature of radicalisation among Irish nationalist activists, as well as providing an example of the competing loyalties of family and politics that frequently informed and constrained the actions of nationalist activists.     

Partners for stability? Irish Free State perceptions of the incoming British Labour government 1923–24

This article examines the anxiety and frustration of the Irish Free State government faced with the uncertainty of which party was going to become the next British government in 1923–24. The Free State government had only recently emerged victorious in its own fratricidal civil war and its moral and political legitimacy was still challenged in Ireland itself. The most contentious issue an incoming British government had to deal with on Ireland was the final demarcation of the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which, according to Article 12 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, would be determined by a boundary commission. The Free State government remained unconvinced that any incoming British Labour government had the competence, understanding or commitment to resolve this issue and contribute to long-term stability in Ireland, given Labour's perceived lack of knowledge and interest in Irish politics and its commitment to social and economic issues taking precedence. This apprehension was articulated in contemporary Irish government papers and personal correspondence and proved well founded, given the legalistic and cautious approach of the Labour government to establishing the Irish Boundary Commission.     

British and Irish Conflict Regulation from Sunningdale to Belfast Part I: Tracing the Status of Contesting Sovereigns, 1968–1974

Abstract. This article, which is presented in two parts, analyses the changing conceptions of the status of the two sovereigns (the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic) whose competing claims to sovereignty over Northern Ireland has been the ultimate cause of conflict. In Part I (presented here) I adapt Ian Lustick's theory of state contraction and expansion to the British-Irish relationship as it affected the negotiation of the Sunningdale Power-sharing Agreement of 1973–1974. I argue that the failure to address the competing claims to sovereignty limited the possibilities of achieving and maintaining the consent of sufficient proportions of each ethno-national community. Part I of the article (forthcoming) will extend the analysis to explain the relative equalisation of sovereignty status between Britain and Ireland and presents a modification of a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ explanation of the evolution of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Belfast Agreement (1998).     

Republican Political Theory and Irish Nationalism

Republicanism has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times among political theorists. This article examines the way in which republican strains of democratic political philosophy impacted political thinkers and leaders in the case of modern Ireland. Although the Republic of Ireland was officially established in 1949, the question of its origins was a source of contention throughout the first part of the twentieth century. I argue that the intellectual origins of Irish republicanism lay in the impact of French revolutionary thought on Irish nationalist leaders in the 1790s, and then trace these republican ideas through the public debates and tracts that marked the major stages in the development of the Irish Republic. In particular, I focus on the principles informing the 1916 Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, as well as the central arguments employed in the debates surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948. My aim is to demonstrate that republican ideas affected nationalism to such an extent that in Ireland republicanism and nationalism became, and in some respects still are, practically synonymous.     

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second‐generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement.     

试析爱尔兰多元民族认同形成的原因

16、17世纪,在不列颠和爱尔兰群岛这个大的历史语境中,爱尔兰形成了三种不同的民族认同：天主教盖尔民族认同、新教英爱民族认同和长老会一苏格兰民族认同。在后来的历史中,这三种民族认同一直用不同的甚至是对立的政治权力观念和财产神话表现出来,成为爱尔兰内乱和分裂的主要原因。正确认识爱尔兰多元民族认同的影响,对于彻底解决爱尔兰问题有非常重要的意义。     

‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement put us on side with the Americans’: Margaret Thatcher,Anglo-American relations and the path to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1979-1985

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical re-evaluation of British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with U.S president, Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) and his successor, Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict from 1979 to 1985. Specifically, it examines the impact that the ‘Irish Question’ had on the changing nature of Anglo-American relations from Thatcher’s entry to No. 10 Downing Street in May 1979 to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) in November 1985.     

A Parliamentary Victory: The British Labour Party and Irish Republican Deportees, 1923

After the 1918 general election the Labour Party became the official opposition party at Westminster. In response to the growing Irish republican campaign to establish an independent Irish state the Labour Party had to re-assess its relationship with Irish nationalism. The Labour Party was now acutely conscious that it was on the verge of forming a government and was concerned to be seen by the British electorate as a responsible, moderate and patriotic government-in-waiting. Although it had traditionally supported Irish demands for home rule and was vehemently opposed to the partition of Ireland, the Labour Party became increasingly wary of any closer relationship with extreme Irish nationalism which it believed would only damage its rapidly improving electoral prospects. Therefore the Labour Party supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 even though it underpinned the partition of Ireland and sought to distance itself from any association with Irish republicanism as the new Irish Free State drifted into civil war. In early 1923 the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) alighted upon the new issue of the arrest and deportation without trial, to the Irish Free State, of Irish republicans living in Britain who were obviously British citizens. The attraction of this campaign for the Labour Party was that it enabled the party to portray itself as the defender of Irish people living in Britain without having to take sides in the Irish civil war. In addition the Labour Party was able to present itself as the protector of civil liberties in Britain against the excesses of an overweening and authoritarian Conservative government. One of the main reasons the issue was progressed so energetically on the floor of the House by the new PLP was because it now contained many Independent Labour Party (ILP) ‘Red Clydesiders’ who themselves had been interned without trial during the First World War. Through brilliant and astute use of parliamentary tactics Bonar Law's Conservative government was forced into an embarrassing climb-down which required the cobbling together of an Indemnity Bill which gave tory ministers retrospective legal protection for having exceeded their authority. By any standard, it was a major achievement by a novice opposition party. It enhanced the party's reputation and its growing sophistication in the use of parliamentary tactics benefited it electorally at the next election which led to the first Labour government.     

The Commonwealth and the Oath of Allegiance Crisis: A Study in Inter-War Commonwealth Relations

Recent historical treatment of Anglo-Irish relations in the 1930s has overlooked the complex nature of the legal disagreements between the two countries during that period. This article provides an account of some of the fundamental points of legal disagreement between the countries. It explains how differences of opinion as to the structure of intra-commonwealth constitutional relations led to conflict between the British government and that of the Irish Free State, with particular reference to the oath of allegiance crisis. It considers how other commonwealth countries saw these points of conflict. It concludes with a re-appraisal of the roles of Lord Hailsham and de Valera in Anglo-Irish relations, as examples of differing attitudes towards the commonwealth relationship.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

European Postcolonial Studies and Ireland: Towards a Conversation amongst the Colonized of Europe

In the 1980s, key Irish Studies scholars proposed that Irish culture, politics and economics – both past and present – are most usefully viewed in the context of imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. The result of this intervention is an Irish postcolonial studies which, over the past 35 years, has produced an influential body of scholarship premised on the idea that Ireland is a colony/former colony of the British Empire. Notwithstanding its considerable impact, Irish postcolonial studies has not been without its detractors, with the country's location within Europe forming the basis for one of most persistent objections to the application of a postcolonial framework to Ireland. Given the key role assigned to geography in the postcolonial debate in Ireland, this article explores the implications for Ireland of an emerging postcolonial critique centred on Europe. In addition to discussing the concept of internal colonisation as applied to such Western European countries as Italy and Britain, the article makes reference to postcolonial analyses of the region of Eastern and Central Europe and its relationship with both Russia and Western Europe. The article acknowledges that the branch of European postcolonial studies that focuses on uneven power relationships within and between European countries offers a useful challenge to the argument that Ireland should either be examined within a European framework or a postcolonial one, but argues that the categorisation of a greater number of European societies as colonies or former colonies raises important questions that require further debate.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Anglo-Irish and Gaelic marriage laws and traditions in late medieval Ireland

This paper is intended to draw attention to the very different rights and restrictions accorded to Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women in late medieval Ireland. These differing traditions concerning marriage and women's rights within it led to conflicting marital experiences for Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women during this period. Fundamentally the Anglo-Irish idea of marriage was opposed to the Gaelic one which led to clashes especially where intermarriage between the two cultures took place.     

“A log-rolling,Irish-American politician,out to raise votes in the United States”: Tip O’Neill and the Irish dimension of Anglo-American relations, 1977–1986

The Irish dimension of Anglo-American relations is a relatively marginalized aspect of the historiography of transatlantic studies. Historians have focused on the role of the Clinton administration in the Northern Ireland “peace process” but previous American contributions also warrant attention. As the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill was one of the most prominent Irish-American politicians. This article demonstrates O’Neill's attempts to ensure that the American contribution to the Anglo-Irish process steadily increased, despite the transition from arguably his natural political ally in the President Jimmy Carter administration to President Ronald Reagan in 1981. O’Neill's interest in Northern Ireland and position as speaker helped ensure that Carter's promise of financial aid to Northern Ireland in 1977 following progress in the political process was fulfilled in March 1986.     

Citizens of Nowhere: longing,belonging and exile among Irish Protestant writers in Britain,c.1830–1970

Since the 1970s, the literature on the history of the worldwide Irish diaspora has become increasingly sophisticated, with scholars employing a range of innovative techniques to capture aspects of the migratory experience. Many challenges remain, however, in charting the multifaceted experiences of the Irish in Britain. This article makes the case for a cultural study of Irish Protestants in Britain. It examines the contours of the Irish Protestant migratory mind-set, focusing on the writings of a number of creative émigrés, temporary and permanent, such as W.B. Yeats, Denis Ireland, Nesca Robb, and John Hewitt. Of particular relevance are articulations of longing, belonging and exile, which shaped the literary perspective of these writers, and complicated their relationships with Ireland and Britain. Attitudes regarding emigration within Protestant Ireland are also probed to tease out cross-channel ideals and fears.     

Battle and Siege Maps of Elizabethan Ireland: Blueprints for Archaeologists?

Abstract

During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), the English Crown engaged in a series of bloody wars in Ireland. Principally fought against local Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish lords, these conflicts paved the way for the plantation and colonisation of the late 16th and 17th centuries. As the fighting raged, surveyors, cartographers and engineers produced maps of key locations throughout the country. These were created principally to aid the military effort, but were also designed to provide interested parties in England with a visual reference for events.

This paper will examine one form of this map production, namely the numerous battle and siege maps drawn throughout the period. It will explore the potential accuracy of the depictions, and suggest methods for correctly 'reading' these primary documents. The importance of critically examining the maps against other primary sources and the topographical landscape will be discussed, suggesting a methodology for how this resource can be utilised by conflict archaeologists. In addition, it will demonstrate through a number of examples how these research techniques can be successfully applied.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

“Talk & talk & talk”: Virginia Woolf's responses to Ireland

The complexity of Virginia Woolf's relationships with Empire can be illustrated by considering her responses to Ireland. Woolf's relationship with Ireland and Irish writers has received only cursory attention. Those critics who have addressed the topic have assumed that she responded positively to her experience of Irish “talk” on her holiday in Ireland in 1934. However, her response on that holiday reveals some underlying imperial presumptions and a sense of Ireland as stereotypically a land of “talk, talk, talk”. Indeed, this is in keeping with her responses to a wide range of Irish writers over many years (most notably, it chimes with her reading of Ulysses). This essay brings together for the first time Woolf's comments on Ireland and Irish writers, from her diaries, letters, essays and reviews, in order to show that she consistently characterised them as loquacious. Ireland was thus merely a subject of talk, a “question” that could only by discussed, and then only in stereotypical and liberalist terms. Further, Woolf associated talk with looseness and bad writing, and sought to maintain a mode of semi-privacy, apart from the “talk” that went on around her.     

Through the Eyes of Women: Photovoice and participatory research as tools for reimagining place

In this article, the author explores how one particular group of working-class women living in Belfast, the North of Ireland, experience the place(s) in which they live. The perspective of place that this exploration is embedded in represents the accumulation of multiple person-place relationships that are mediated by the sociopolitical history of the North of Ireland, as well as by the gendered, classed, and religious-mediated contexts in which the women live. The author explores the relationship between place and identity by describing a feminist participatory action research (PAR) project that she engaged in with a group of women living in Belfast (which included the use of photovoice as a tool for investigating people's lives) that provided them with a culturally relevant lens through which to view the relationship between place and the everyday lives of Irish women. Out of that investigation, the author and the women designed a photo-text exhibit that provides knowledge to local and international communities about the ways in which women engage in the formulation and reformulation of place and identity within contexts of everyday life.