'Walking a Real Tight-rope of Difficulties': Sir Edward Heath and the Search for Stability in Northern Ireland, June 1970-March 1971

Since we know Sir Edward Heath was forced to impose direct ruleover Northern Ireland in March 1972, before launching his governmentinto a series of highly constructive (if unsuccessful) initiativesthat led to the Sunningdale Agreement, his policy and approachtowards the province during the first 18 months of his premiershiphas rarely been seen as anything other than a tale of miscalculation,poor judgement and political ignorance. However, with the openingup of various official papers over the past few years, it isnow possible to offer a more sympathetic assessment of Heath'searly attempts to deal with the situation in Northern Ireland.This assessment suggests that his policy, far from being barrenand directionless, was beginning to evolve in quite innovativeand radical directions as it sought to stabilize and reformNorthern Ireland, directions that, significantly, pre-figurethe various policy initiatives Heath took after 1972. Theseincluded the pursuit of active cooperation between London andDublin, and between Dublin and Belfast, major political changein Northern Ireland, with the full involvement of the minorityin the governance of the region, and a consideration of futureconstitutional relationships between London, Belfast and Dublin.     

Tocqueville's interest in the social: Or how statistics informed his ‘new science of politics’

This essay examines Tocqueville's interest in statistics, and how it informed his analysis of democracy. It explores his early engagement with the discipline and shows how this proved critical to his and Beaumont's 1833 study of the American penitentiary system. It shows that Tocqueville's interest in statistics was long lasting. And it pays particular attention to his links with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, examining his attendance at the statistical section meetings of the BAAS conference in Dublin in 1835. It shows how material presented at this conference appeared in a number of Tocqueville's works. The essay argues against the thesis that Tocqueville resisted the primacy of the social. Rather, it shows that his interest in statistics underscored the importance he attached to the social in his analysis of modern democracy.     

Die stadt und das reich in der verfassungslehre des marsilius von padua

This essay examines Tocqueville's interest in statistics, and how it informed his analysis of democracy. It explores his early engagement with the discipline and shows how this proved critical to his and Beaumont's 1833 study of the American penitentiary system. It shows that Tocqueville's interest in statistics was long lasting. And it pays particular attention to his links with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, examining his attendance at the statistical section meetings of the BAAS conference in Dublin in 1835. It shows how material presented at this conference appeared in a number of Tocqueville's works. The essay argues against the thesis that Tocqueville resisted the primacy of the social. Rather, it shows that his interest in statistics underscored the importance he attached to the social in his analysis of modern democracy.     

The Internment of Cahir Healy M.P., Brixton Prison July 1941-December 1942

The arrest and internment in Brixton prison of the leading NorthernIreland nationalist politician and Stormont MP, Cahir Healy,in 1941 has long remained something of an historical enigma.Contemporaneous accounts that his arrest amounted to littlemore than an unwarranted act of anti-nationalist persecutionor was the result of his alleged involvement in ‘actsprejudicial’ during time of war both benefited from theblanket of secrecy that surrounded the case. This article castslight on this affair. It offers an insight into the strategicconsiderations of Northern nationalist politicians at a timewhen British victory in the war was uncertain. It argues thatsome senior nationalist activists, including Healy, did envisagea situation in which British defeat and German victory couldbring closer the prospect of Irish unity, did contemplate apolicy of cooperation with Germany and did take steps to makethis known to the German Legation in Dublin. The article alsoexamines Healy's relationship with fellow internees in Brixtonprison and his continued post-war association with figures onthe British far-right, particularly Sir Oswald Mosley.     

Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries. Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was "determined" through the reflex action of the body and brain-a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker's vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.     

The Northern Ireland Conflict: A Framework for Discussion1

At the Dublin Antipode Conference of March 1978, a debate occurred on the Northern Ireland question. In what follows we present extended versions of two of the papers (those by Boal and Anderson). We have also included other pertinent material in the form of Pringle's essay and Perron's review. Hopefully both of these papers will add a further dimension to the debate. In the case of Anderson's paper, due to both time and space limitations, the editorial collective reduced his original work substantially.     

‘Not a Position for a Gentleman’: Sir Matthew Nathan as Colonial Administrator: From Cape Coast Castle to Dublin Castle via Natal

This article examines the role of Sir Matthew Nathan, British permanent under secretary for Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising in April 1916, and how critical events in his career as soldier, colonial governor and civil servant shaped his conduct and reaction to events in Ireland as the Rising unfolded around him. The article raises issues of identities: namely Nathan's own identity as an English gentleman, when, given his Jewish background, he was an outsider to that caste. Nathan's brief military career and lengthier career as a colonial governor earned him high praise as a model bureaucrat. In this paper Nathan's track from the War Office through government houses situated in West Africa, Hong Kong and Natal to Dublin Castle is traced to illustrate the changes in his character from decisiveness to indecision. While Nathan clearly misread the volatile situation in Ireland over the 1916 Easter weekend, his actions demonstrated both indecision and bureaucratic delaying tactics. It is argued that his experiences with obdurate settler ministers in Natal played a role in shaping his hesitancy at the time of crisis in Dublin and that this hesitancy provided an opportunity for the direct action of the Irish Volunteers. The conclusion is that, at the time of the Irish crisis, Nathan failed to exercise the ‘power of the personal influence’ expected of an experienced governor.     

Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk

ABSTRACT

This article is adapted from the dissertation ‘Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk’, completed by Siobhan Osgood for the MPhil in Art History: Art + Ireland, where it was awarded a distinction. The study provides an historical analysis in the context of architectural development and broader railway culture in Ireland to provide an interpretation and understanding of the use of polychromatic yellow, red and black brickwork to create a visual identity for railway architecture. The use of accented colours to pick out key features is repeated across a series of buildings, thus creating a distinctive style of ‘brick-branding’. These are most prominent in the town of Dundalk, where the GNRI had its central engineering works at the halfway point on the Dublin to Belfast mainline and at the point where the Irish North line extended west and north. The buildings were each intricately designed by the GNRI's first chief engineer, William Hemingway Mills, a second-generation railway engineer who merged the roles of architect and engineer using an amalgamation of architectural designs from his earlier career in Derby, Scotland, Mexico and Spain. Mills thus created his own ‘Millsian’ style of industrial architectural design.     

Cerebral Automatism,the Brain,and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries.

Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was “determined” through the reflex action of the body and brain—a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker’s vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.     

Migration and Viking Dublin: paleomobility and paleodiet through isotopic analyses

During the early medieval period in Ireland, Dublin was established as the largest Viking settlement on the island in the ninth century AD. A previous biodistance study has suggested that the population of the town consisted of a polyethnic amalgam of immigrant and indigenous. In this study, we use biogeochemistry to investigate paleomobility and paleodiet in archeological human remains from the ninth to eleventh century levels at the sites at Fishamble Street II (National Museum of Ireland excavation number E172), Fishamble Street III (E190) and John’s Lane (E173), as well as twelfth-century remains from Wood Quay (E132). Through radiogenic strontium isotope, stable oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope, and elemental concentration analyses, we investigate the origins of the individuals who lived and died in early and late Viking Dublin. Mean archaeological human enamel and bone isotope values from Dublin are ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70975 ± 0.00139 (2σ, n = 22), δ¹³C_{carbonate(V-PDB)} = −14.8‰ ± 0.8‰ (1σ, n = 12), and δ¹⁸O_{carbonate(V-PDB)} = −7.2‰ ± 1.0‰ (1σ, n = 12). Archaeological human bone samples exhibit mean δ¹³C_{collagen(V-PDB)} = −20.8‰ ± 0.5‰ (1σ, n = 12) and mean δ¹⁵N_{collagen(AIR)} = +10.0‰ ± 1.7‰ (1σ, n = 12). Comparing these data with archaeological faunal data from Dublin and published data from northern Europe, we argue that there are no clear immigrants from other parts of the North Atlantic, although there is one clear outlier in both origins and diet. Overall, the relative homogeneity in both paleomobility and paleodiet may support models of acculturation in Viking Dublin, rather than a high number of first-generation immigrants or continued migration from Scandinavia.     

Robert Graves,Marshall Hall,and reflex action in 1837

ABSTRACT

In several issues of the London Medical Gazette during June–July of 1837 there was an interchange of letters between Robert Graves, Regius Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and the London physician and experimental physiologist Marshall Hall, often considered the discoverer of the phenomenon of reflex activity. Graves asserted that he, rather than Hall, was the originator of the idea of reflex action as a disease mechanism. Hall rejected that assertion and, after exchange of some verbal “pleasantries,” began a tirade about a somewhat different, although not unrelated issue into which the journal editor interjected some not exactly dispassionate comments. Graves soon let the matter of priority lapse, and Hall continued his war with the Council of the Royal Society, but examination of the contemporary and earlier literature suggests that Graves probably was correct, by a narrow time margin, in relation of his claim for priority in using the concept of reflex action in explaining neurological disease mechanisms (not a claim for discovering reflex action), that Hall had used the phrase “reflex action” earlier than Graves, and that others before Hall had gone a long way in studying reflex mechanisms, although Hall’s writings had familiarized the medical profession with the concept.     

James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state

James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as ‘The Drapier’. Writing under the name ‘Hibernicus’, he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725–26). They can be read as a ‘polite’ Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.     

Assessing the role of the international financial services centre in Irish regional development

This paper examines the manner and extent to which the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in Dublin contributes to regional development in Ireland. Since its 1987 launch, the IFSC created over 10,000 jobs and promoted urban renewal in a previously derelict section of Dublin. Although it stands as one of Ireland's most prominent development projects, empirical examination of the IFSC remains limited. This study looks specifically at issues such as the kinds of activities and employment created at the IFSC, as well as local linkage formation. Based on published data and research interviews, this paper shows that the IFSC contributed to Ireland's economic development at a time when industrial policy focused primarily on employment creation. To date the IFSC has proven to be a successful policy intervention, the routine nature of many IFSC-related activities raises questions about the IFSC's ability to become something more than a centre for back-office financial services.     

“The stone in the sling”: Frederick Douglass and Belfast abolitionism

Frederick Douglass’s sojourns in Belfast during 1845–1846 coincided with the “Send Back the Money” controversy in the Free Church of Scotland over the receipt of money from and fellowship with slaveholders, the South Carolina minister Thomas Smyth’s exclusion from the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1846, and the aftermath of the debate at the inaugural meeting of the Evangelical Alliance over fellowship with slaveholders. Since Douglass regarded Belfast as the central location of Presbyterian sympathy for the Free Church outside of Scotland, he believed that the town was crucial in the crusade against the Free Church. The attacks on the Free Church, however, cost the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society considerable support in the long term. Belfast also played a role in the personal development of Douglass. His dispute with his Dublin publisher, Richard Davis Webb, over the ministers’ recommendations to his Narrative constituted evidence of growing maturity. Although William Lloyd Garrison united with Douglass in Belfast to denounce the Evangelical Alliance, this essay argues that Douglass displayed evidence of independence from strict Garrisonianism.     

Neurognostics question. Gordon Morgan Holmes

Gordon Morgan Holmes, MD, MRCP was an Irish born neurologist who received his medical education at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He was trained in neuroanatomy and neuropathology at the Senckenberg Institute, Frankfort-Am-Main by Ludwig Edinger. He then returned to serve as a Registrar (House Officer) mentored by Richard Gowers and John Hughlings Jackson at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. He collaborated with Thomas Granger Stewart in describing the loss of recoil in patients with cerebellar hemispheric tumors in 1904. Volunteering in 1914 for frontline hospital duty, he examined soldiers who had injuries to their occipital area causing hypotonia, dysmetria, staggering gait, and falling to the side ipsilateral to their injured cerebellar hemisphere. Holmes discovered that increasing the pace of the finger-nose manuever and applying slight resistance to a moving limb attenuated the dysmetria. Continuing observation of these patients afforded him to describe the evolution of their injuries to include increasing tremor and decreasing hypotonia. Holmes first attached levers to the limbs of hispatients to record their movements on a moving smoked paper kymograph. In 1939 he published photograh tracings made by low mass minature light bulbs attached to ataxic limbs that showed thehpometira and hypometria of their movements ipsilateral to their damaged cerebellar lobes. Holmes made sigficant contributions to understanding of the physiology of the human cerebellum.     

Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening.     

Ernest Blythe as Minister for Finance in the Irish Free State, 1923–32

This article explores Ernest Blythe's tenure as minister for finance of the Irish Free State, 1923–32. Using a range of sources, but particularly his papers in University College Dublin Department of Archives, this work aims to redress the academic neglect of one of the Free State's most infamous characters. In a broader sense, this study offers a commentary on Blythe's party, Cumann na nGaedheal, and Irish political culture generally. Throughout the text, attention is paid to the existing historiography of the period, and, where deemed necessary, some critiques are made.     

"The orang lives almost next door" the correspondence between John Fulton (New Haven) and Willem Verhaart (Java)

Between 1937 and 1959 John Fulton (1899-1960), Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University (New Haven) and Willem Verhaart (1889-1983), neuropsychiatrist at Batavia Medical School (Java, Dutch East Indies) corresponded on neuroanatomical topics. Verhaart had easy access to primate brains in Batavia and stayed at Fulton's lab as a Rockefeller fellow (1938-1939), learning techniques of surgery and histology of the primate brain in order to apply it in his own lab. The correspondence relates of their undertakings in research, the preparations for Verhaart's stay in New Haven, the failure of subsequent research plans because of World War II, the camp experiences in Asia by Verhaart, the period of restoration after the war, helped by Fulton, and the political changes (independence) in Indonesia that finally lead to Verhaart's return to the Netherlands in 1950, where he became professor of histology and Director of the Neurological Institute at Leiden University. The correspondence shows how neuroscientists from different parts of the world cooperated. Moreover it is an example of the gradual change from a German (like his teacher Winkler) to an Anglo-American orientation in medical science that started in the beginning of the nineteenth century.