Re-writing Protestant history in the novels of Glenn Patterson

This article considers the representation of the history of Belfast in Glenn Patterson's 2012 novel The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. It situates this novel within the context of Patterson's previous work and the history of the Northern Irish novel, as well as with the representation of maritime Belfast in the Titanic centenary year. This novel will be read as a recovery and rehabilitation of a Protestant history which could be problematic for Patterson, an avowedly liberal writer, but instead this context allows for an exploration of the uses of history in contemporary Northern Irish cultural and political discourse.     

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.     

“Bound in darkness and idolatry”? Protestant working-class underachievement and unionist hegemony

Over the past decade or more there has been a growing concern at the levels of educational underachievement within loyalist working-class areas of Northern Ireland. The inability of both educational and social policy initiatives over the past decade to improve the situation in any meaningful way has raised important questions concerning how the problem can be tackled more effectively. Placing the issue within the theoretical framework of Gramsci's hegemony, this paper argues that there is a need to better understand the historical nature of the problem and to recognise the political and social forces that have shaped its existence. It argues that there is a need to move away from explaining Protestant underachievement simply by the availability of jobs in Ulster's industrial past and to place its roots in the complex battle for social, political, and economic power since the 1801 Act of Union.     

Defenders of the state: the Irish Labour Party,coalitionism and revisionism, 1969–77

Irish Labour Party politics underwent a significant transformation during the period 1969–77. During these years, the party moved from a position of opposition to coalition and apparent support for socialist politics to involvement in a coalition government with Fine Gael and an abandonment of its previously stated goal, the thirty-two-county socialist republic. This paper locates the main factor behind this shift in Labour’s attachment to the institutions of the Republic of Ireland state. As that state was threatened by the crisis in Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards, so the Labour Party was compelled to shift ground politically and move towards agencies that could offer stability. This led to permanent shifts in Labour policy and strategy.     

Political geographies, ‘unfaithful’ translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism’, postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles’ as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.     

From practice to theory to practice: William Penn from prison to the founding of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for toleration in Restoration England. The broader political theory that Penn articulated in England and attempted to realize in Pennsylvania contained economic, political, social, legal, and religious components, worked out in drafts of founding documents over the course of many months. But the foundation of that theory – its unshakeable commitment to liberty of conscience, its faith in juries as a potential restraint on the arbitrary exercise of power by civil governors, its unsteady mix of principled and pragmatic underpinnings – was laid in Penn’s early years as a Quaker, intertwined with his experiences of imprisonment in England and Ireland. In a very real sense, then, the road to Pennsylvania, for Penn, began in the Cork prison 15 years before he set foot in America.     

A place apart? The interventions of John P. Mackintosh and Bernard Crick on Northern Ireland

This article considers the significance of the scholarly and practical engagement with the Northern Ireland problem on the part of the Scottish politician and academic John P. Mackintosh, and the academic and controversialist Bernard Crick. It is argued that they were among the few scholars and public figures outside of Northern Ireland for whom the crisis represented an opportunity to explore more searchingly issues with broader significance for the UK as a whole, particularly devolution, and for relations within and between the islands of Britain and Ireland. For both men, Northern Ireland brought into sharp focus questions of sovereignty and identity, and of constitutional reform in the UK.     

‘Putting Place on a Plate’ along the West Cork Food Trail

ABSTRACT

In 2011, Ireland's National Tourism Development Authority (F?ilte Ireland) announced a plan to increase the number of food tourists to the country. According to the plan, Irish food will be recognized for the quality of its regional food experiences that evoke a unique sense of place. To further the plan, it created a program entitled ‘Place on a Plate’ which encourages restaurant owners/chefs to offer fresh locally sourced seasonal food and list the names of local suppliers on their menus. This paper examines the effectiveness of this ‘Place on a Plate’ strategy by examining 53 restaurant menus along the West Cork Food Trail in southwest Ireland to determine whether they contain: (1) a statement as to the origin of their food supplies, (2) a listing of local food producers, and (3) geographical place name references on individual menu items. The study found that the majority of restaurants do not include a statement as to the origin of their food supplies, indeed only three out of the surveyed restaurants provided complete food supply listings. The largest number of menu items to be connected with a place were linked with Ireland followed by West Cork and the Atlantic. The results suggest that the ‘Place on a Plate’ strategy has had a limited impact and that more education needs to occur about its potential to contribute to West Cork's gastronomic identity.     

‘As a lever gains power by its distance from the fulcrum’: tracing Frederick Douglass in the Irish Atlantic World

Following the publication of his autobiography and fearing recapture and return to slavery, in 1845 the abolitionist Frederick Douglass embarked on an 18-month lecture tour of the United Kingdom, during which his thinking on the subject of abolitionism developed significantly. While this period in Douglass’ life has received only modest scholarly attention, even less has been paid to the fact that the tour commenced in Ireland – then arguably more akin to a colony than an integral region of the UK. Drawing on archival research and scholarship that advocates for a more interconnected sense of place, a more oceanic perspective on history and consequently a better sense of how political activity is forged relationally, the paper traces Douglass’ journey through the Irish nodes of the abolitionist Atlantic network. In the process, it considers the degree to which Douglass was influenced by this colonial and deeply sectarian society, it illuminates a forgotten world of Irish abolitionist activity, and contributes to debates regarding intersecting histories and geographies in the Atlantic World.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.