Army In Ireland Research Articles

Anti-Standing Army Ideology, Identity, and Ideas of Union within the British Isles, 1689–1714

AbstractTraditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics

The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics

John Redmond and the First World War

John Redmond and the First World War John Redmond and the First World War Ronan McGreevy On the week before the centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising in 2016, a banner appeared in front of College Green, the seat of the Irish parliament until 1800. It was placed there to recognise the constitutional tradition in Irish history. The four men depicted on it were Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond. There is no dispute about the legacy of the first three. They have GAA grounds and streets named after them. Their statues are in prominent parts of our capital city. But what of Redmond? Within days of the banner going up, a group I had never heard of, called Misneach, scrawled the number 35,000 on the image of Redmond.1 There was no explanation offered for the figure: none was required. 35,000 is the usual best estimate for the number of Irish who died in the First World War. I think the figure is greater than that but that’s an argument for another day. Not for the first time, John Redmond was blamed for the worst loss of life on the battlefields in Irish history. The graffiti was a provocation, but it raised a fair question about Redmond’s role in encouraging so many Irishmen to fight in the war. Much of the commentary about this is based on a false premise. As a nation, if you could call us that in 1914, we had no choice but to be involved in the war. We no more had a choice in the matter than the peoples of Scotland or Wales had a choice when the invasion of Iraq happened in 2003. We were part of the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. Build-up to war John Redmond’s choices have to be seen in that context. It is fair to say that the war came at the worst possible time for him, just a week after the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace talks in which he, John Dillon, Edward Carson and James Craig tried to find a compromise solution to the problems of Ulster and Home Rule. The principle of partition had been conceded with the greatest reluctance by Redmond. The question was what areas of Ulster would be excluded and whether that exclusion Studies • volume 107 • number 428 407 would be temporary or permanent. Just ten days before the outbreak of hostilities, the authorities tried to intercept guns that were being landed at Howth and, in what is known as the Bachelor’s Walk Massacre, three civilians were killed. The standing of the British Army in Ireland could hardly have been lower. The incident convinced nationalist Ireland that there was one law for nationalists and another for unionists in Ireland. At the same time, the long peace that Europe had enjoyed since 1815 was coming to a bitter end. Churchill, then a cabinet minister himself, memorably described the scene as cabinet colleagues pored over the poor law maps of Tyrone, trying to ascertain where there was a nationalist majority. Meanwhile, an ashen-faced foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, arrived with the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. As Churchill remembered it, ‘The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland and a strange light began immediately and by perceptible gradations to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.2 Events that fateful August of 1914 moved with a stunning swiftness. On 2 August, the cabinet agreed it would not be sending British troops to the continent if Germany invaded France. A day later everything changed utterly when Germany invaded neutral Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan. The neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed by the Treaty of London in 1839. It was this violation of international law that persuaded the British government to make the fateful decision to go to war. ‘Are you really going to defend Belgium for a scrap of paper?’, the German Chancellor asked the British ambassador to Berlin.3 The answer was ‘yes’. Germany had fatally miscalculated the willingness of the British to become involved...

‘The Mind of the English Adversary Is Laid Bare’: Ernie O’Malley’s 'On Another Man’s Wound' in Germany and Irish Aspects of German National Socialist Propaganda, 1938-1943

Ernie O’Malley’s memoir of the Irish revolution, On Another Man’s Wound, was translated into German and published in Berlin in 1938, with further editions appearing during World War 2 in 1941 and 1943. While academics dealing with O’Malley have indeed shown awareness of this, depictions of the publication of O’Malley’s work in Nazi Germany have been devoid of wider context and not always factually correct. This article places the publication of O’Malley’s book within the wider context of Irish aspects of anti-British Nazi propaganda, while also recreating the intellectual context of the Metzner Verlag, the book’s German publisher. It is argued that O’Malley’s text, as a work depicting the workings of the British army in Ireland with a degree of authenticity, became an important source of antiBritish Nazi propaganda. While intercultural, global and European aspects of Irish Studies have indeed been examined for many years, this article also argues for the merits of a Cultural Transfer History strand within a Europeanist Irish Studies.

TimHarris. Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567‐1642. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 588pp. ISBN 13: 9780199209002. £30.00; $45.00 (cloth).

TimHarris. Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567‐1642. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 588pp. ISBN 13: 9780199209002. £30.00; $45.00 (cloth).

The Army in Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Press: Antimilitary Sentiment in an Atlantic Context

The Army in Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Press: Antimilitary Sentiment in an Atlantic Context

Danish Troops in the Williamite Army in Ireland, 1689–91, by Kjeld Hald Galster

The army with which William III defeated James II at the Boyne in 1690 was multinational. It included Dutchmen, Huguenots and a Danish contingent which initially numbered about 7,000 men, and made up about 15 per cent of William’s forces at the Boyne. The Danish king, Christian V, had a larger army than his small kingdom could support, so was more than willing to hire out some of it to William: in that way the soldiers would be paid and would gain valuable experience. The Danes also fought in the bloody battle of Aughrim in 1691 and took part in the two sieges of Limerick. After the treaty of Limerick, the Danes travelled with the rest of William’s army to Flanders, where they saw more active service, finally returning to Denmark after the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. The story of the Danish force in Ireland is already quite well known to non-Danish-speaking scholars, thanks to a translation of some of the key documents—particularly letters from its commander, the duke of Württemburg-Neustadt, published in The Danish Forces in Ireland, 1690–91, edited by K. Danaher and J.G. Simms (1962). The present volume is based on a much more extensive range of documents from Danish sources, which make it possible to produce a fuller study than in any previous work.

Securing the Hanoverian Succession in Ireland: Jacobites, Money and Men, 1714–16

This article examines the connection between issues of security, finance and the army in Ireland in the years 1714–16. The death of Queen Anne and succession of the first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in August 1714, offered renewed hope to the supporters of the jacobite cause in Ireland, Scotland, England and beyond. However, the threat of a Stuart restoration by force of arms served to galvanise the efforts of government in both England and Ireland in support of the Hanoverian succession, though the necessary military preparations and precautions resulted in increased public expenditure. In Ireland, the government's need to find new sources of revenue meant that parliament would have to be convened, which, in turn, necessitated compliance with a series of constitutional practices which had evolved since the 1690s in relation to Poynings' Law and supply legislation. Yet, despite a threatened jacobite invasion, factional political manœuvring, as ever, demanded compromise, though, ultimately, the wholly protestant Irish parliament took the necessary precautions to secure Ireland for the new Hanoverian regime by voting new taxes and facilitating the creation of a national debt in order to raise new regiments for the army. The coalescing of the issues of security, finance and the army thereby led to innovations in Irish parliamentary and financial practice which were to become key components of the constitutional framework in Ireland until legislative independence in 1782.

Danish troops in the Williamite army in Ireland, 1689–91. By Kjeld Hald Galster. Pp 250, illus. Dublin: Four Courts. 2012. €50.

Danish troops in the Williamite army in Ireland, 1689–91. By Kjeld Hald Galster. Pp 250, illus. Dublin: Four Courts. 2012. €50.

"Unofficial" British Reprisals and IRA Provocations, 1919–20: The Cases of Three Cork Towns

"Unofficial" British Reprisals and IRA Provocations, 1919–20:The Cases of Three Cork Towns James S. Donnelly Jr. (bio) Writing in 1925, General Sir Neville Macready, the commander-in-chief of the British army in Ireland during the War of Independence, made the egregiously inaccurate claim that between 1919 and 1921 "on four occasions only did the troops indulge in unauthorized retaliation." He acknowledged four "unofficial" military reprisals in 1920—at Fermoy, Queenstown, and Mallow in County Cork and at Ennistymon in County Clare. He then proceeded to minimize the significance of these four cases and to praise what he considered the remarkably high degree of discipline displayed by British soldiers in Ireland in the face of extreme IRA provocation. "As one who for many years had been intimately connected with the administration of discipline in the army," he enthused, "I can say that I was often astonished at the restraint exercised by all ranks, a restraint which I believe no other troops in the world could or would have practised."1 Macready conceded that members of the Auxiliary [End Page 152] Division of the RIC and some of the several thousand English recruits added to the Irish police force beginning in mid-1920 were much more prone to serious indiscipline and unauthorized reprisals, but his solution was to impose martial law (instituted in December 1920) and to have the British government itself assume the responsibility for controlled and authorized retaliatory actions by its armed agents,2 as it finally did under military auspices at the very beginning of 1921, though without the benefits that he predicted for these "official reprisals." This article seeks to demonstrate how tone-deaf army and RIC leaders and, still more, their British political masters were to the impact of military and police retaliation on ordinary Irish nationalists by examining the cases of three Cork towns that experienced severe British reprisals in 1919 and 1920—Fermoy, Mallow, and Bandon.3 (The notorious burning of Cork city on the night of 11–12 December 1920, and the torrent of violence by the IRA and crown forces against persons and property that preceded it, have been the subjects of a recent book.)4 This article also aims to amplify in full human detail several major arguments that other scholars have made about the double-sided violence of the Irish Revolution. Specific instances of the much-emphasized cyclical character or tit-for-tat nature of that violence are explored.5 In particular, this article connects IRA provocations with British retaliations and raises the [End Page 153] question of whether the IRA instigators of the provocations actually counted on grossly excessive retaliations in order to advance their goal of political mobilization and consolidation at the extremist end of the nationalist spectrum.6 A related purpose of this essay is to buttress through some thick description a central point made by Michael Hopkinson (among others) that "nothing in the conflict had remotely the same effect on domestic and international opinion as did [British] reprisals."7 From this survey of the experiences of three Cork towns in 1919 and 1920 it becomes clear that initial revulsion or hesitancy among many nationalists over acts of brutal IRA violence tended to be overwhelmed or diffused by the excesses of the British responses, both in specific cases and in their totality. Lastly, this article shows by means of an approach different from the methods of Peter Hart's seminal work that towns and towns-people were at the center of the violence of the Irish Revolution, and not only in the county where by far the greatest violence occurred.8 Towns in Cork and elsewhere often became the scenes of extreme violence partly because the proximity of opposing forces within their precincts or orbits intensified the polarization and radicalization that provided such fertile soil for rival acts of murder and arson.9 In addition, the growing concentration of the forces of the crown in [End Page 154] urban bases raised the level and widened the scope of state violence in numerous towns. Sitting cheek by jowl in urban space, Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and unionists, sympathetic or neutral civilians and active insurgents were easily...

Kevin McKenny, The Laggan Army in Ireland 1640–1685: the landed interests, political ideologies and military campaigns of the north-west Ulster settlers

Kevin McKenny, <i>The Laggan Army in Ireland 1640–1685: the landed interests, political ideologies and military campaigns of the north-west Ulster settlers</i>

Kevin McKenny. The Laggan Army in Ireland, 1640–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of North-west Ulster Settlers. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Pp. 250. $65.00 (cloth).

Kevin McKenny. The Laggan Army in Ireland, 1640–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of North-west Ulster Settlers. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Pp. 250. $65.00 (cloth). - Volume 46 Issue 1

The Laggan army in Ireland, 1640–1685: the landed interests, political ideologies and military campaigns of the north-west Ulster settlers. By Kevin McKenny. Pp 250. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. €45.

The Laggan army in Ireland, 1640–1685: the landed interests, political ideologies and military campaigns of the north-west Ulster settlers. By Kevin McKenny. Pp 250. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. €45. - Volume 35 Issue 138

"The Only Thing British That Everybody Likes": Military-Civilian Relations in Late Victorian Ulster

T   , Ireland was home to a large proportion of the British army. Although figures fluctuated considerably over time, up to , soldiers, or around one-seventh of the total strength of the force, were based in Ireland at any one time.1 Academic study of this sizable section of the Irish population has been limited, however.2 For most historians “the army” has simply supplied bit players to fill in the background to the rich tapestry of agrarian protest, political agitation, and sectarian conflict seen to characterize late Victorian Ireland.3 The few specific studies of the military in this period have tended to examine the army primarily in a political context. Virginia Crossman has argued that toward the end of the nineteenth century the army in Ireland was “sucked into the political morass” and became a “combatant as opposed to [a] mere auxiliary” in the conflicts between the majority nationalist

Review: The Laggan Army in Ireland 1649–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of the North-West Ulster Settlers

Review: The Laggan Army in Ireland 1649–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of the North-West Ulster Settlers

A Swiss Soldier In Ireland, 1689–90

In 1714 Jean Francois De Morsier wrote an account in French of his early years of soldiering. This ‘Journal’, a detailed record of the several campaigns in which De Morsier participated, written wi...

THE BALTINGLASS REBELLION, 1580: ENGLISH DISSENT OR A GAELIC UPRISING?

When news arrived in summer 1580 that James Eustace, third viscount Baltinglass, had entered into rebellion with Gaelic elements in Leinster, Tudor officials in Ireland could barely contain their mystification. How, they wondered, had this important Tudor noble, whose family had for centuries served as a bulwark against the menace of marauding Gaelic clans, become ‘so forgetful of himself’? In seeking to explain the rebellion historians too have sought to understand Eustace's motivation, and in so doing have come to emphasize his integral position in conceiving and leading the revolt. Yet this approach has obscured the rebellion's Gaelic dimension. The rebellion would not have been possible without the support of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles who sought to uproot the English county administration then being erected in place of their quasi-independent lordships. Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne emerged from this interest to become the rebellion's true strength and in August 1580 dealt a shattering defeat to the English army in Ireland.

The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis

Part 1: Background to the Nine Years War the machinery for war the demands of the war on the shires of England and Wales. Part 2: military levies raised from Kent levies from Northamptonshire and Derbyshire levies from Lancashire and Cheshire. Part 3: Chester, the chief military port for the Irish services in the 1590s Bristol, Barnstaple and other western ports in the service of the Irish war. Part 4 The maintenance of the army in Ireland the Elizabethan soldier at war casualties and welfare measures for the sick and wounded.

PARLIAMENTARY TYRANNY? INDEMNITY PROCEEDINGS AND THE IMPACT OF THE CIVIL WAR: A CASE STUDY FROM WARWICKSHIRE

AbstractRecent research into the impact of the Civil War on provincial England has pointed to extensive economic and social dislocation, in the short term at least. We are no longer so certain that the English experience was qualitatively different from continental sufferings in the Thirty Years War. Formal taxation levels, for example, were higher in the 1640s and even in the 1650s than they were to be again until the French wars of the 1690s. In Warwickshire during the war itself the main parliamentarian levy, the weekly assessment paid to local troops, amounted in a year to ten times the annual ship money levy of the 1630s. In addition the county's inhabitants paid taxes for the New Model Army, for the British Army in Ireland, and a whole host of local, ad hoc levies, to provide horses or supplies for particular forces, or labour and animals for the fortifications of local garrisons. There was an unprecedented purchase tax, the excise, levied on many essential commodities; there were compulsory ‘loans’...

The augmentation of the army in Ireland 1767–1769

The augmentation of the army in Ireland 1767–1769