Century Ireland Research Articles

Voices in Prefaces: Speaking Irish in an English Reformation

Voices in Prefaces: Speaking Irish in an English Reformation John McCafferty ‘I humbly take my leave. From my house in St Patrick’s Close Dublin, the 20th of October 1609’: these words close the preface to a book printed in the Irish language in Dublin: Leabhar na nurnaightheadh gcomhchoidchiond agus mheinisdraldachda na Sacrameinteadh … do réir eagalse na Sagsan. Coming sixty years after the first Prayer Book in English, this translation is one of eight works printed in Irish between 1571 and 1690. Five have prefaces, yet only one of those is wholly in Irish – the 1571 Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma. Only one has prefaces in both languages – the 1601 New Testament. The remaining three introduce Irish books solely in the English tongue. Why? Because they were speaking to the authority sponsoring reformation in Ireland. That authority, whether in Dublin Castle or Westminster, was monoglot. A monolingual monarchy meant a great deal for the future of Protestantism in Ireland. The Dublin parliament of 1536–37 passed a flurry of legislation borrowed from the English break with Rome two years earlier. Yet tucked in after the SupremacyAct came 28 Henry VIII c. 15: An Act for the English Order, Habit and Language. This law yoked Henry’s break with Rome together with the politics of language in Ireland, thus wrapping medieval roots around modern regalism. Much of the provision of this statute was centuries old, familiar from the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 – targeting Irish hairstyles, clothing and customs. Yet there was a new twist, a twist with big consequences, unthinkable in thefourteenth century, because here was now a king supreme under God, a king who had broken with the Pope. This supreme governor insisted that all newly-ordained clergy take an oath to learn English, teach it in their parishes, preach and make bidding prayers in it. Over a decade before the first Prayer Book in English in England (1549), this legislation made a seamless garment of Anglicisation and schism. As Henry’s schism segued into Protestant reformation under his son Edward VI and his daughter Elizabeth I, the reforming belief that use of 484 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 John McCafferty the vernacular was essential grated against Dublin Castle’s promotion of English. Tudor and then Stuart policy towards Irish was unstable in intention. There was sporadic interest, usually shown in proclamations, spurts of enthusiasm and local initiatives. Even Elizabeth I herself (despite her 1567 provision of £66 13s 4d for an Irish typeface) was door-stepped in 1575 by Laurence Humphrey, Master of Magdalen College, Oxford who, producing an alleged Irish translation of the New Testament by Archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh, urged the queen to get on with the job. Yet, it was not until 1634 that the Church of Ireland itself got around to legislating for Irish. Loss of enthusiasm for evangelisation through the vernacular in colonial settings, a kind of colonial fatigue, was not a particularly Protestant phenomenon. In New Spain and in New France, Catholic missionaries jettisoned Nahua and Huron respectively, as they became convinced of the innate barbarity of the vernaculars. In sixteenth century Ireland, an old discourse about English civility and superiority joined a new colonial sensibility. All of this makes the prefaces above mentioned those of what might be described as overlooked voices. The writers, Irish-born Gaelic-speaking Protestants, were people under pressure. They were at serious variance with the overwhelming majority of their fellow speakers. They adhered to an established church in a state whose reflexive strategy was to remake Ireland as a copy of England. These are, quite literally, prefaces to a history that didn’t happen. They are worth a listen. Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma (Dublin, 1571)1 Seán Ó Cearnaigh was born in Leyney, Co. Sligo, about 1545. He attended Cambridge, taking a BA degree in 1565. By 1570, he was Treasurer of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. This first book printed in Irish in Ireland came just as Elizabeth was trying to retrieve her early investment in the enterprise. In his short Irish preface to this fifty-five page primer, Ó Cearnaigh insists on the redemptive effect of the Irish typeface, which will ‘open to you that road that...

The Rising Goes Digital : Century Ireland.ie

The “decade of commemorations” initiated on May 1st, 2013 in Ireland has brought about a wide range of new media projects which aim at remembering events and understanding how ideals are elaborated and how famous or anonymous figures and women, anonymous or not chose to enact them, focusing on the 1913-23 period. This paper examines the Century Ireland website [http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/]. It proposes to assess how archival material related to the Rising contributes to the elaboration of an alternative discourse that takes affect and immateriality into account and engages the users of these interfaces.

Irish droughts in newspaper archives: rediscovering forgotten hazards?

Irish newspaper collections are a rich source of information on historical droughts. Following a search of 250 years of such archives, this paper brings to light four newspaper articles describing three drought events that convey the cultural impacts and unusual societal responses to drought in nineteenth century Ireland. Amongst the archives we find two poems from 1806 and 1893, a call to pray for rain in 1887, and a suggestion for weather modification in 1893. These records demonstrate that, contrary to recent experience, Ireland is surprisingly prone to drought.

Irish Adventures in Nation-Building by Bryan Fanning (review)

future. Through archival research, interviews and legal analysis, it sheds light on that web of mutually regarding personal relationships that have shaped our constitutional law. For lawyers, it provides invaluable context for the legal decisions that have influenced our constitutional system and political community. For non-lawyers, it provides an engaging and provocative introduction to the fundamentally important work of the Supreme Court. In providing this excellent account of a misunderstood but foundationally important institution, Mac Cormaic has provided a valuable service to our democracy. Dr Oran Doyle is Associate Professor of Law and Head of School, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on constitutional law. Irish Adventures in Nation-Building, Bryan Fanning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), viii+196 pages. This collection of eighteen essays covers the relationship between ideology and public policy in the cultural, political and economic development of modern Ireland. It ranges from the Famine to the boom-era inflow of immigrants and the argument over the roles of liberalism and corporatism in the economic bubble and crash of early twenty-first century Ireland. It is unusually coherent for a collection of occasional pieces, partly because the author provides an introductory essay setting out its main concerns and linking it to the analysis of such theorists of nationalism as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, partly because it forms part of a wider intellectual project. This comprises several related books in which Fanning interrogates the formation and adaptation of official versions of Irish identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through debates in policy journals and through attitudes to immigrants and ‘New Irish’ citizens in the twenty-first century. Some of these essays are more convincing than others. For example, the comparison between state development strategies and official culture in Ireland and Taiwan lends a new dimension to the concept of the ‘Celtic Tiger’(not least because so few Irish readers will know much about Taiwan). The surveys of the changing nature of public policy debates in Studies (incidentallycritiquingsimplisticassumptionsthatpost-independenceIreland 240 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Summer 2017: Book Reviews was sharply divided between Catholic reactionaries and liberal modernisers) and of the extent to which The Bell, for all its perceptive criticisms of Irish society, remained a creature of its time, are likewise valuable contributions to knowledge. (More might, however, have been said about the overlap and tensions between Peadar O’Donnell’s communitarian-Marxist approach and Sean O Faolain’s enlightened liberal-bourgeois project). The analysis of the rise and fall of Irish Thomist sociology is also helpful. On the other hand, the discussion of Pádraig Pearse, centred on a 1906 article in which Pearse fantasised about a glorious Irish-speaking republic of 2006 in a world where English was only spoken by a few peasants in Somerset, is two-dimensional: it misses several hints that Pearse – who, contrary to contemporary perceptions, did have a sense of humour – was speaking tongue-in-cheek and engaging in self-conscious hyperbole, and it fails to note that Pearse’s idealisation of Cuchulain and his world resembled contemporary British public-school idealisation of mediaeval chivalry. (This was explored in Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot; as Girouard points out, a major progenitor of this ethos was The Broadstone of Honour by the early nineteenth-centuryAnglo-Irish convert to Catholicism, Kenelm Digby). In this context, Fanning’s contrast between Pearse’s idealised future and the current Irish vogue for the television series A Game of Thrones (which consciously reacts against the chivalric myth by emphasising the bloody and rapacious aspects of feudal knighthood) may be more appropriate than he realises. The essay format naturally lends itself to suggestion rather than comprehensiveness, and it is no disrespect to Fanning’s achievement to point out that some of the issues he raises are more complex than he presents them. For example, he accepts the ‘modernist’ theory of nationalism, and its emphasis on such matters as the way in which national identities, which present themselves as outgrowths of peasant folk cultures, in fact derive from a process of codifying and adapting premodern identities – this produces a standardised high culture capable of meeting the requirements of social and political modernity...

‘from education, from duty, and from principle’: Irish Catholic loyalty in context, 1829-1874

The passage of the Emancipation Act in 1829 presented an opportunity for Catholics to reimagine their loyalty as equal subjects for the first time under the union between Great Britain and Ireland. This article explores the way Catholic loyalty was conceived in the decades that followed the act of 1829 through to the mid 1870s, when there was renewed focus on the civil allegiance of Catholics following the declaration of Papal infallibility. Historians are increasingly exploring a range of social, political and religious identities in nineteenth century Ireland, beyond the rigid binary paradigm of Catholic nationalisms and Protestant loyalisms that has dominated Irish historiography. However, Catholic loyalty in particular remains an anachronism and lacks sufficient conceptual clarity. Our understanding of a specifically Catholic variant of loyalty and its public and associational expression, beyond a number of biographical studies of relatively unique individuals, remains limited. By providing an exposition of episodes in the history of Catholic loyalty in the early and mid-Victorian years this article illuminates the phenomenon. It demonstrates that Irish Catholic loyalty took on different expressive forms, which were dependent on the individuals proclaiming their loyalty, their relationship to the objects of their loyalty, and its reception by the British state and Protestant establishment.

Listening to Identity: Music in 21st century Ireland

Listening to Identity: Music in 21st century Ireland

Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? by Liam Kennedy (review)

quite ferocious.’ Clearly he didn’t suffer fools gladly. His acerbic wit is well illustrated in his response to a query as to how he would like the Corpus to be bound – ‘in the hide of Robin Dudley Edwards, the thickest and most impenetrable hide in Ireland’, was his answer. Like many, Binchy was disillusioned with post-war Ireland, and he viewed the state’s Irish languagerevival policy with scepticism. Daniel Binchy’s fine portrait by Sir William Orpen hangs in the DIAS. It might have been given a more prominent position in the book, where, reduced to a small scale, it is relegated to the back cover. However, it is surely appropriate that Ireland’s greatest portraitist should have been the one to paint perhaps the country’s greatest Celtic scholar. Although he is occasionally prone to digress, Professor Garvin has written a fine biography of Binchy that is at once rounded, readable and scholarly. The text is frequently enlivened by the author’s own pungent opinions. Dr Harman Murtagh is a Visiting Fellow at Athlone Institute of Technology. He writes on local and military history and is completing a study of King James II’s Irish army. Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?, Liam Kennedy (Sallins: Merrion Press, 2016), 272 pages. Liam Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Queen’s University Belfast. This book comprises a series of essays written over a period of twenty years, addressing some major aspects of modern Irish history. The title is based on a quote from Berthold Brecht – ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes’ – and the author casts a very cold eye on some of the heroes, and some of what he would regard as the myths, of Irish historiography. The first part of the book, under the heading ‘The Long View’, is the only one which explicitly addresses the issue of oppression. In the first chapter Kennedy introduces the concept of MOPE – the Most Oppressed People Ever – which he describes as the master template for writing about modern Ireland. In debunking this notion he observes that both Northern Ireland and the Republic are among the richest regions in the world and analyses the freedoms enjoyed in both places since the nineteenth century. He observes Spring 2017: Book Reviews 122 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 that most Irish emigration has been voluntary and resorted to for economic reasons, with none of the restrictions on freedom of movement which presented elsewhere in Europe. He concludes that whether it is location, climate, land occupancy, political and religious rights, economic welfare or violence, the Irish record is no worse than the modal European experience and is, in a variety of respects, more fortunate. The two other chapters in the first part of the book are titled ‘The Planter and the Gael’and ‘Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland’. The cultural revival of the late nineteenth century in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, placed a value on ethnic and linguistic purity and on racial origins. Yet Ireland, as a small island on the western edge of Europe, has been open to waves of warriors, predators and settlers riding in from western and northern Europe. Kennedy regards the idea of an original ethnic stem or a pure Gael as a piece of fiction and ideological make-believe. He looks at some of the cultural, ethnic and religious issues which caused unionism and nationalism to diverge in the nineteenth century. He analyses economic progress in both northern and southern Ireland in the period 1800-1914 and concludes that the north prospered over the south. He stresses the importance of industrialisation and urbanisation, without which there would not have been a sufficiently populous Protestant presence for effective opposition to home rule and the creation of the statelet of Northern Ireland. The second part of the book, ‘Famine in Ireland’, looks at comparisons which have been made between the Great Irish Famine of 1845-47 and the Shoah, and at the allegation that the British government was guilty of genocide during the famine. He makes a number of comparisons between the Irish famine and the twentieth-century Jewish Holocaust. He maintains that...

An exploration of ethos in Irish Muslim schools: ethnographic insights and perspectives from parents and teachers

Islam is the fastest growing faith in the Republic of Ireland, with the number of adherents reported in 2012 at 50,000. However, despite this number there are only three Muslim primary schools. Empirical research on Muslim schools in Ireland is currently very limited. This article aims to provide insight and understanding into the role of ethos as a lived experience among children in Muslim primary schools in contemporary twenty-first century Ireland. The data for this ethnographic study were based on observations and interviews with Muslim parents and religion teachers in two Muslim Irish state-funded schools. This study revealed both similarities and variations between the schools, despite being under the same patronage. These were significantly notable in how the ethos was manifested and experienced by Muslim pupils, in terms of prayer, dress code and physical environment. The article concludes with some implications for the research.

Irish History Online and in Real Time: Century Ireland and the Decade of Centenaries

Irish History Online and in Real Time:Century Ireland and the Decade of Centenaries Mike Cronin (bio) In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences offered the following view on the potential for academic engagement with the digital realm: "Online resources offer unprecedented opportunities for scholars to frame topics of public interest, to participate in a wider community of public intellectuals, and to reach general audiences. The digital world offers vast new possibilities, not only for delivering instruction but also for facilitating research and for making the past and future possibilities come alive to students of all ages."1 While there is little to challenge in the view that access to online audiences offers scholars significant openings for presenting their work, one might question how far academia has actually embraced that potential. There is also the issue of what type of scholarship has gone digital, what the audience has been for that scholarship, and how successful and innovative the project of digital research has been to date. The answers to those questions need not concern us, and there has been a significant amount of research that has teased out the history of digital scholarship, particularly in the areas of digital humanities and (in the context of this essay) digital history.2 The contention here is that the digital humanities have largely been the preserve of a network of self-motivated scholars in various countries. These scholars responded [End Page 269] in their respective fields to the potential of digital scholarship, and over the years professional societies, research centers, and specialist journals emerged in reaction to these developments. As the discipline (or perhaps rather the methodology) became a norm within scholarship, so national research-funding bodies began to support the work of those in the digital humanities. However, by and large the digital humanities have been centered within the confines of university-based researchers, state-funded grant-giving bodies, and various archives and libraries that hold the materials that are to be digitized and analyzed. While such digital scholarship has been important, and there have been obvious gains in terms of the use of digital content in the lecture hall and in the initiation of public outreach on many projects, the whole endeavor has been driven by the needs of the scholarly community over other concerns. Writing in the early days of digital history in 2005, Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig offered the opinion that "all of us have a responsibility to ensure that the new digital history is a democratic history, one that reflects many different voices of the past and the present, that encourages everyone to participate in writing their own histories, and that reaches diverse and multiple audiences in the present and future."3 This is a key point in the context of this article, as it highlights some central concerns and questions about digital history. Is it democratic? Is digital history open to all? And how does digital history encourage a dialogue between the multiple voices of the past and those of the present? Effectively, how can digital history move beyond the scholarly environment and into the public sphere? For all the many excellent digital-history projects that exist, I would argue that too many are still the products of students working with their faculty advisors and archivists working with subject-specific experts. Digital history has not often, as Bill Adair asked of the museum community in the digital age, "let go." According to Adair, "What the museum 'lets go' of is not expertise but the assumption that the museum has the last word on historical interpretation. … This scenario involves letting go of the notion that one can or should [End Page 270] control all outcomes in the museum."4 It is arguable that a specific opportunity in Ireland—the centenary commemoration of the 1912–23 period—allowed historians and others to "let go." In an age of digital opportunities that coincided with a peak in the public's engagement with the past, digital history moved outside of the classroom and the research environment and stepped into the genuinely public sphere where curated web projects did not control...

The Development of Liberalistic Integration in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland:

The Development of Liberalistic Integration in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland:

The British Labour Party and Twentieth Century Ireland

The British Labour Party and Twentieth Century Ireland

Theory/praxis confusion within Irish Liberalism: The curious case of teenage sexuality

The contention that non-procreational sex is inherently sinful is a basic tenet of Catholic teaching. From a secular liberal perspective this proposition is inverted. Yet, despite this ideological clash, in 21st century Ireland there exists a unique convergence of views between members of these opposing ideologies when answering the questions as to whether teenagers under 17 should be allowed to control their sexuality and whether it is right to conceive of female teenagers under 17 as less autonomous and less sexual than their male counterparts.Utilizing an ideal type ‘Irish secular liberal’ construction, this article, deploying insights from the Foucauldian framework, problematizes the secular liberal response to a series of related issues revolving around the rights of Irish teenagers to control their sexuality. It argues that the Irish secular liberal regulation of teenage sexuality by reference to the cognitive ability/sexual autonomy discourse is not the product of a reflexive concern with the psychological harm that may ensue if underage teenagers engage in sexual relations. Rather, it advances the theory that such surveillance, both internal and external, is primarily a means through which the responsible heteronormative adult subject position is produced and governed.

Village and town in mid nineteenth century Ireland

No abstract!

Village and town in mid nineteenth century Ireland

No abstract

Suicide in Ireland in the 19th century.

The procedures used in this presentation involve analysis of data from the 1841 and 1851 Censuses of Ireland and the Reports of the Registrar-General of Ireland from 1864 to 1899 and the Annual Reports of the Inspectors of Lunacy, 1850 to 1899. Reported suicides had relatively low rates in the 19th century, ranging from 0.9 to 3.3 per 100 000 per year. The proportion of these suicides that occurred in asylums was low at ~4%. The reporting of suicide as a cause of death was relatively rare in the first-half of the 19th century in Ireland, but increased in frequency progressively throughout the second-half of that century. The reported numbers are likely to have minimised the real rates because of under-reporting.

Who is Irish Today? Citizenship and Nationality Issues in 21st Century Ireland

Over the last two decades, many European States have altered their immigration policies in a context of intense economic, social and demographic changes. As a consequence, immigration issues have turned into more political issues, forcefully questioning the notion of belonging to the “community of citizens”. Long considered as an emigrant nation without any real experience in dealing with immigration issues, how has Ireland dealt with an outstanding reversal of its population trends in less than two decades in a context of huge economic and social changes? The purpose of this chapter is to look at the two notions of citizenship and nationality in the Republic of Ireland through a two-facet perspective set against the economic and demographic changes of the last two decades. In the Irish case, both elements seem to stress the idea of an unchanging Irish citizenship and identity while negating the diversity of Ireland itself.

Ó Chéitinn go Conradh: The Revivalists and the 1916 Rising

Was the Gaelic League the ‘breeding ground’ for the IRB? Was the Irish language the Language of the Revolution? These parting words from the O’Rahilly (Ua Rathghaille) border on absurd black humour but like so many other Gaelic Leaguers their journey to the Rising, which will be reviewed in this paper was anything but humorous. This title reflects the long heritage from which the Gaelic League and Language Movement emerged, emanating from Geoffrey Keating’s (Seathrun Ceitinn) seventeenth century comprehensive history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (c.1634) and resulting in a language and literary revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in the spirit of this heritage that the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League was founded in Dublin by Sean O Ceallaigh in 1901, following on the inspiration of Father Peter Yorke’s rising speech entitled ‘The Turning of the Tide’ in 1899. The Branch title links the Gaelic League with this strong scholarly heritage but the Keating Branch would also take on another role in the run up to the Easter Rising in 1916, as it became known as a recruiting ground for Volunteers and IRB. However after the Rising the Gaelic League and Language Movement renewed the focus on Irish heritage and culture taking a new role in Irish society, forming the basis for a new Irish identity in twentieth century Ireland. This approach acknowledged the need for action linking the work of Keating with a new approach to literary practice and processes.

Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals

The purpose of this article is to assess the value of law journals as sources for the analysis of modern Irish history. It examines how two periods of obvious political transition in Irish history are reflected in law journals. The article covers the period between 1916 and 1922, which saw the secession most of the island of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and the period between 1922 and 1937, which saw the gradual secession of the Irish Free State from the British Empire. It examines how military conflict, partition and the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty influenced the content, nature, and editorial policies followed by Irish law journals. Important non-Irish law journals, in particular the Canadian Bar Review and the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, are also examined in the context of the constitutional relationship between the Irish Free State and Dominion status. These examples are used to support the conclusion that law journals remain important sources in charting and evaluating political transitions in early twentieth century Ireland.

Differential diagnosis of pathologically induced upper and lower limb asymmetry in a burial from late medieval Ireland (CE 1439–1511)

This paper reports a case study from 15 to 16th century Ireland of a mature adult male with upper and lower limb asymmetry. All of the bones of the right upper and lower extremity were atrophied and demonstrated limb shortening. This individual also had severe scoliosis and accessory facets on the superior aspect of the distal ends of the right metatarsals. These facets were most likely caused by the individual walking predominately on his toes to make up for the height difference between the lower limbs. Based on the patterning of affected bones and associated pathological changes, the individual was diagnosed as suffering from cerebral palsy with right-sided hemiplegia. Few definite cases of cerebral palsy have been identified in the archaeological record and most often only include the shortening of one or two long bones. The case from Ballinderry provides one of the most definitive archaeological cases to date.

The first Sterling Area†

Between the eleventh century and mid‐thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European ‘bullion famine’ of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s.