Decade Of Centenaries Research Articles

Commemorating history, historicising commemoration

This essay offers a combination of historical, editorial and commemorative approaches to the process of historicising the practices of remembering the Easter Rising in Ireland. Considered one of the most defining historical moments that has shaped the present-day Ireland and its relationships with Great Britain, the Easter Rebellion of 1916 was remembered in a series of events comprised within the framework of the “Decade of Centenaries” programme of celebrations. The history of the Easter Rising, spoken and unspoken, was symbolically re-enacted in various commemorative forms and via multiple media: television, radio, theatre, internet and many more cultural institutions. The study deals with crucial interconnected problems concerning the ephemerality of commemoration treated as a historical moment whose aim is to remember the defining historical event and which, paradoxically, itself becomes history. The importance of editorial and typographical considerations, as studied on the basis of selected commemorative texts and media,are important in the way in which commemoration functions and seeks unity in terms of shaping the perceptions of historical events in Ireland. Yet, the editorial, typographic and graphic dimensions of such texts may also question the discourse of practices or, at least, signal inconsistencies. The methodology applied here is that of a case study and comparative examination. Following the temporal confrontative procedure employed in one of the previous coauthored articles (see Koneczniak & Koneczniak, 2022), the research cases involve two historical moments: the analysis conducted and described during the exact commemorative moment, that is, the precise one hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, and the state found almost five years after the remembrance series, at the beginning of 2021. The comparative basis involves the same research materials, and it focuses on determining changes in the access to the original commemorative materials available in 2016 and linked to the celebration of the 1916 Rising.

Spectres of ascendancy: Beckett, Yeats, and the politics of postcolonial amnesia

This essay reflects on the shifting status of “Ascendancy” as a colonial social formation and an historical and aesthetic category shaping the development of anticolonial and postcolonial thought in Irish writing and culture from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of commemoration and anti-imperial reckoning. In particular, the essay considers how Ascendancy is a surprisingly useful category for thinking about Samuel Beckett and his reflections on power and empire. The essay reevaluates Beckett’s relationship with W. B. Yeats and explores the significance of their markedly different but intertwining relationships to Ascendancy. Looking at the arc of Beckett criticism within Irish studies alongside new readings of Yeats’s elegies for the Ascendancy Big House and his plays The Countess Cathleen and Purgatory, the essay explores how we might reevaluate that intellectual and cultural history amidst the recent controversies attending Ireland’s “Decade of Centenaries” and the reimagining of Ireland’s place within a global imperial history. As part of that exploration, the essay considers Beckett’s and Yeats’s legacies alongside twenty-first-century Ireland’s public monuments, commemorations, and architectural heritage while also reflecting on commissioned inquiries into the legacies of empire by the President of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. In the midst of what President Michael D. Higgins has labeled a “feigned amnesia” around the legacies of empire in Ireland, the essay considers how Beckett’s work might be seen to have anticipated the terms of much of the current discourse.

Introduction: New Histories of the Irish Revolution

The centenary of the Irish Revolution has just concluded, with 2023 marking the hundredth anniversary of the ‘dump arms’ order which ended, albeit ambiguously, the civil war of 1922–3. European history has been accustomed to marking centenaries during the past ten years, from the First World War which overturned a global order, to the Russian Revolution which created a new one, to the post-war national reverberations which created revolutions of their own. The enthusiasm with which these have been marked across Europe has varied considerably, with the sombre ne plus jamais tones of the centenary of the First World War giving way rapidly to the muted if not entirely absent commemorations of the October Revolution in Russia. The island of Ireland has perhaps been more wedded than elsewhere in Europe to the relentless treadmill of centenaries, with the Irish state formally dating its existence to the vanguardist rebellion, popular mandates and political institutions that occurred between 1916 and 1922, and Northern Ireland being dated to 1920. The ‘Decade of Centenaries’, as it is known in Ireland, has been unfolding according to a carefully arranged schedule since 2012; the end, marking the ambiguous conclusion of the Irish Civil War, is finally upon us. The implications of the ‘Decade’ for public history, for the position of professional historians within and outside the academy, and for the broader understanding of the revolutionary decade are significant and have generated their own critical literature.

Historians and the Decade of Centenaries in Modern Ireland

The Irish ‘Decade of Centenaries’ is, at last, drawing to a close, ending the ‘interminable round of national soul-searching’ which one prominent historian warily anticipated in 2013.1 The final major event to be commemorated is the Civil War of 1922–3, when the Irish republican movement split bitterly and violently over the terms of the treaty granting the southern part of Ireland partial independence from Britain. As it turns out, the government in charge of overseeing that commemoration is a coalition made up of the two principal political parties that emerged from the aftermath of that civil war. Where for a century these parties had formed the binaries of the Irish political division, now their peaceful cooperation in government could be seen as proof of the ‘end of history’, Irish-style. Even erstwhile political enemies – whose ancestors one hundred years ago executed and assassinated each other – could unite in a shared project of ‘inclusive’ and ‘ethical’ commemoration informed by an expert advisory panel made up of prominent academic and public historians. Their unprecedented political cooperation would be encapsulated by the peaceful swapping of the position of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) half-way through the government's term. The third great strand of the Irish Revolution, the labour movement, was fortuitously represented by the election to the Irish Presidency in 2007 of Michael D. Higgins, an academic sociologist and former Labour Party TD (member of parliament). Casann an roth, as Higgins declared in one of his many addresses during the ‘Decade’, as it is colloquially known in Irish history parlance.2 The wheel turns, and this time had come full circle, repairing the fractures in the national movement and restoring national political unity.

‘An unfinished democracy’: gender and political representation in the Republic of Ireland

ABSTRACT Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries, beginning in 2012, has seen the commemoration of a period of significant social and political transformation. For scholars of gender and politics, it also provides the opportunity to take stock of women’s path to greater political representation (ultimately aided by the introduction of a candidate gender quota in 2016) and to highlight key areas where more work needs to be done in order to understand how women can enjoy greater inclusion and participation, as well as representation of their interests, going forward. This symposium provides an overview of what we know about the causes of women’s underrepresentation in Irish political life so far, before addressing some of these areas where our understanding is as yet underdeveloped. In doing so, it contributes to the developing knowledge of the Irish case. Overall, the symposium highlights diverse forms of women’s political participation in the Republic of Ireland.

Unbiddable Pasts

At the Ulster Museum in Belfast two artefacts connect the momentous events of 1916 with the thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. One piece is the work of republican prisoners interned aboard HMS Maidstone in the Belfast docks in the early 1970s: a plaque, signed by its creators, bearing a portrait of the only socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, James Connolly. The other is a painting by Gusty Spence, the founder of the modern loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It commemorates the Battle of the Somme: two soldiers in silhouette, bugles to their lips, on either side of a standard bearing the words ‘In Immortal Memory’, a reference to the 5,000 troops from the 36th Ulster Division who were killed or injured going over the top on 1 July 1916. These two objects not only bring home the importance of history and memory to the paramilitaries who fought each other during the Troubles but also point to how the story of the modern conflict is already being crafted for current political debates and future generations. As William Blair writes, the greatest challenge for the Ulster Museum in the near future will not be remembrance of the battles of a century ago but ‘dealing with the difficult and divisive legacy of “the Troubles”’.1 This is also an issue which historians have already begun to confront, often through their contributions to the debates surrounding the so-called ‘Decade of Centenaries’, stretching from the Home Rule crisis of 1912 to the end of the Irish revolution in 1923. These five books deal with the politics of memory in Ireland generally, and Northern Ireland in particular, and how memorialisation of traumatic events – official, unofficial and private – has shaped both the public sphere and the hidden recesses of everyday life. Two almost simultaneous events from 1916 – the Easter Rising in Dublin and the Battle of the Somme – have acquired extraordinary resonance in the contemporary politics of memory in Northern Ireland.

Irish Postcolonial Studies, 1980–2021

AbstractThis essay contests the idea that Irish postcolonial studies is a diminished field in contemporary Ireland, instead contending that it has been a sustained and significant critical force in Irish studies for over four decades and will likely remain so. The Irish “decade of centenaries,” international protests against institutional racism, and “decolonizing the university” controversies have brought issues of colonialism, racism, and empire to new prominence in Irish society and encouraged the take-up of postcolonial critique in Irish historiography, political studies, and other disciplines. The essay surveys the achievements and limitations of Irish postcolonial studies, primarily in the field of cultural analysis, since the 1980s and concludes with an assessment of major challenges ahead. The crises of contemporary global capitalism, it suggests, will impel postcolonial studies not just to engage received histories of empire and anti-imperial struggle but also to consider current conjunctures in terms of postcapitalist futures.

Ireland Reimagined

Ireland's decade of centenaries (2012-2022) commemorates historial milestones that led to the country's independence from Great Britain and the creation of the Republic of Ireland. However, since the advent of the Irish nation, its history has always been a contested space - where opposing political social, and cultural groups negotiate between historical narratives - to lay claim to a 'true' Irish history. This paper presents the competing historiographies involved in the Irish government's decade of centenaries and identifies the socio-political agenda behind state commemorations. A historical analysis of the commemorations that took place in the 2010s proves that socio-political considerations factored in the way Ireland's founding was portrayed by the Government, the public, and civil society. Overall, this paper concluded that the Irish Government's chief aims were to strike a conciliatory tone with northern Ireland, 'crowd-out' opposing historical narratives, and project Ireland's economic progress through the irish proclamation. Neverthless, academic historians and the public intervened in this negotiation to create reimagined histories of Ireland.

The “Decade of Centenaries”: Commemoration, Controversies, Gender and “Trending”

The Irish State officially commemorated the Easter Rising of 1916 in 2016 as part of a “decade of centenaries”, a period in history (1913-23) marked by significant episodes of violence and conflict. Despite this, the concepts of pluralism and reconciliation were chosen and embraced as the basis to successfully remember and recall these landmark events in the present.

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire Sara Dybris McQuaid (bio) Ireland is at a key moment of rethink. Between 2012 and 2022 Ireland is officially marking a "Decade of Centenaries" in which the country reflects on seminal events that led to the birth of the state. The Third Home Rule Bill passed in the British Parliament in 1912, effectively paving the way for Irish independence (albeit within the empire). After a tumultuous decade, 1922 saw the final establishment of the Irish Free State, with the island having been partitioned in 1921. The most significant single event in this decade was arguably the Easter Rising of 1916. At that point Ireland was still governed under the Union with Great Britain, and the constitutional path to Home Rule had been postponed because of the outbreak of World War I. In this context the Easter Rising was staged by a relatively small group of radicals who took over key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish republic. A short week of fighting with the British Army ensued, during which Dublin was completely devastated and the leaders of the Rising were imprisoned. The subsequent execution of the leaders outraged the public and rallied more widespread sympathy for a radical agenda. The historiographical agreement—to the extent it exists—has largely been that as a military maneuver, the Rising was a spectacular failure, but as a symbolic performance of blood sacrifice it was a roaring success.1 While the Rising itself failed to achieve its goals of a united, Gaelic, and socialist republic, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has argued that it came to be seen as the point from which all subsequent Irish history begins.2 [End Page 110] Prologue In 2016 the state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising, and in April of that year I brought a group of MA students on a fieldtrip to do participant observation of the commemorations in Dublin. Getting to an old friend's house out near Kilmainham Gaol (where the leaders of the rising were executed in 1916), I asked the taxi driver whether he was already tired of "remembering the Rising"; he said, "Not at all!" On the contrary, he had enjoyed it immensely, with so many new aspects of the Rising being explored. I asked him what he had been especially impressed by, and he said the RTÉ radio documentary An Easter Re-rising about a 1930 uprising in Chittagong in prepartition India (now Bangladesh) apparently modeled closely on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.3 I downloaded the radio program, which was made by Pranjali Bhave, an Indian woman who had lived in Ireland for ten years.4 The idea for this article began to take shape. While the Decade of Centenaries is about reaffirming and recharging (and to some extent critically reassessing) the national community, imperial and postcolonial relationships have also been pivotal points of renegotiation. One dimension of this is how commemorations are used to position Ireland in relation to the imperial experience, which it may be understood to be both part of and subjected to. Another emerging dimension relates to how commemorations are used to come to terms with other former colonial populations, now living in Ireland, and how they and the transnational, imperial pasts they represent are incorporated in local and national commemorations. At the same time certain forms of remembering, particularly those rehearsing antagonistic relations to Great Britain, have been submerged as a wide variety of other focuses have risen to the front of official remembrance. In this article I consider An Easter Re-rising in the context of these wider forms of remembrance, spurred by the Decade of Centenaries, to show how it at once brings a globalizing and transnational dimension to remembering the Easter Rising, while at the same time through a series of displacements reenables a narrative that has largely been eschewed in national commemorations. [End Page 111] Introduction Centenaries are occasions in which all remembrance is necessarily disembodied (since almost none of the people who lived the historical experience are still alive) and therefore must be reembodied by new generations and populations through their participation in memorializing and imagining the nation.5...

Hauntology in Practice: Commemorating Partition in the Age of Brexit

Hauntology in Practice:Commemorating Partition in the Age of Brexit Jonathan Evershed (bio) and Rebecca Graff-McRae (bio) "Full Derrida. I'm hauntology in practice, an aporia upon which meaning depends, the emptiness at the logocentre, as it were."1 Brexit is haunted by the ghost(s) of partition. Since June 2016 the vexatious specter of the Irish border has returned to haunt Irish, British, and wider European politics in a way not seen since the height of the Troubles.2 In rolling news coverage and opinion columns, on social media, and even in the pages of a book that it had purportedly authored (I Am the Border, So I Am, 2019), the border has found new ways to interrupt present political settlements and to disrupt and reshape the relationships and meanings that define contemporary politics on and across "these islands."3 Crucially, the disruptive return of the border and its divisive politics has given the lie to an assumption that had underpinned the Decade of Centenaries and its prevailing narratives on "reconciliation,"4 namely, that the vexatious question of the border had been all but successfully exorcised from political life in Ireland, North and South. Claims by the British [End Page 312] and Irish governments, political figures, and cultural commentators that the Decade of Centenaries has marked and aided in Ireland's "overcoming" of past conflicts—between "Unionist" and "Nationalist," "British" and "Irish"—have been revealed as profoundly problematic. A divided and unstable present continues to frame how the ghosts of a violent past are received and represented. Building on previous work undertaken by the authors on the hauntology of commemoration in Ireland and drawing on a series of ethnographic interviews with key stakeholders in the centenary of partition, this article will situate the centenary and its multiple narratives within a political context determined by the fallout of Brexit on the island of Ireland, thus mapping this anniversary within the fluid and shifting political dynamics that it both mirrors and serves to shape.5 Highlighting the ambivalent and transfigurative nature of commemorative politics, we propose hauntology as a useful lens through which to read commemoration during the Decade of Centenaries, with the term itself a form of political intervention that creates and sustains conflict even as it lays claim to having overcome it. Applying a hauntological lens offers a vocabulary—a lexicon—to describe the temporal and ontological (dis)juncture of history, memory, and politics at the centenary of partition. Hauntology both permits and forces us to ask "how does commemoration reproduce and reconfigure the power-discursive relations between the dead of the past and the politics of the present?"6 Crucially, hauntology is also a method of disrupting claims to foundational narratives and asking "in what ways are the foundations of the state and the nation both (contentiously) laid upon the graveyard of history?"7 To name the ghost is to acknowledge the multiple paradoxes of social and political memory—notably absence/presence, past/present, continuity/rupture. As Evershed suggests: [End Page 313] [Ghosts] exist somewhere between the real and the imagined, structure and agency, signifier and signified. They carry messages from the past that can act to compel particular forms of individual or collective action, but they also require forms of action in order that these messages might be received.8 Commemoration is quite literally "a prayer to be haunted,"9 conjuring into the political present the restless ghosts of a troubled past in an attempt to fix or control the meaning of the message they carry. Such an attempt is necessarily and contentiously political, as these meanings are always multiple and conflicted.10 To explore the centenary of partition hauntologically is to follow those involved in commemorating (or indeed not commemorating) it as they convene with its ghosts; it is to ask "how they interpret [these] 'ghosts' and how they use them as a source of knowledge."11 It is to examine how this contributes to contemporary political conflict about borders and bordering on the island of Ireland. Whereas commemoration navigates geographical and politico-spatial borders, the ghosts of time cross paths with ghosts of space and place. The confluence of Brexit and the centenary...

Rethinking Commemorative Narratives through Exhibition: The Contact Relics of Michael Collins

Rethinking Commemorative Narratives through Exhibition:The Contact Relics of Michael Collins Siobhán Doyle (bio) Commemorative exhibitions are practices of remembrance and communication that shape, transfer, and disseminate narratives about the past and are significant in examining the construction and reevaluation of historical narratives. These narratives constantly shift rather than remaining fixed, and material artifacts are part of these interpretive devices that cause that shift. In the immediate aftermath of Michael Collins's death at Béal na Bláth in August 1922, conscious commemorative actions began to take place. Photographs were taken of his remains, a death mask was created, and artifacts were carefully safeguarded by those close to him, but also opportunistically collected by those who encountered Collins's remains. This research examines how Collins's death transformed the meaning of his personal possessions. Their circulation, first within private circles and eventually into public-museum collections, demonstrates how they acquired a value beyond material means and have become "treasured relics" of the dead leader.1 This body of objects, based around the evidence of and proximity to Collins's death, constitutes the material culture that played a significant role in creating and reinterpreting narratives of commemoration. Commemorative exhibitions are part of the commemorative process and a "cultural system of representation" whereby past events are represented as meaningful through messages conveyed to visitors in the display of images and artifacts.2 Many of these artifacts, [End Page 147] including Collins's scapular and greatcoat, have been displayed publicly for many years in both permanent exhibitions and temporary displays. A substantial collection of artifacts relating to his death has survived, and each one within this collection has varying display histories. Notably, the military cap he wore at the time of his death, which has visible signs of blood and "organic" brain matter, was removed from display in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) for ethical and conservation reasons. The cap is among several artifacts that occupy a position at the edge of commemorative narratives, and their entry into the public domain is sometimes to the antipathy of Collins's descendants. This research reflects on how decisions over the display of Collins's contact relics reveal the challenges and complexities of commemorating the Irish Civil War, including the highly politicized remembrance of the past in the public sphere, the conservation requirements of artifacts, and the ethics of display. The motivation for this research is to explain how the display of artifacts associated with the death of Collins gives a dynamic insight into developments of commemorative narratives in museums. The practices of commemoration associated with Collins's contact relics discussed here are spread across different temporalities, from the creation of a death mask in the days after his killing to the first public display in 2014 of a coin believed to have been in his pocket at the time of his death. The distinctive commemorative gestures at different historical distances from Collins's death all contribute to the formation of varying representations and display cultures of the Civil War in museums. In theorizing the relationship between history and collective memory, Pierre Nora asserts that collective memory does not function in an organic, natural way but instead transforms itself according to temporal continuities, progressions, and the relations between things.3 Edward Said implies a similar reasoning in his consideration of how methods of collective memory are selectively used by "manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating [End Page 148] still others in an entirely functional way."4 The decisions over whether to confine Collins's contact relics to private collections, donate them to museums, or display them to the public relates to the suppression and elevation of commemorative narratives of the Civil War, yet such narratives can generate dissatisfaction and condemnation. This subject will be discussed later. The various forms, genres, and media of Collins's contact relics in commemorative exhibitions are examined through exploring three themes: narrative in museums, indexicality, and display cultures. Narratives in museums are particularly meaningful within complex and rapidly changing political and cultural contexts, such as Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries. Indexicality is based around the evidence and immediacy of conflict, whether through...

Round table: Decolonising Irish history? Possibilities, challenges, practices

AbstractThe nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.

Ireland, 2021: a century of insurgency, terrorism and security challenges

Ireland’s ‘decade of centenaries’ means different things to different people.1 On the one hand, for Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Republic,2 the term refers to the period bookended...

Labour History in Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’

In 2012 the governments in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland launched their Decade of Centenaries projects to ‘focus’ on ‘significant centenaries’ occurring between 2012 and 2022-3, with an unusual degree of co-ordination between them. The initiatives have generated major public interest in the commemoration of events like the third Home Rule crisis, the 1913 Lockout, the 1916 rising, the First World War, the War of Independence, extension of the franchise to women, and partition, and also in the meaning and relevance of historiography. This paper examines the thinking behind the Decade of Centenaries, the state of the Irish Labour History Society and Irish labour historiography, the involvement of state authorities with labour anniversaries, and the consequences for publications on labour and on the public understanding of labour historiography. While the Decade of Centenaries is patently an attempt to manage the remembrance of the controversies and violence that led to the creation of the two Irish states between 1920 and 1922, it has been beneficial for historians by encouraging popular engagement with the past. Traditionally, Irish labour historiography has been weak in its presence in the academy, but strong in its organic connections with the trade union movement. The Decade of Centenaries has allowed it to exploit its strength to secure greater state and public recognition. Among the positive outcomes have been a significant increase in the number of labour historians and publications on labour, and an extension of the ambit of labour history into new fields of enquiry.

How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"?

How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"? Marc Mulholland (bio) "My Lords, for ten years … it is no exaggeration, it is the literal truth to say that there has been going on in Ireland a great revolution—social partly, political partly."1 So said Sir Charles Russell QC in 1889. He was addressing the special commission sitting in judgment on the Land War and the rise of the radical Parnellite nationalist party since 1879. We are now more likely, however, to think of the ten years between 1912 and 1923 as the "Irish Revolution." This way of thinking is relatively new. It is true that the language of revolution can be found in Irish history, particularly in the ambiguity of the militant separatist tradition. Until reorganization in 1873 there was no formal certainty whether the initials IRB indicated that this Irish brotherhood was "revolutionary" or "republican."2 "Revolutionary" was generally understood to signal a commitment to illegality, and in this regard the distance from "constitutional" nationalism could easily shrink, as episodes such as the 1879–82 Land War had shown.3 But while we can find self-identifying "revolutionaries" in modern Ireland, and revolutionism elided with militancy, can we claim as a revolution the period in which the independent Irish state was founded and Northern Ireland carved out? A couple of instant histories at the time did refer to the period as a revolution. Alison Phillips defined the collapse of British rule in most of Ireland as the local expression of an ongoing international "revolution," a generalized crisis of stable hierarchy and empires. For this reason he called his book The Revolution in Ireland rather than The [End Page 139] Irish Revolution.4 From a nationalist perspective we find a similarly ambiguous categorization of Ireland's experience as "revolution." William O'Brien, in his book The Irish Revolution and How It Came About, described the process in rather unrevolutionary terms: at once a militant backlash against home rule, and as its constitutional consummation.5 These descriptors of "revolution" did not stick in the years after Irish independence and partition. In general, no fixed term came to describe as a totality the series of episodes including the third Home Rule bill and "Ulster Crisis" of 1912–14, the 1913 Lock Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish War, the 1920–22 Ulster Troubles, and the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. For a society that still remembered these episodes with all too sharp clarity, and not yet concerned with how to collectively label them in a "decade of centenaries," these were intertwined paternosters. When a blanket term was felt to be required, that old term "Irish Troubles" was often rolled out.6 Padraic Colum, in his 1959 celebration of Arthur Griffith, the founder of moderate Sinn Féin, argued that the "Irish Revolution affords … an admirable and somewhat neglected case history of a nationalist revolution in our modern Western world."7 He did not find very many willing to take up the term "nationalist revolution," however. In Cold War Ireland the milieu of conservative Fine Gael nationalism was unlikely to enthuse about revolution of any sort. The term used around the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of 1916, stoutly ignored by Ulster unionists, was "The Irish Uprising" or, more neutrally, in 1969, "The Conflict."8 [End Page 140] Revolution as a descriptor appeared at the end of the 1960s in the context of a wave of national-liberation struggles in the global south. For Oliver MacDonagh, the revolutionary delusions of "halfcrazed millenarians" had to be yoked to the sober constitutionalism of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin to win independence.9 F.S.L. Lyons likewise depicted the merging of a separatist underground with moderates to achieve at least a "thwarted revolution."10 In 1971 C. Desmond Greaves used the term "Irish revolution" in his biography of the leftist anti-Treaty leader Liam Mellowes. Greaves characterized the period as an incomplete "national revolution." The political implication of this in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles, escalating as he wrote, was obvious.11 George Dangerfield in his 1976 study of the period The Damnable Question also spoke of the "unfinished...

James Doherty Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909-14 (review)

Reviews James Doherty, Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909–14 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 320 pages. What a pleasure it is to read a book on the Third Home Rule Bill which places it firmly in the politics of the state – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – in which it was by far the most important political issue in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. This is in stark contrast to the current ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorations in Ireland, where the Third Home Rule Bill is portrayed as the beginnings of an ascent which, barring a few serious stumbles such as partition and civil war, leads inevitably and inexorably to the sunny uplands of Irish self-determination – an Irish nationalist version of the Whig interpretation of history. The struggle for Irish Home Rule in this period was a metaphor for the transformation of the United Kingdom into a fully-fledged democracy. To most British democrats, which included Liberal Party members, backbench Liberal MPs and the Labour Party, the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill was the test of whether the 1911 Parliament Act had, through emasculating the powers of the non-elected House of Lords, been successful. Viewed from this perspective, Irish Home Rule was the litmus test of Britain’s democratisation, far surpassing in importance other contemporary issues besettingAsquith’s Liberal government, such as women’s suffrage, industrial unrest and the naval race with Germany. Successful Home Rule legislation for Ireland would both symbolically and actually prove that the entire United Kingdom had made the transformation into democracy. The book is revelatory in many ways. The similarities between the structures and tensions of the Liberal Party and the Irish Party are remarkable. Both were loose coalitions and the strains and tensions inside both parties were at times at breaking point. The British Liberal Party and Liberal government were dominated by liberals who were not necessarily democrats. Men like Asquith, Haldane and Grey believed in liberty, but had substantial reservations about equality. They were leading a party which, by now, was heavily influenced by the philosophy of New Liberalism, that required the state to take a far more pro-active role in promoting a new era of equality and democracy. These social democrats were firm in their belief Studies • volume 109 • number 435 336 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews that the passage of the Third Home Rule Bill was totemic of their drive to democratise Britain and both Liberal Party members and backbenchers saw the Irish Party and their demands as advancing democracy throughout the entire United Kingdom. Even many Nonconformist Liberals, dubious about Irish Home Rule and its perceived threat of the resurgence of a rampant Roman Catholicism, were swayed by appeals to their reason, sense of justice and religious liberty, and these usually trumped any reservations they may have otherwise had. The New Liberals, now the majority in the party, regarded Home Rule as the battering ram for democratisation, even though they recognised that it took up valuable parliamentary time which could have been used for social reform. The author argues that by 1914 Asquith was under no illusion that defying radical Liberals, Irish nationalists and Labour on Home Rule would lead to the shattering of his party. The recipient of all this support from the radical wing of British politics – the Irish Party – was even more a broad church than the Liberal Party. For a start, the Irish Parliamentary Party was hardly a party. It was racked by residual rivalry and hostility dating back to the Parnell era, particularly between John Dillon, T M Healy and William O’ Brien. The Irish Party’s political dominance in Ireland arose practically in default of effective alternative movements. It was led by John Redmond, an imperialist at heart like so many others in the Irish Party, to whom there was no incompatibility between Irish nationality and imperial patriotism. These Irish nationalists wanted a self-governing Ireland to play a prominent role in the affairs of the Empire along the lines of the white settler dominions such as Canada and Australia. Rather than lead to the break...

Public history in the digital age: Century Ireland and the decade of centenaries

Public history in the digital age: Century Ireland and the decade of centenaries

A war that stopped a war? The necropolitics of (Northern) Ireland’s First World War centenary

The recent ‘recovery’ of First World War memory in Ireland has been much discussed and widely celebrated. What has been represented as Ireland’s centennial reacquaintance with its Great War heritage has been framed by a wider ‘Decade of Centenaries’: a policy construct through which a more reconciliatory approach to commemorating the violent events which gave birth to the two states on the island of Ireland has been promoted. The Decade has seen the ascendance of joint British–Irish First World War commemorations, and attempts have been made to use commemoration to bridge the ‘communal’ divide between unionism and nationalism. In this article, I interrogate this new commemorative dispensation and the assumptions that underwrite it. I argue that the reconciliatory reorientation of commemoration in Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries is based on an ethically contradictory and militaristic reframing of the First World War as ‘a war that stopped a war’. Eliding the ways in which the War has actually long been remembered in nationalist Ireland, this reframing is representative of and acts to reinforce the wider anti-political project in which the British and Irish states have been jointly involved since the advent of the peace process. Arguing that the (necro)politics of Ireland’s First World War centenary have represented the slaughter of Irishmen on Flanders’ fields as a symbolic sacrifice for a particular, neoliberal ‘peace’ in (Northern) Ireland, I will conclude that the limits of this project have been radically revealed by recent political events which have called its future hegemony into doubt.

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone? How centenary publications are reshaping Ireland’s divided understanding of its decade of war and revolution, 1912–1923

Ireland is currently mid-way through its ‘decade of centenaries,’ the commemoration of its period of greatest political upheaval in recent history, which stretched from the signing of the Ulster So...