Early Twentieth-century Ireland Research Articles

James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Remarks by Ronan Gargan, Ambassador of Ireland to Hungary

James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Remarks by Ronan Gargan, Ambassador of Ireland to Hungary

Translating Gendered Paralysis in Dubliners: A Reflective Retranslation of James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’ through a Feminist Translation Approach

ABSTRACT While current Chinese translations of James Joyce's Dubliners are acclaimed, demonstrating a commendable effort to make this classic of English language world literature accessible to Chinese readers, the book's depiction of the way femininity, masculinity and broader society in early twentieth century Ireland are ‘paralysed’ could be further emphasised for young Chinese readers through specific translation strategies. This exegetical paper offers a reflective analysis based on a comparison between our feminist retranslation of one of the short stories in Dubliners, ‘A Painful Case’, and two of its existing translations. In doing so, this essay aims to demonstrate how specific translation strategies can encourage a more critical gender and cultural consciousness in a younger generation of Chinese readers, and sheds light on the benefits of applying feminist translation methods to the retranslation of a classic naturalistic short story by a male writer. This article also makes a fresh and distinctive contribution to the scholarship of Chinese studies of Joyce and the translation of his work, through the lens of gender and culture.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Ireland – State (Ryan) v Lennon and its Aftermath

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922 did not immediately change this position and natural law was limited to a peripheral position during the drafting of the first Irish Constitution. This article examines how and why the use of natural law by the Irish courts became increasingly acceptable by the middle of the twentieth century. It will also examine the connection between the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State and the 1934 judgment of the Supreme Court in State (Ryan) v Lennon. This provides a new perspective on the judgments delivered in this case and on the origins of the use of natural law in interpreting Irish constitutional law. The article will also examine the legacy of State (Ryan) v Lennon, the position of natural law in the 1937 Irish Constitution and the evolving position of natural law in the decades that followed.

Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Ireland – State (Ryan) v Lennon and its Aftermath

This article examines the perceived and desired relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. In this period the concept of natural law was largely championed by the Catholic church but was also used by Irish nationalists to justify calls for independence. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922 did not immediately change this position and natural law was limited to a peripheral position during the drafting of the first Irish Constitution. This article examines how and why the use of natural law by the Irish courts became increasingly acceptable by the middle of the twentieth century. The article will also examine the connection between the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State and the 1934 judgment of the Supreme Court in State (Ryan) v Lennon. This provides a new perspective on the judgments delivered in this case and on the origins of the use of natural law in interpreting Irish constitutional law. The article will also examine the legacy of State (Ryan) v Lennon, the position of natural law in the 1937 Irish Constitution and the evolving position of natural law in the decades that followed.

‘The iron rusted and decayed in our clubs’: the failure of weightlifting in early twentieth-century Ireland

ABSTRACT As a branch of sport history, the historiography of weightlifting lags behind other areas. The field is growing but much work needs to be done on its origins. Seeking to provide some context as to the origins of organised weightlifting in Europe, the following article uses Ireland as an ideal case study. The first two major efforts to form an Irish weightlifting organisation in the 1910s and early 1920s failed owing to a series of material and ideological problems. Exploring this point, the article begins with a discussion of weightlifting as an informal sport in Ireland in the nineteenth century before discussing the failure to establish an Irish weightlifting organisation in the early 1910s and early 1920s. Where one organiser, a Mr. W.A. MacPherson failed owing to a lack of material resources and a poor network of contacts, those following him, like the Irish weightlifter Michael Stokes, were hampered by warfare and political conflict. For historians of sport, a study of Irish weightlifting in this vein reiterates the many factors needed to establish formalised pursuits and serves as a timely reminder of the many barriers facing individual athletes wishing to compete.

Marching Forwards or Backwards? Physical Education and the Army in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

This article examines systems of physical education implemented in Ireland in the period 1890-1939, their origins and underlying messages. The systems used to train children’s bodies were not ideologically neutral but reflected wider societal ideals surrounding health, fitness, warfare and modernity. There is a particular focus on the first decade of the twentieth century when systems of military drill based on British Army practice were brought into Irish classrooms, and also on the 1930s, when the Irish Free State Army and some Irish schools, briefly trialled the Sokol System of Physical Culture from Czechoslovakia. While the motivations for introducing these programmes reflected changed circumstances, the underlying messages spoke to much greater continuities. There is a particular emphasis on the symbolic function of physical education in Ireland in the four decades spanning independence and partition. It was seen as a means of protecting the nation’s health, improving children’s intelligence and as a defence against undesirable aspects of social change.

Political and religious ideas during the Irish Revolution

ABSTRACT Intellectual historians have tended to focus either on shifts in sensibility or, more analytically, on the substance and structure of thought. They might usefully, however, examine both, as well as the reciprocal action of the one upon the other. This applies equally to political and religious ideas. In early twentieth-century Ireland, it was the relationship between religion and politics that stirred controversy. How would the institutions of church and state function, respectively, under Home Rule and the Union. Opposing camps advanced competing prognostications. This contest forces us to rethink the claim that revolutionary insurgency in Ireland was a species of ‘political religion’. The evidence points to a more complex picture while at the same time highlighting the persistence of sectarian attitudes in the historiography of the period.

Sociability, radium and the maintenance of scientific culture and authority in twentieth-century Ireland: a case study of the Royal Dublin Society.

This article, through a case study of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), traces the reception, experimentation with, and uses of radium in early twentieth-century Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century there was increasing state intervention in the provision of scientific and technical education in Ireland. This culminated in the loss of the RDS's traditional role in this area. The article demonstrates that the RDS was forced to re-envisage its role as a scientific institution by actively seeking to support experimental research. Using radium as a case study, the article argues for the success of this tactic. It demonstrates that radium played a central role within the RDS as a nexus for the maintenance of an experimental and philanthropic culture that permeated much of the society's scientific output in this period. In doing this it highlights the importance of sociability in the promotion of science in Ireland in the early twentieth century. In addition, it explores the role of the RDS as an arbiter of scientific authority.

‘I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’: the marriage ban, teaching and ideologies of womanhood in post-Independence Ireland

ABSTRACT This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered, and the ways in which they negotiated their own individual consciousness within a specific cultural framework. Specifically, the analysis of these women’s testimony generates significant insights into the gendering of teaching as a suitable profession for women in early twentieth-century Ireland; how gender shaped social and cultural roles; Church control over women’s training and employment; and the use of policy to deepen women’s social and economic subordination.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

The Irish Sandow school: physical culture competitions in fin-de-siècle Ireland

ABSTRACTBeginning with an examination of Ireland’s turn of the century interest in physical culture, this article highlights the case of Eugen Sandow’s “Great Competition” and its Irish contestants. Seen as a precursor for today’s bodybuilding competitions, Sandow’s contest enjoyed submission photographs from hundreds of half-naked men – many of whom were Irish – posing in Greco-Roman pose. In studying this topic, the article addresses two pressing issues. In the first instance, the article examines how and why physical culture competitions became a competitive outlet for Irishmen in the first decade of the twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that these contests were often connected to broader societal ideals surrounding acceptable forms of masculinity. The article thus examines a previously unexplored but nevertheless important part of sporting and athletic behaviour in early twentieth-century Ireland.

Irish Catholics in Early Twentieth Century Ireland: The Case of the Macardle Brothers

Irish Catholics in Early Twentieth Century Ireland: The Case of the Macardle Brothers Desmond Gibney Introduction This article uses archival resources to recount the lives of two brothers from a prominent and wealthy Catholic family, the Macardles of Dundalk, during the first quarter of the twentieth century.1 This time span includes the First World War, the fight for Irish independence and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Sir Thomas Callan Macardle KBE (1856–1925) was a prominent businessman and played a leading role in civic life, during which he demonstrated his loyalty to the British crown. His younger brother Andrew Macardle SJ (1863–1942) was a Jesuit priest. The tradition of loyalty by Irish Catholics to the crown is an under-researched aspect of the social and political history of modern Ireland. One of the few examples is a study by Richard Keogh and James McConnel of the Esmondes, a prominent Catholic family in Wexford.2 A study by Fergus Campbell of what has been termed the ‘Irish establishment’ between the Land War and the First World War periods divided the establishment into six categories, including politics, business and the church.3 Using Campbell’s criteria, the Macardles could be regarded as part of that establishment. Context The prominence of the Macardle family centres on their ownership of a Dundalk brewery, Macardle Moore and Company, one of the few Irish breweries that has not of yet been the subject of an extensive published history. Macardles was regarded as one of Dundalk’s ‘oldest and most progressive industries’.4 Macardle’s Ale was first brewed in Dundalk in 1863 and continues to be produced by Diageo Ireland. Macardles brewery demonstrated strong family and business support for the First World War, and the firm’s letterhead described the company as ‘Irish Army Brewers, Contractors to H.M. Forces’. Macardles ‘did a very big trade in supplying Studies • volume 107 • number 426 199 ale to the British army […] and also exported to the troops in Liverpool and in the Mediterranean, and for this the brewery received wide recognition’.5 The contrasting paths taken by the two brothers, Thomas the brewer and his younger brother Andrew the Jesuit priest, whereby one became a wealthy businessman and the other took a vow of poverty as part of his priestly vocation, are illustrated by the value of their respective estates at time of death. Using Central Statistics Office (CSO) data,6 these amounts have been rebased to current (i.e. December 2017) values. When Thomas died in December 1925, his estate was worth approximately €2 million in current values; by contrast, when Andrew died in December 1942, his estate was worth approximately €200.7 Sir Thomas Callan Macardle KBE Thomas was director and chairman of the family brewery, Macardle Moore and Company. According to his entry in Who Was Who,8 he was also, among other roles, chairman of Dundalk and Newry Steampacket Company Limited, chairman of Dundalk Race Company Limited and president of Dundalk Chamber of Commerce. He also occupied three roles which were abolished on the creation of the Irish Free State: Deputy Lieutenant for Louth, High Sheriff for the county for 1917 and Justice of the Peace.9 In 1888, he married Minnie Lucy Ross, an Anglican who had converted to Catholicism before her marriage and whose father was a colonel in the Scots Guards. Thomas and Minnie had five children: sons Kenneth, John and Donald, and daughters Dorothy and Mona. Dorothy became a well-known writer and historian, bestknown for her The Irish Republic, first published in 1937.10 The five children grew up against a background of wealth and privilege, with the sons educated at boarding school in England (including the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College) and the daughters at Alexandra College in Dublin.11 Further evidence of the standard of living in the Macardle family is provided by the 1901 census, when the household consisted of Thomas and Minnie and their five children, along with four domestic staff: a governess, a nurse, a maid and a servant.12 By the time of the 1911 census, Minnie had permanently relocated to London, while Thomas remained living in Dundalk and retained...

Private Spaces, Public Interest: State Regulation of Farm Households in Early Twentieth Century Ireland

For farm households across Ireland, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were nothing short of a revolutionary period. While the increase in state control and supervision of aspects of Irish life had been expanding throughout the 1800s, it was only in the later part of the century that this attention began to shift from the wider land and landscape to focus on the previously sacred private space of the family home. The Victorian preoccupation with improvement, particularly in relation to standards of hygiene and sanitation, would result in a raft of biopolitical legislation that impacted all families but was felt most strongly by farming households across the country. Public health and sanitation legislation ordered the eviction of animals from inside cottages, the removal of manure heaps from outside doors and introduced regulations for the sale or even provision of dairy produce. This paper will examine these and other changes introduced by the state in the period leading up to the First World War, investigating the role of local government in their implementation and using local authority records to reveal the practical consequences of this incursion of agents of the state onto private property and into private lives.

Private Spaces, Public Interest: State Regulation of Farm Households in Early Twentieth Century Ireland

For farm households across Ireland, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were nothing short of a revolutionary period. While the increase in state control and supervision of aspects of Irish life had been expanding throughout the 1800s, it was only in the later part of the century that this attention began to shift from the wider land and landscape to focus on the previously sacred private space of the family home. The Victorian preoccupation with improvement, particularly in relation to standards of hygiene and sanitation, would result in a raft of biopolitical legislation that impacted all families but was felt most strongly by farming households across the country. Public health and sanitation legislation ordered the eviction of animals from inside cottages, the removal of manure heaps from outside doors and introduced regulations for the sale or even provision of dairy produce. This paper will examine these and other changes introduced by the state in the period leading up to the First World War, investigating the role of local government in their implementation and using local authority records to reveal the practical consequences of this incursion of agents of the state onto private property and into private lives.

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings Michael Patrick Gillespie Although this article will look chiefly at the ways in which Joyce's experiences with religion shaped his treatment of the end of life, like most issues related to his works a full understanding can come only through consideration of a broader cultural context. Catholicism played an integral part in almost every aspect of the Irish ethos at the time that James Joyce was growing to manhood in Dublin. To catch the flavor of his world, he fills his narratives with references to all aspects of Catholic belief, and he readily draws on its prayers, liturgies, dogma, and traditions for a rich source of metaphor. With that in mind, one states the obvious in saying that any thorough study of his fiction must include attentiveness to how Joyce understood Irish Catholicism and how he represented its diverse aspects throughout his fiction. Such an analysis needs to emphasize, not conventional Catholic teachings, but Joyce's subjective impressions of them: Joyce, like any other human being, constructed his environment based on his personal understanding of everything he encountered in the world. As such, a discussion of his views on Catholicism would be markedly distinct from any objective review of the church's influence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. To be sure, one of the specters that has troubled countless discussions of Joyce's relationship to the church is that of positing an essentialist, reductive understanding of Catholicism. Doing so can easily construct a straw-man argument; many such arguments reflect a view that overlays personal animosity toward aspects of the church, almost as if settling old scores. As a result, one's appreciation of the Catholic culture of Joyce's fiction will not be materially enhanced by objective, social scientific efforts more fittingly employed by historians—for instance, gathering data on attendance at mass from 1880 to 1900. In fact, such information could very well mislead one's comprehension of Joyce's representations. Instead, the thoughtful literary critic must emphasize attentiveness to the subjective instincts of an artist endeavoring to capture a particular tone and perspective of a specific societal cross-section—lower middle class, Catholic, and urban—that he wishes to inculcate into his [End Page 114] writings to enhance a reader's sense of the way particular characters saw and reacted to their world. The key to such an approach is the acknowledgement of Joyce's sophisticated sense of the range of feelings informing the attitudes toward the Catholic church that were held by even the most ordinary citizens whom he depicted in his fiction. Only a few of Joyce's Dubliners, for instance, seem inclined to participate in the Devotional Revolution—the surge in public piety in the latter part of the nineteenth century effected largely through the work of Cardinal Cullen—or to submit to the ecclesiastic tyranny that sought to regulate every aspect of their lives. A clear example of the impulse to resist such efforts at control comes when Simon Dedalus, in a fit of anger during the Christmas Dinner scene in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, famously invokes what has now become the shopworn cliché characterizing the Ireland as "an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter."1 Many of Joyce's characters showed, time and again, a relationship with Catholicism, far removed from the supposed lockstep conformity to church dictates that stereotypical portrayals of Catholic Ireland present as an oversimplified donnée. In fact, many were openly antagonistic. A few sentences after the passage quoted above, Simon Dedalus brags about a grandfather, saying "he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them to put his two feet under his mahogany" (P 33).2 Examples of this of sort of energetic anticlericalism abound, often mixed with sardonic humor. One of the most forceful and amusing appears in Ulysses when Ned Lambert's recollection of a rough-and tumble clash of church and state gives a perfect sense of the offhanded undermining of episcopal...

The Bestial Feminine in Finnegans Wake

Female characters frequently appear as animals in the unstable universe of James Joyce’s a Finnegans Wake. What Kimberly Devlin terms “the male tendency to reduce women to the level of the beast” is manifest in Finnegans Wake on a large scale. From the hen pecking at a dung heap which we suppose is a manifestation of matriarch Anna Livia Plurabelle, to the often lascivious pig imagery (reminiscent of Bloom’s experience with brothel-keeper Bella in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses) associated with juvenile seductress Issy, the lines between animal and human are frequently blurred when it comes to representing the feminine in the Wake. As scholars such as Devlin have highlighted, such constellations of images have their roots in blatantly misogynistic iconographies. Indeed, the reinscription of female characters into bestial roles in the Wake echoes a religious history of the dehumanisation of women. Yet, while this gendered representational tendency has been noted in Joycean and, more recently, wider modernist studies, its deployment and impact as a cultural and literary trope has not yet been interpreted according to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts which shaped the composition of Finnegans Wake. In particular, the culturally-specific sexual politics of Free State Ireland (1922–1937), against which Joyce arguably pushes throughout the entirety of the Wake, offer a suggestive lens through which to view the text’s interconnected representations of the feminine and the bestial. This article suggests that, in Finnegans Wake, the nonhuman is a mode through which Joyce explores the fraught sexual politics of early twentieth-century Ireland. Specifically, the bestial feminine becomes an avenue to inspect, expose, and satirise prevalent contemporary fears over female sexual licentiousness and national moral decline. Historicising the text’s grappling with themes of carnality and baseness, the article discusses the ways in which the woman-as-animal is deployed in Finnegans Wake as a grotesque symbol of an unbridled and threatening female sexuality—an extreme embodiment of 1920s and 1930s Ireland’s worst fears surrounding the perceived degeneration of Irish women’s modesty. Unearthing the Wake’s social contexts in order to interpret its sexual politics, this article ultimately asks whether the trope of the woman-as-animal stages a complete resistance against the conservatism of early twentieth-century Ireland’s sexual politics, or whether Joyce’s invocation of a historically misogynistic and patriarchal construction risks reinforcing the dehumanisation of women, moving the text’s sexual politics further away from the liberatory.

At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole

Reviewed by: At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole Krista Kauffmann Sarah Cole. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. xiv + 377 pp. Sarah Cole’s fascinating new study At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland takes its title from The Waste Land. Optically and aurally close to “violent” yet also denoting spring flowers and the color purple, the word “violet,” Cole argues, “herald[s]” violence in Eliot’s iconic poem (74) while simultaneously “transform[ing]” and “beautify[ing]” it (75). Thus, “violetness” becomes an apt figure for what she names the “enchantment” of violence (75). However, because the words are so similar, the “violet hour” is always at risk of shading back into the “violent hour,” and thus violetness also serves as an evocative figure for the complex interplay explored throughout the book between enchantment and its opposite mode for imagining violence, disenchantment. Enchantment, as Cole has it, is the process through which violence comes to be sacralized and viewed as productive. Disenchantment, by contrast, treats violence as “unredeemable” (36). Lest we are tempted to substitute aestheticization for enchantment, Cole emphasizes that both modes are, in fact, aesthetic. Her masterful readings of a wide range of texts acknowledge the generative function of violence for modernist literary production as well as the excessive quality to it that often “haunt[s],” “stain[s]” and “deface[s]” even those texts that enchant it (19). At the Violet Hour chiefly sets out to reconsider the centrality of violence to modernist form, and Cole argues powerfully that in [End Page 178] “seek[ing] to understand literary violence, we will find ourselves looking at literature’s very nerve center, the place where its most proud accomplishments and greatest limitations are engendered and defined” (7). The book provides fresh looks at key modernist authors Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf, while carefully situating their work in relation to other authors and modes of textual and visual production that similarly grapple with the violence of the modernist moment. Cole reaffirms the pivotal role of World War I in the development of modernism but cautions that not all modernist texts readily fit into the narrative of the war as the driving force behind experiments with form. Thus, she directs our attention as well to European anarchist violence—or, in her rather more colorful parlance, “dynamite violence”—and to the specific, historical convulsions of violence that rocked early twentieth-century Ireland (36). The book is comprised of an introduction, four substantial chapters, and a brief coda. Throughout, Cole combines original close readings of canonical texts with a cultural studies approach that sheds light on their broader cultural and historical milieus. The introduction opens by noting the extent to which the story of literature has always been enmeshed with the story of violence, from the writing of the Homeric epics to the present. Yet, she notes, the modernists were singularly situated to explore questions of the representation of violence, not only because of the cataclysmic violence of their era but also because of their well-known interests in “deconstructing great cultural institutions that are fundamentally sustained by violence” and “exploring the human psyche” (4). Chapter 1 continues the introduction’s work of setting up the argumentative framework, beginning with an elaboration of the theoretical model of enchantment and disenchantment. This chapter represents the book’s primary engagement with World War I’s impact on literature, and it ends with an incisive reading of the interweaving of the enchanted and disenchanted modes in The Waste Land. The next three chapters are designated “historical chapters” (35). Chapter 2 explores the representation of dynamite violence and the closely associated figure of the anarchist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in popular novels, drama, sensationalist journalism, and Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It also considers the transmutation of the historically specific late-Victorian anarchist into the “transhistorical figure of the terrorist” (36). Chapter 3 turns to early twentieth-century Ireland, offering four new paradigms for understanding literary violence in that context. This time, the privileged terms are “keening,” “generative violence,” “reprisal violence,” and “architectural...

Fionn mac Cumhaill in twenty-first-century Ireland

This article surveys the corpus of Fenian narrative available in twenty-first-century Ireland. The socio-political situation during the Celtic Revival era that enabled the continued production of Fenian texts into the present moment is first examined. Revivalist engagements with Fenian narrative, including publishing, folklore collection, and educational activities, are briefly traced. The connection between cultural and political nationalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland emerges as a key factor in the establishment of the Fianna as cultural symbols for the modern Irish nation—a position which they continue to hold. The remainder of the article explores the twenty-first-century Fenian narrative corpus and traces areas of continuity and development with relation to the revival-era corpus. Areas of consideration include Fenian material in school textbooks, in children's literature and media, and in literature and media for older audiences, including books of heritage and tourist interest. Consideration is given to both English- and Irish-language sources.

Sinn Féin, socialists and “McSheeneys”: representations of Jews in early twentieth-century Ireland

ABSTRACTDuring the decades immediately prior to the creation of an independent Irish state in 1922, nationalists and socialists in Ireland struggled to reconcile their progressive principles with challenges posed by the arrival of an increasing number of Jewish immigrants. This article examines how at that time the press, both mainstream and agitational, occasionally gave public expression to anti-Semitic prejudices, stereotypes and outright hostility. Such discourses are contextualized within a framework in which Irish political leaders and others had earlier asserted that Ireland was the only country in the world that could not be charged with persecuting the Jews. I suggest that some representations of Jews in the media prior to independence foreshadowed and help to explain the context of later official Irish policies towards Jewish refugees.