Irish History Research Articles

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.

The work of representation and representations of work: the feminist experimental poetries of Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon employ a shared feminist experimental poetics to address notions of female labour in contemporary Ireland. It argues that both subscribe to a contemporary feminist consensus, outlined in Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, that neoliberalism has co-opted the ideals of second-wave feminism, and redeployed them as spurious evidence that “there is no longer any place for feminism in contemporary political culture.” Both poets challenge this latter assertion, positioning a distinctly female form of traditional Irish labour – butter-making – as a site in which to reclaim lost feminist ideals and forms of social solidarity. Beginning with an account of how Ireland has transitioned to the logic of capital while paradoxically exploiting the ideals of the social movements it necessarily suppresses, it then shows how Walsh uses a feminist experimental poetics in Optic Verve (2009) to simulate the experience of the Irish female subject in a harsh “post-feminist” neoliberal landscape, while gesturing towards lost female forms of labour and commoning. It then posits that Dillon’s Butter Intervention (2022) seeks to expose the neoliberal erasure of feminist labour struggles from Irish history, as well as present ways to repatriate them within a contemporary social consciousness.

Greece, Poland, and the Construction of American Irish Catholic Identity in the New York Truth Teller, 1820–1845

Abstract The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) and the abortive November Uprising in Poland (1830–1831) were two major developments in nineteenth-century European history, and both became central to foundational narratives of European modernity. These events have, however, received scant attention by American immigration historians. Despite this neglect, both were integral to how the New York Truth Teller, the leading Irish Catholic newspaper in New York in the years before the Famine, attempted to consolidate an Irish Catholic ethnic identity in the United States. The Truth Teller's contributors interpreted the Greek and Polish conflicts through reference to a specific narrative of Irish history as one of unparalleled suffering. In doing so, the paper kept American Irish Catholics informed about contemporary events in Europe. In comparing Irish Catholic history to the contemporary struggles of Greece and Poland, the Truth Teller insisted that neither Greece nor Poland had experienced suffering comparable to the persecution of Protestant Ascendency Ireland. This article is a corrective to scholarship that has underemphasized the importance of the Truth Teller to Irish Catholic identity in the United States before the Famine and undervalued the relevance of European events for the construction of American Irish Catholic identity.

Sixth Irish History of Mathematics Conference

Sixth Irish History of Mathematics Conference

LGBTQ Visibility Media and Sexuality in Ireland, by Páraic Kerrigan

22 May 2015, when the Irish people overwhelmingly voted to enshrine the right to marry for same sex couples in their country’s constitution, is a nodal point in modern Irish history and a key date for the larger, international LGBTQ rights movement. Internationally, this made Ireland the first country to enact such reforms by popular vote. Domestically, the 62% Yes vote has now come to be viewed as the turning of a historical page and the end of any feeling, among the LGBTQ community, of cultural or national exclusion (Bird; Murphy). This keystone event was followed by other markers of progressive modernity.

Future directions in rural history: Ireland, the First World War and the search for historical evidence

AbstractA social history of Ireland (encompassing rural communities) is needed if historians are to fully come to terms with what really happened between 1914 and 1918 and to properly tackle the question of ‘consent’ and ‘constraint’ in relation to the war effort. In addition, historians need to devote a comprehensive book-length research to the April 1918 Conscription Crisis in Ulster (but more generally to the anti-conscription movement in Ulster), determining if the urban/rural – Belfast/countryside divide existed (and, if so, what its magnitude was). Finally, in a few years’ time, anyone will be able to say if the Republic of Ireland of today opted to anchor the global conflict in the collective memory of its people, or if the Centenary of the First World War was just a politically motivated parenthesis to commemorate a lost generation that still struggles to find its rightful place in modern Irish history.

Introduction: a new agenda for women's and gender history in Ireland

AbstractIn the thirty years since the publication of ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland’, the study of women's and gender history has been transformed. The introduction to this special issue contextualises the ‘Agenda’ within this evolving landscape, underlining the significant role it played in stimulating scholarship by outlining some of the major developments in the field since 1992. The introduction also points to developments that the authors, Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O'Dowd and Maria Luddy, could not have foreseen when writing the ‘Agenda’, such as rapid technological advances and the possibilities they have opened up for scholars of women and gender in Irish history. By tracing these developments, the introduction serves as a gateway into the articles that form the special issue: contributions that demonstrate the wide-reaching and multifaceted impact of the ‘Agenda’ and the three pioneering scholars who authored it, and that provide thought-provoking analysis of existing and future scholarship in the field.

Progress, challenges and opportunities in early modern gender history, c.1550–1720

AbstractFollowing some of the themes of the original ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ and others that were not as prominent, this article considers progress since 1992 and highlights opportunities for the further development of Irish early modern women's and gender history. It considers aspects of the life cycle of women and men, especially birth, youth and marriage; the economic roles of women, especially when it came to work and property; and the importance of movement to and from Ireland in both personal biographies and wider contexts. It also reflects on some of the ways in which understandings of early modern politics and of religion and belief for the period c.1550–1720 have been transformed by consideration of the role of women. While the ‘Agenda’ noted the potential of buildings and spaces, there has been a new emphasis on ‘things’ as remnants of lives and labour, expressions of cultural norms and tools in the construction of gender, selfhood and social status. Very early on, the ‘Agenda’ strongly stated that ‘the history of women is also the history of men’, and this article also notes the green shoots of the history of masculinity in early modern Ireland.

Networking early modern Irish women

AbstractOver the last decade, network analysis has developed as an approach within digital humanities as a wider array of tools has become available to humanities scholars, and these approaches are now beginning to make an impact on the disciplines of history and English. This article presents an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis. It assesses recent projects to see how they accounted for gender in their datasets and what can be learnt about early modern women from these projects. It then looks at how projects in Ireland are engaging with network analysis, discussing the approaches used by RECIRC and introducing MACMORRIS's analysis of the Dictionary of Irish biography (D.I.B.) and the Bardic Poetry Database (B.P.D.), looking at how the latter is attempting to overcome the unconscious gender bias inherent in the D.I.B.'s selection of early modern lives from the period between 1541 and 1660. Finally, it points to some of the wider issues we as scholars face when engaging with this methodology, such as access to the required training and collaboration, arguing that while these are not unique challenges to the study of gender history in Ireland, they are important debates that can enhance scholarship in the field.

‘From a woman's point of view’: the Presbyterian archive as a source for women's and gender history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland

AbstractThis article responds to ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ by highlighting the explanatory potential of the Presbyterian archive in extending and reshaping our understanding of women, gender and the family in Ireland. Discussed here as the ‘Presbyterian archive’, the records of the Presbyterian church offer a tantalising insight into the intimate worlds of women and men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Although Presbyterians were a minority religious community in Ireland, their records provide much more than a marginalised picture. Instead, the Presbyterian archive casts fresh light on the wider Irish evidence, enriching our knowledge of the everyday lives of women and men in Ireland. The article begins by introducing the Presbyterian archive and the community responsible for its creation. Next, it considers how the Presbyterian archive both meets and advances the aims of the ‘Agenda’ and reveals what it can tell us about the lives of women and men as gendered subjects. Overall, the article underlines the importance of the Presbyterian archive as a source for Irish historians because it underscores why all history is gender history.

Exploring the ordinary: migration, sexuality and crime, and the progression of the ‘Agenda’ in Irish women's history, 1850s–1950s

AbstractThis article reflects on some developments in women's history based on the 1992 ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’, particularly responding to the section authored by Maria Luddy, incorporating work grounded in the nineteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth. Specifically, it considers developments in Irish women's social history over the past thirty years on the period from the 1850s to 1950s. The focus is on themes of poverty and migration, crime, and sexuality, which were touched on in the ‘Agenda’ and identified as areas for future research. Analysis on these subjects allows for an insight into lived realities for ‘ordinary’ women. These are areas which reveal the growth and development of historical research and its impact on public narratives and policy. Taking its cue from the ‘Agenda’, this article also identifies other fruitful research topics that could be further explored in future scholarship.

Developing an agenda for the history of women religious in Ireland: historiography and potentiality

AbstractIn ‘An Agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ (1992), Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O'Dowd and Maria Luddy noted that research on convents and women religious (nuns/sisters) in Ireland was beginning to open up in the 1980s. They also suggested areas that merited the attention of scholars, including the experience of vowed religious life by women, issues of class and power within Irish convents, and the role of nuns in Irish society. This article examines historiographical developments, with a view to seeing whether or not scholars rose to the challenges posed in 1992. Additionally, it considers areas that still demand attention.

History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.

‘The Whole Thing was Numbingly Bland and it was Deliberately So’: Food and Power in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, 1922–1996

AbstractFor survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, food is a sensory embodiment of the punishment and powerlessness they experienced while contained within the institutions. As part of the Irish Free State's architecture of containment, the relationship between the Laundries and the state is unique: the Catholic‐run institutions operated outside of state bureaucracy, yet they were central to its attempts to consolidate sovereignty as a fledgling nation. For historians, the sensing body is one of the few avenues to understanding the Magdalene institutions and their place in twentieth‐century Irish history. This article uses memories of food as a point of access to the subjectivities of survivors, and in doing so reveals the affective imprint of institutional power on embodied experience.

Ghosts of Tao House

Ghosts of Tao House

Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism

Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism Kevin Hargaden (bio) At one stage in Derek Scally’s brilliant journalistic account of the collapse of the influence of the Irish Catholic Church, he compares the institution to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Thinking about the Irish Catholic Church as a ‘leaning tower of piety’ is an interesting image, because it is widely understood today that the famous white marble bell tower does not simply have a precipitous tilt because of faulty foundations. That was the initial problem, identified about five years after construction. Soon after that, Genoa and Pisa went to war, and it was the better part of a century before building resumed. Modifications were made that did not sufficiently address the fundamental problem. Even though the edifice was completed in 1370, it was already sliding back off its axis. One of the strengths of Scally’s book is how it introduces the figure of Cardinal Paul Cullen to his readers. While many in Ireland have an understanding of Irish history stalked by a caricature called John Charles McQuaid, Cullen was a much earlier and perhaps more significant ecclesial revolutionary leader. Scally resists the temptation to cast him as a villain and instead locates him in context as a skilled organiser, formed in Rome, who perceived how to advance the institutional reform of the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Famine and Catholic Emancipation. Scally is clear that this reform was not purely ultramontane, meaning aligned and subservient to the interests of Rome, but also a hybrid with Victorian social mores. At the heart of this project was a devotional revolution that brought about the ‘Irish Catholicism’ that sometimes seems somewhat more ‘Irish’ than ‘Catholic’. It expressed itself in the development of schools, hospitals, parish buildings, and growing seminaries. It also aimed at the social advancement of Catholics in Irish society. Desmond Bowen reports that less than ten years after his appointment, Cullen’s office could boast that ‘everywhere now Catholics were advancing socially, on the bench, in commerce, in railways, even among the landed gentry and nobility’. [End Page 225] If the foundations for Cullen’s Church reform went awry, it may well be here: in its pursuit of social and political influence through economic attainment. Unlike the tower in Pisa, Catholicism has collapsed, and in its wreckage thousands of lives have been ruined. If economic attainment and societal legitimation were part of the shifting sand that set the institution to fall, then excavating those foundations is a central part of understanding how the collapse happened and how ‘they are still palpable now’. Scally’s account is more comprehensive than any 300-page first-person investigation has any right to be, but a notable absence from his analysis is how the Irish economic ‘miracle’ took off in parallel with the decline in the Irish Catholic Church’s fortunes. In this essay, I will put Scally’s book into dialogue with Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism with a view to understanding how the economic factors that can be identified in malignant Irish Catholicism have not been exorcised but intensified in the new era’s moral imagination. Tracing the family tree: the story Scally tells The Best Catholics in the World is an attempt to provoke an engagement in Irish society with a version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of coming to terms with the past, modelled particularly on German efforts to remember rightly the Nazi regime, war, and holocaust). It is a story told in three parts. First, he seeks to unearth why it is that Irish people came to believe themselves to be so very Roman Catholic. These chapters are full of useful demythologisation. He tries to draw a line under the bogus self-flattery that often gets hidden behind discussion of ‘Celtic Christianity’. Whatever else it was, it was neither imposed on the Celts through force nor wildly divergent from what prevailed elsewhere. He very neatly explains how the Penal Laws – which in some cases were statutes passed in parliament without much real-world impact – were retroactively woven into the nationalistic narrative that emerged in the nineteenth century...

"I'll Go On" – Terry Eagleton, Writer


 
 
 This essay seeks to link Terry Eagleton’s work as a novelist and playwright with his work over many years, in theory, philosophy, and literary criticism. The several pieces discussed here shimmer with raw energy, innovative technique, and a deep grasp of the tangled histories of England and Ireland. The ability to work in both critical and creative modes is rare and the constantly shifting boundaries of the work considered here indicate Eagleton’s desire to carve out a genre that incorporates an inclusive model of expression. The issue of Irish history and politics is an abiding concern for Eagleton; the painful and violent struggle for Irish independence is a constant theme in his work and makes a connection with his own Irish background. Ireland is also a shelter to Wittgenstein in Saints and Scholars, a work that shows Eagleton as also able to cut philosophy and narrative with a ready and effective humour.
 
 

‘Irishness’ and the Equine Animal in Anne McCaffrey’s the Lady: A Novel

ABSTRACT National identities may be one of the most problematic aspects of Irish history, in part because they can hardly be detached from the symbolic instrumentalisation of more-than-human animals. In the case of ‘Irishness’, one of the animals most commonly chosen for such human purpose is the Irish horse. I contend that the horse as a symbol for the (re)negotiation of ‘Irishness’ might be spotted in Anne McCaffrey’s The Lady, set in the 1970 Ireland. Here, the author explores how the human protagonist, an Anglo-Irish girl, interacts with several equine animals and copes with the death of her first pony. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to find evidence of how horses and ponies are used to ease anxieties about hybrid identities related to humanness and Irishness, and, on the other hand, whether and to what extent the human protagonist’s accident with her pony character involves an ethical encounter with the nonhuman Other that helps her to resist anthropocentric uses of nonhuman animals.

Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity and Power in Medieval Ireland

Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity and Power in Medieval Ireland

A Superb Resource for Lovers of Shaw

A Superb Resource for Lovers of Shaw