Irish History Research Articles

A Superb Resource for Lovers of Shaw

A Superb Resource for Lovers of Shaw

BRIAN FRIEL’IN TRANSLATIONS OYUNUNA BAKHTINCI BİR YAKLAŞIM

Brian Friel chooses the fictional time of his play Translations as nineteenth century, 1833, when the hedge schools in which instruction was in Gaelic were replaced by the new national schools in which lessons were to be taught in English. Another important event taking place in this time was the ordnance survey through which Irish place names were replaced with English ones. As a result of these two pivotal events in Irish history, Irish language and, accordingly, Irish culture were eroded and became Anglicized. This play has been studied and discussed from a varying perspectives such as postcolonial, political, or a national perspective. However, Friel bases his play on the above mentioned two events and claims that the play is only about language. As a result, examining this play through the lens of Bakhtin's concepts of unitary language and heteroglossia, focusing on the language and its relationship to Bakhtin's terms of heteroglossia and monoglossia, will aid in observing the effects of two pivotal events in Irish history on Irish language, culture, and people.

Men, Misfits, and Martyrs

Homosexuality has historically been constructed as an issue within Ireland and the Irish diaspora for centuries. However, the academic investigation of homosexuality and, consequently, homophobia’s roles in Irish history have been sparsely studied. This essay seeks to examine homosexuality in the Irish diaspora. Specifically, it investigates how heterosexuality necessarily came to be closely associated with the growing Irish nationalist movement in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England. Through the analysis of Oscar Wilde’s court cases as well as the impact of the publishing of Roger Casement’s personal diary entries, it is evident that homosexuality was constructed as a controversial issue in the Irish diaspora during times of instability in Ireland. Because homosexuality threatened the sanctity of Irish nationhood by existing outside of outlined social norms, instances of publicized homosexuality amid elite Irish men living within the Irish diaspora were largely looked down upon in order to preserve traditional notions of ‘Irishness’. This investigation concluded that familism’s rise in Ireland and throughout the Irish diaspora in response to Britain’s encroaching colonial intervention in the country determined that homosexuality served no purpose to the nationalistic cause, thus leading to its construction as an inherently anti-Irish characteristic among Irish men.

The Voyage of St Brendan by A. B. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Voyage of St Brendan by A. B. Jackson Jameson D. K. Lawwson The Voyage of St Brendan, by A. B. Jackson (Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2021, 80 p., paperback, $16.95) The Voyage of St Brendan follows the oceanic wanderings of the Irish monk St. Brendan, who, tasked by a higher power to repent after burning a book of fantastical tales, sets out to broaden his horizons and experience wonders the real world might have on offer. Along with six other monks, he assembles a traditional Irish ship called a currach and sets sail. On this voyage, Brendan experiences a plethora of things: a genteel whale with a forest on its back, sea serpents, hellfires, cast-aside angels in purgatory-paradise, and his own unceremonious-unsanctified-quiet death. In a well-crafted reimagining of this Irish tale, A. B. Jackson predominantly works with a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch version, originally translated from Old Irish. The book begins with the monk's folly: enjoyment of a book, which Brendan self-scorns with a measure of hefty Christian guilt, which forces him to disparage its contents. In a dream, an angel-messenger arrives to correct him: the contents of the book were in fact true. From there begins Brendan's journey to discover the honest and wonderful things available in the world. His worldview, and by extension his faith, is expanded wildly by his years on the sea, where witness is borne to mermaids and sirens, where temptations are resisted and succumbed to, where demons are surprisingly convivial. Jackson's work re-creates a variety of poetic form constraints from Irish history, paying homage to older works of Irish poetry. Jackson also includes elements of prosimetrum, the practice of offering sections of reflective prose to break up the poetry, hearkening to Irish epics like Táin Bó Cúailnge. The poetry within the collection, reminiscent of classic adventure narratives but still wholly adult and scholastic, serves the story well. Jackson preserves a sense of wonder that will delight readers new to the tale and reignite a passion for the journey in those already familiar. The quick-sharp poetry does not linger any longer than is welcome, the flitting from location to location is perfectly served by the author's careful hand, and the respect given to each incident places the reader deeply and firmly within the moment. While the poetry of the piece only runs from pages fourteen to fifty-six, the experience of Brendan's full journey is not lost or hastened beyond what is reasonable. The intricate lacing of facets of the journey appear as quick anecdotes, each incident a vignette of Brendan's thoughts and experiences regarding every interaction with the now-wondrous world. The stitching in of prose, as Jackson himself admits post-script, reminds the reader of the connection to epic poetry beyond the implications of the immram style and the ever-present comparison to Mael Duinn. The use of prosimetrum, while not necessarily a strict adherence to its traditional appearances in epic poetry and other earlier Irish works, is a [End Page 144] welcome addition to the tale's fluidity, breaking up the poetic verses and maintaining a narrative speed consistent with the content. The prose poem–esque sections, which number ten in total, are typically of moderate length and imitate the styles of the poetic verse well. The bulk of the collection takes the form of shorter, stanza-style verses, predominantly in quatrain. Jackson works with different old-style Irish meters and the classic ABCB quatrain to differentiate his version from the Middle Dutch one that served as his inspiration. The distinct and deliberate step away from the epic draws attention from the confines of the heroic couplet and the imposing bulk of the long poem. The movement away from heroic and epic conventions frees up space for interpretations and allows Jackson a considerable degree of creativity in manipulating form and content. Beyond the constraint of heroic couplets, Brendan's voyage is presented in the present tense; in this current-moment approach the reflective presence of the epic past is left by the wayside, removing the fantasy veil of separation expected of...

Multiple crises, multiple sticky plasters: repositioning regimes of truth in ECEC policy to affirmative ethics of interconnection

ABSTRACT In recent times, the role of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), as a public service within Irish society has been illuminated. In the twenty-first century, although crises may unfold on a global scale, the response from society is galvanised at local level. Amongst other functions, ECEC is ideally positioned to form part of a local response to unanticipated public crisis. However, ECEC in Ireland finds itself in a space of converging multiple crises such as high fees for parents, poor working conditions for staff, alongside concerns of how children experience provision. This article analyses the institutional systems from which ECEC has emerged by mapping several discursive ‘regimes of truth’, that have built up through Irish history. Exposure of multiple crises, such as fragmentation and the commodification of care are mapped to a neoliberal discourse set in a history of colonialism and religious doctrine. Pulling off the sticky plasters is painful, whilst facing multiple crises can lead to a state of exhaustion. However, guided by affirmative ethics this article aims to generate possible solutions, thereby proposing mechanisms for creating a more sustainable model of ECEC as a public service, embedded in an interconnective narrative of ethical care.

Re-membering Easter 1916: Homosexuality and Irish History in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys

While the benefits brought to the LGBTQ+ community through the legal reforms enacted in the last two decades are undeniable, paradoxically the contribution of this community to Ireland is still largely absent from official narratives of the past. This article discusses Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys (2001) as a response to this absence through its reconstruction of Easter 1916. The narrative that the novel presents on the Easter Rising differs from national and nationalist accounts of the event in that it is not a mere recollection or remembering of what happened, but rather a re-membering of it. Drawing on the approach of the Easter Rising as a moment of possibility, the novel reassembles the narrative of the rebellion on the basis of gay experience, an experience that has been absent not only from the historiography on the Easter Rising, but also from the national imaginary as well. Through this reassemble and resignification of the rebellion, O’Neill’s novel provides a retroactive as well as future-oriented counter-memory of Irishness that materializes the need to reorient of Irish historiography and the political body based on a non-heteronormative affiliative understanding of the sovereign country.
 
 Keywords: LGBTQ+ Voices; 1916 Easter Rising; Memory; Jamie O’Neill; Irish Historiography.

Person, Place and Culture

Modern Irish history now records the exhumation of the remains of 155 ‘consecrates’ at High Park Convent in September 1993 as one of the first tremors in a quarter-century of scandals whose collective impact would shatter the nation’s deeply ingrained respect for and deference to the Roman Catholic Church. Belatedly, Irish society has sought to listen to and learn from the personal testimony of the individuals who lived under institutional regimes of varying levels of harshness. Their accounts held a mirror up to a society that continued to pathologise and warehouse social problems long after better solutions should have been available, but they also resonate in the fields of architectural history and material culture, forcing us to reckon with the meanings accorded to landscapes, buildings and spaces by those obliged to inhabit them. Demography and the spectre of justice too-long denied made the task of recording the oral testimony of former laundry residents an urgent one, yet another equally finite source of lived experience continues to pass away mostly unremarked - the religious who operated them. Whether vilified as villains, exalted as pioneering and entrepreneurial proto-feminists, or cast as the superfluous siblings of a system of patrilineal, impartible inheritance, our understanding of the history of our times could only be enhanced by adding the personal reflections of those whose lived long enough to witness the disintegration of the system to which they voluntarily committed their own lives. This ‘obituary’ represents a creative act of reconstruction, but one firmly founded on documented fact and fragments personal memory. The goal is less to document a history than to recover an essence of a life, a place and a culture long-lived but now departed.

Renegotiating Ireland, Transnational History, and Settler Colonialism in White Australia

AbstractEfforts to transcend island histories in Irish historiography have predominantly centered a narration of white settler pasts as an outer boundary of Irish history. This article works through the disjunctions between differently situated transnational turns in Irish and Australian historiographies by interrogating metaphors of extension, including “Greater Ireland” in the former historiography. It proposes that to decenter the nation as a historical unit, transnational Irish history requires a critical tension with white settler, and not only Irish, methodological nationalisms. The article surveys the critical possibilities presented by the transnational turn in Irish historiography while questioning its limits, with attention to the paradigm of a transnational Irish revolution. It then flags possible directions for a closer dialogue between transnational Irish history and postnational historiographies of white settler colonialism. An unsettling of discrete historiographical boundaries remains a necessary condition for tracing histories of Ireland beyond, below, and outside the nation.

Hugh O'Neill in Irish historical discourse, c.1550–2021

AbstractAn analysis of the multiple publications relating to the career of Hugh O'Neill that appeared during the middle decades of the twentieth century reveals the extent to which authors who were then writing about the past permitted their interpretations to be influenced by the politics and prejudices of their own time. It is then demonstrated that the various positions then adopted by competing authors had been influenced also by polemics from the past. A study of the place accorded to Hugh O'Neill by authors writing in the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth and even the sixteenth century shows that they too were divided over whether O'Neill should be considered the forger of an Irish nation or a champion of Catholicism, or an ingrate who had betrayed the crown that had rescued him from obscurity. This leads to a discussion of academic writing of more recent decades and the efforts of scholars who have engaged on fresh research to better comprehend what motivated Hugh O'Neill at various junctures in his career, even as he remains one of the more enigmatic personalities in Ireland's history.

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.

Mary Hayden: Irish historian and feminist, 1862–1942. By Joyce Padbury. Pp. 362. Dublin: Arlen House. 2020. €25.

Mary Hayden: Irish historian and feminist, 1862–1942. By Joyce Padbury. Pp. 362. Dublin: Arlen House. 2020. €25.

The Wages and Price of Whiteness

Abstract Despite the Irish experience of white-on-white racism, can any predominantly white country in the global North be free of white supremacy? It has been argued that the Irish became white. What was the cost of becoming white? What does Ireland endorse in accepting this construct of whiteness? This article attempts to answer these questions with a contemporary analysis of the wages of whiteness in Ireland against the backdrop of Irish history. It argues that the recategorization of the Irish as white and the subsequent change in positioning on the racial ladder came at a price of subscribing to white supremacy. It presents white supremacy as the unacknowledged, everyday positioning of white superiority, as opposed to white extremism, and argues that whiteness is employed as a determinant of Irishness. The article ends by arguing that history can either reify or debunk white supremacy, and calling for a decolonized narrative in Ireland.

Women’s Agency, Catholic Morality, and the Irish State

Abstract The text reviews four new books in Irish women’s history and the history of sexuality: Mary McAuliffe’s biography of the revolutionary Margaret Skinnider; Jennifer Redmond’s Moving Histories, exploring the discourses about Irish women migrants to Great Britain in the first few decades of the Irish state, and their everyday lives in Britain; Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart’s The Irish Abortion Journey, which documents the repressive discourses and policies surrounding abortion in twentieth-century Ireland and relates stories of traveling to Great Britain to obtain it; and finally, Sonja Tiernan’s book examining the ultimately successful political and legal campaign for marriage equality in Ireland. These highly readable, well-researched books place gender and sexuality at the center of Irish history; provide insight into the contradictory political, religious, and medical discourses about Irish women, gays, and lesbians; and document the lives of women both in and out of Ireland.

A genetic analysis of grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) populations in Ireland

The grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) is an invasive rodent in Ireland that has had detrimental impacts on the native Irish red squirrel (S. vulgaris) as well as on silviculture. This invasive species spread rapidly throughout Ireland, but in recent years appears to be declining in certain areas of the country. This study analysed the genetic profile of grey squirrel populations in Ireland to gain insight into their introduction, evolutionary history in Ireland, and vulnerability to management strategies. The genetic diversity and population structure of eight grey squirrel populations in Ireland was assessed using 11 species-specific microsatellite loci, and was compared to a small population from Tennessee, U.S.A., part of the native range of the grey squirrel. This is the first time these microsatellite markers developed specifically for grey squirrels have been used to study the species in Ireland. We found low to moderate genetic diversity overall across Irish populations as well as the presence of inbreeding. One population in particular, (in Co. Kildare), was differentiated from all other populations, which could indicate genetic isolation between Irish populations or a secondary introduction of S. carolinensis to Ireland.

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.

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey and Valerie McGowan Doyle

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, research into early modern Irish history underwent something of a renaissance. Due in good part (but hardly exclusively) to the pioneering studies of Nicholas Canny and the late Brendan Bradshaw, and also in part to their frequent controversies, research into Irish history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became the subject of successive interpretative currents, loosely (and often lazily) characterised as revisionist, anti-revisionist, post-revisionist and the like. The present collection of essays is an assurance that this febrile flow has not been diminished. But it is distinctive in important ways. First, notwithstanding the dedication to Nicholas Canny and an entertaining and revealing autobiographical foreword by the dedicatee, it is not a Festschrift. Nor is it a testament by a new interpretative school. It is best described as an exhibition, a demonstration, as the subtitle declares, of the way in which the...

On Seamus Heaney. By R. F. Foster

As Northern Ireland erupted in violence in the late 1960s, Seamus Heaney commented in a newspaper piece on the delicate balance required to negotiate the chaos. ‘The ideal in politics as in writing’, he wrote, ‘is one of integrity; to establish a congruence between a man’s public image (his speeches and actions or his writings) and his private self (his inherited emotional loyalties, his evolving ideals, his prejudices and uncertainties)’. Heaney’s life-long project was the working out of that congruence between the public and private man, and the critical acclaim he enjoyed during his lifetime and his extraordinary popularity among readers were both due, in no small part, to his success in that undertaking. Beginning with a 1965 profile in Vogue magazine, of all places, and continuing through BBC radio broadcasts, public readings and interviews, his critical writings, and Stepping Stones, Heaney fashioned a highly coherent narrative that grounded his poems in his own personal history. His body of work as a whole is an assertion of a poetic persona that is familiar to his readers everywhere. As the Irish historian R. F. Foster notes at the beginning of this book, ‘It is difficult to write about someone who wrote so well about himself’.

‘Staying on in national schools’: a history of Ireland’s secondary tops, 1880-1980

ABSTRACT Staying on in national school to gain some second-level education became a feature of the Irish education system during the late nineteenth century and continued until the 1980s. Following the establishment of Ireland’s Department of Education in 1924, the classes in national schools which provided second-level instruction became known as ‘secondary tops’. At their peak, there were more than 80 secondary tops in Ireland. Nonetheless, few academics have seriously considered the place of secondary tops within the history of Irish education. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to examine the origins and purpose of secondary tops. It also charts the growth of secondary tops from the 1920s and finally explores the impact of the 1960s reform period on their subsequent decline. This paper argues that, until the 1960s, secondary tops were an important component of Irish second-level schooling, providing one of the few opportunities for educational advancement.

Irish history at school, its transnational nature and its international contexts, 1980s–1990s: convergence and divergence between the Irish state and Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT A comparative analysis of Irish history at school in the two parts of Ireland from 1921 to the 1990s is proposed here through an examination of history curricula and textbooks. The main focus is on the 1980s and 1990s, which were pivotal decades, usually described as having brought about a gradual convergence between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in terms of the treatment of Irish history within a wider context and related conceptions of Irish identity. The article argues that the new perspectives in fact reveal a dual trend, with elements of convergence but also enduring or even consolidated aspects of distinctiveness or divergence, in the treatment of both Irish history and European history: the more open, more transnational approaches of Irish history went hand in hand with a consolidation of state and regional identifications, as well as with a different view of the place of European history.

Wherever Green Is Orange

Wherever Green Is Orange Stephen O'Neill (bio) "Caught Inextricably in the Web of Their Tragic History" Reconciliation has been something of a mantra for the Decade of Commemorations. At the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) annual conference held in the Armagh City Hotel in 2012, the tánaiste Eamon Gilmore rebranded his government's commemoration program as "A Decade of Reconciliation," which formed the title of his keynote address: "Let's aim not simply for a decade of commemoration. Let's work together on a decade of true national reconciliation."1 In 2014, during president Michael D. Higgins's state visit to London, David Cameron echoed the president's words in suggesting that "we must … keep on with the work of reconciliation."2 The Ireland 2016 centenary program suggested that the decade provided an opportunity to "Remember, Reconcile, Imagine, Present, and Celebrate."3 A 2019 Sinn Féin policy document lauding the success of the official commemorations recognized the importance of "continu[ing] to be imaginative and creative in taking initiatives on commemoration and remembering which enhance reconciliation and healing."4 In the ongoing context of the peace process, the act of gleaning this "reconciliation" from commemoration has often relied [End Page 289] upon a deterministic reading of the chosen "decade," which was the climax of one of the most heavily narrativized periods in Irish history. In his influential summary of the Irish cultural and political revolution, F.S.L. Lyons's Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1945 (1979) exemplified a pervasive attitude of fatalism toward the events of "the period from the fall of Parnell to the death of Yeats": It was not primarily an anarchy of violence in the streets, of contempt for law and order such as to make the island, or any part of it, permanently ungovernable. It was rather an anarchy in the mind and in the heart, an anarchy which forbade not just unity of territories but also "unity of being," an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.5 Writing of this diagnosis of "irreconcilable cultures" and its comorbidity with the "intractable, timeless problem" of the north of Ireland, Ian McBride detected "an unmistakable ring of self-exoneration."6 McBride noted that this deterministic interpretation refused the possibility that these readings are dictated by the present rather than the past.7 Such determinism and self-exoneration has dominated the Decade of Commemorations in terms of its chronology, its themes, and the attitudes toward the uses of the past that it has adopted, particularly in its search for a "shared future" as a prehistory of the peace process. The commemoration of partition has proven particularly difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the aims of this peace process. As Lesley McEvoy, Kieran McEvoy, and Kirsten McConnachie wrote in 2006, "The 'two-traditions,' or perhaps more pejoratively 'two tribes,' paradigm was, arguably until the current peace process the dominant construct for not only framing an analysis of the nature of the conflict for much of its history, but also of what was required to achieve its [End Page 290] resolution through reconciliation between those warring traditions."8 Yet even with the onset of the peace process, and indeed arguably because of it, little has changed in terms of the framing of the conflict since then, particularly in relation to understanding the roots of an ongoing partition. The apparatuses of each state on the island have either refused or been incapable of integrating partition into their legitimating narratives, with the failures to find reconcilable ways of marking the foundation of the northern state forming a case in point. As Éamon Phoenix recounted in a conversation about partition with Laura McAtackney and Myles Dungan on RTÉ's The History Show in May 2021, some of the initial plans for commemorating the centenary included a "baby box" and a "twenty-one gun salute," recalling what he termed the worst excesses of "Ulster '71."9 When asked by Dungan how the "potentially divisive" nature of commemorating the beginning of...