Irish Land Research Articles

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

A Free Market of Morals: Boycotting, Liberalism, and Property

The development of the practice of boycotting during the Irish Land War (1879–82), and its subsequent spread beyond Ireland to the United States, sparked outrage and concern. This was prompted by the specific intellectual challenges the practice posed for liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. In relying on a liberal defense of free speech and freedom of association, early boycotters in the 1880s were able to demonstrate the dependence of property rights on social sanction while also remaining initially impervious to legal censure. As a result, the definition and extent of property rights came under scrutiny because of the ease and simplicity by which they could be curtailed through social force. It is observed here that consequent legislation to insulate commercial wealth from boycotting’s parallel moral economy required the reinforcement and development of political justifications of the state’s right to manage economic interactions in the name of social stability and public welfare. The paper argues that boycotting was so threatening to classical visions of liberal individualism precisely because it was so firmly grounded in individualistic premises. It observes not only that boycotters used the language of “free trade” to defend the practice but also that the practice itself contained latent political assumptions about social organization. The argument also suggests that, contrary to much current academic opinion, rights-based popular resistance can be directed toward egalitarian ends.

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War, by Niall Whelehan

<i>Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War</i>, by Niall Whelehan

Medieval Irish Land Law as an Alternative Justice System in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland, Denmark, and Norway

Medieval Irish Land Law as an Alternative Justice System in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland, Denmark, and Norway

Changing land: diaspora activism and the Irish Land War. By Niall Whelehan. Pp 216. New York: NYU Press. 2021. US$30.

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The Right to Life, the Right to Nature, and the Impact of Irish Land on Political Thought in the 1880s

AbstractThe Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

Re-staging the 1916 Rising: Eugene McCabe’s Pull Down a Horseman (1966)

ABSTRACT The essay addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

Entrenching positions? The dynamics of Brexit negotiations mirrored in British, Irish, and EU executives’ speeches

ABSTRACT Brexit constitutes an unprecedented crisis for the European Union and its member states. Three affected parties – the United Kingdom, the EU and Ireland – worked hard to protect their interests, making the negotiations difficult, especially regarding the Irish land border. While the key interests of the negotiating partners are clear, it is less known how and to what extent these interests were communicated by the political representatives of the three countries. We approach Brexit as a critical juncture and base our work on the framing literature. We use a unique dataset including political speeches made by EU Commission members and the UK and Irish government officials during a period from January 2016 until January 2020, relying on the innovative automated text analysis approach of keyword-assisted topic modelling. Beyond insisting on their interests, communication reflects the socio-political context. We find indications that speeches reflect the flow of the negotiations. Finally, our analysis reveals topics that largely flew under the media radar, such as research and protection.

The Irish Land Question, the International Monetary Problem, and Archbishop William Walsh, 1881–1896

AbstractThis article explores the significance to the Irish land question of a controversial issue in late nineteenth-century international political economy – bimetallism. Bimetallists advocated a monetary system that used gold and silver to define currency value rather than gold alone. Archbishop William Walsh's support for bimetallism is analysed to highlight how Ireland provided a case-study that framed this debate. Walsh believed the gold standard deepened an agrarian crisis that drove the Irish land question. He argued that careful and internationally orchestrated reform of the monetary system offered the means for its resolution. Walsh's bimetallist views marked him out as an original thinker within Irish nationalism, and his views were debated and adopted by monetary reformers across Britain, Europe, and the United States where they featured during the 1896 Presidential Election. Walsh's engagement in monetary politics must also be understood within a tradition of Catholic social teaching in which he positioned himself as a critic of financial capitalism. This article contextualizes the Irish land question within wider debates on the role of silver in the global economy and argues that Walsh's monetary thought reveals him to be a more significant international intellectual than his involvement in Irish politics tends to allow.

Empire and enterprise: money, power and the adventurers for Irish land during the British Civil Wars. By David Brown. Pp 312. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. £80 hardback.

Empire and enterprise: money, power and the adventurers for Irish land during the British Civil Wars. By David Brown. Pp 312. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. £80 hardback. - Volume 45 Issue 168

David Brown. Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars. Studies in Early Modern Irish History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 311. $120.00 (cloth).

David Brown. Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars. Studies in Early Modern Irish History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 311. $120.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 2

Northern Ireland: Managing COVID-19 Across Open Borders

The early response to the coronavirus pandemic in Northern Ireland revealed three things. First, although part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland is integrally connected in very practical ways to the Republic of Ireland. Policies and practices regarding COVID-19 on the southern side of the Irish land border had a direct impact on those being formulated for the North. Secondly, as well as differences in scientific advice and political preferences in the bordering jurisdictions, a coherent policy response was delayed by leaders’ failures to communicate in a timely manner with counterparts on the other side of the border. And, thirdly, different policies on either side of an open border can fuel profound uncertainty in a borderland region; but this can give rise to community-level action that fills the gaps in ways that can actually better respond to the complexity of the situation. This essay draws on the author’s close observation of events as they happened, including news coverage, press conferences and public statements from the three governments concerned over the period of March-October 2020.

Introduction: Eco-Fictions, The Animal Trope and Irish Studies

[...]during the decades of the economic boom, the Irish land of the Celtic Tiger was plundered mercilessly by unscrupulous property developers, and its historical sites and natural resources were appropriated as commodities for tourism. Whereas such conceptual frameworks emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, the consolidation of their bases, principles and values in the 1990s, as well as the development of their methodologies, coincided with the years of the Celtic Tiger, when Ireland and the Irish were being carried on a tide of economic prosperity which would have disastrous consequences, although these were only discerned by a small number of artists and intellectuals. [...]the much-needed revision of and deep reflection on ecology and the environment in Ireland came only after the economic collapse of 2008. The process of edition of the present issue took place, to a significant extent, during the period of confinement forced by the Covid-19 pandemic, when academics were saturated with online classes, sundry telematic commitments and difficult access to library sources. [...]we want to express our most sincere gratitude to the readers who generously agreed to assess the submitted contributions, to the authors who diligently revised their manuscripts according to the indications received by the reviewers, and, most emphatically our gratitude goes to the former general editor of Estudios Irlandeses, Dr. Jose Francisco Fernandez Sanchez who always encouraged and supported us, supervising our work from the very beginning, and patiently answering our endless e-mails.

Saving Ireland in Juteopolis: Gender, Class and Diaspora in the Irish Ladies’ Land League

Abstract First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large majority. This article analyses how a transnational movement translated into a local setting and how emigrants’ activism was shaped by factors of class, gender and religion. The circulation of mobile agitators and newspapers connected local branches in Dundee with the wider world of the Irish land reform movement, and this article seeks to uncover a more textured picture of the people who collected funds, attended rallies, and who are too often considered in the plural, as anonymous supporters grouped together under ethnic or political banners. The picture that emerges challenges existing views of the Ladies’ Land League as a predominantly middle-class affair. In Dundee the members were overwhelmingly working-class and their harsh experiences in the city’s jute industry shaped their activism. Local Catholic networks and ideas of religious humanitarianism contributed significantly to the branches, yet clergymen did not direct their activities, rather they responded to women’s mobilization.

J.S.Mill and the Irish Land Question: From Irish Economic History to Coherent Socialism and Irish Historicism

John Stuart Mill is regarded as the last representative of the classical school of political economy. However, in a variety of issues, he developed interesting and radical economic views. The Irish land question is one of the most characteristic cases of his transition from classical economic analysis to a liberal version of socialism. This article attempts to illustrate this transition by highlighting Mill’s pluralistic and historically specific political economy. This is achieved through the delineation of his views on the Irish land question indexing his Principles of Political Economy (1848), England and Ireland (1868) and his pamphlet Land Tenure Reform (1871). The article concludes that Mill’s heretic views regarding the Irish land question are associated with his transition towards socialist views and facilitated the emergence of the Irish historical school of the late nineteenth century.

‘Ireland is not going to take her orders from Rome’: Leo XIII, Thomism, and the Irish political imagination

ABSTRACT This article explores the extent to which the traditional Catholic philosophies of Thomas Aquinas influence the Irish political imagination in the nineteenth century. It looks first to Pope Leo XIII, one of the leading proponents of restoring Thomism into mainstream Catholic political thought, and the author of the influential encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The article examines how the Irish Land War during the 1880s influenced the development and audience of the encyclical. Finally, it analyses how the Thomistic principles which served as the foundations of Rerum Novarum were used by the lower-class Irish Catholic laity to legitimize incidences of protest and resistance which were considered morally illicit by the Catholic Church. In doing so, the article demonstrates how Catholicism and Thomistic philosophy influenced the way in which Irish Catholics perceived their relationship with the state and their rights as citizens.

THE REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE CLAIMANTS BEFORE THE TRUSTEES FOR THE IRISH FORFEITURES, 1700–1703

AbstractThis article examines the rate and nature of female representation before the board of trustees for the forfeited estates in Ireland, established by the Act of Resumption in 1700. The legislation was introduced by a discontented English parliament to nullify William III's grants of forfeited Irish land, which he awarded after victory over James II in the War of the Two Kings (1689–91). The act's remit extended well beyond the resumption of freehold land, incorporating real property, judgements, securities, obligations, debts, and goods and chattels forfeited by outlawed Jacobites. It was also retroactive, as all parties with a legitimate title to a property that predated 13 February 1689 were entitled to enter a claim. Using a printed list of 3,140 claims submitted to the trustees, this article analyses the commonality of female claimants, considers their economic, social, and marital status, and identifies the legal or equitable basis for their representation before the trustees. In doing so, it examines prenuptial and familial practices in post-Restoration Ireland, underlines the economic importance of marriage and inheritance as means of conveyance, and suggests that women's and female minors’ successful claims provided a number of Catholic families with a lifeline in the early eighteenth century.

‘Scattred All to Nought’: Feminine Waters, Irish Sources, and Colonialism in Edmund Spenser’s River Mulla

Abstract This article examines Edmund Spenser’s use of Irish mythology, particularly in relation to feminized rivers, in order to conceptualize how he constructs English colonialism as necessary for Ireland via the poetically constructed river Mulla. More specifically, it examines ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’ and The Faerie Queen, Book IV, Canto xi through the lenses of ecofeminism and a reading of the medieval Irish text Acallam na Senórach. This article argues for understanding the reappearance of the river Mulla from ‘Colin Clouts’ to FQ IV.xi as a materialist effort to dominate the place and space of Ireland through writing. It further argues that the Acallam is a potential source text for Spenser’s own endeavours with his river Mulla. Specifically, Spenser repurposes place-names and Fenian myths from medieval Ireland in his literature, which acts as another form of colonial domination to subsume Irish identification. It is particularly important that this lens is applied to Irish waterscapes, as the ability to reconstruct Ireland rhetorically and poetically in English literature allowed Spenser to ‘map’ Ireland and bring even the finicky Irish land- and waterscapes firmly under English control in violently masculine manners, which are enacted via enforced marriages.

“The Surging Tide of Pauper Democracy”

AbstractNamed and developed during the Irish Land War, boycotting quickly spread beyond Ireland and became a favored tactic for labor organizers in Britain and the United States. This article traces its emergence and growth, as well as the reaction generated by the novel aspects of the practice. It argues that boycotting constituted an intellectual challenge to late Victorian-era liberals, and had profound implications for the conceptions of freedom, rationality, and individual autonomy that underpinned Anglo-American liberalism. By examining the difficulties faced by British and American legislatures and political thinkers in proscribing the practice, the boycott can be more clearly conceptualized both as a political philosophy and as democratic praxis.

Crossing the Irish Land Border after Brexit: The Common Travel Area and the Challenge of Trade

“While the wind of change may be about to blow the precise direction in which it will blow cannot yet be determined so there is a level of uncertainty, as is evident from discussion about, for example, how Northern Ireland’s land boundary with Ireland will be affected by actual withdrawal by the United Kingdom from the EU.” Maguire J. Re McCord [2016] NIQB 85 para 107 Maguire J. was prescient in his observations as to the uncertainty surrounding the only land border there will be between the EU and the UK after Brexit. This raises the question of how to maintain an invisible border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, that invisibility being one of the most conspicuous outcomes of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The answer to that question depends on how people and goods are dealt with post-Brexit. This in turn depends on the preservation of the long-standing Common Travel Area (CTA) and the nature of the trade relationship between the EU and UK post-Brexit and whether there are special arrangements in relation to Northern Ireland. The border emerged as a key issue in the final hours of the first phase of the Brexit talks , highlighting how it is a complex challenge. That border has many dimensions. There is the obvious question of geography: a land border of almost 500 km that currently is invisible. There is the legal context of the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland, which the UK and EU have agreed will continue after Brexit. There is the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, which the same parties have agreed to protect. And there are the EU treaties and the future agreement between the UK and the EU following Brexit. There are the practical considerations of movement of people and goods across the border and there is the sensitive political context that this has been a violently contested border in the past. This article explores these dimensions focussing mainly on the movement of people across the border. It analyses how the CTA will survive Brexit and specifically how a border can(not) be avoided if the UK leaves the customs union. It explores the CTA and December Joint Report between the UK and EU marking the end of the first phase of Brexit negotiations. It sets out the challenges for the law posed by the conflicting political ambitions of a soft border and a hard Brexit. Its conclusion is in the spirit of the comment of Maguire J. above: that while legal certainty is to be aspired to, that sometimes this is not possible. Even after the hoped for transitional arrangements between the EU and UK that may allow for some legal experimentation, the border and the CTA will necessarily look different after Brexit if the UK leaves the internal market and the customs union. Divided into four parts, the article first provides some context in relation to economics and politics before turning to the opaque, legally obscure and practically significant CTA. The CTA and Brexit are then analysed before turning to the issue of how trade and in particular how the UK leaving the customs union will affect the guarantee of no hard land border before concluding.