Irish Politics Research Articles

Deliberative Democracy in Action Irish-style: The 2011 We the Citizens Pilot Citizens' Assembly

The research reported here sets out in some detail an experiment in deliberative democracy that took place in Ireland in 2011. The We the Citizens initiative featured a nationwide pilot citizens' assembly, the first of its kind in Ireland. It recruited a random selection of Irish residents to deliberate on specific issues relating to the economy and also reform in Irish politics. The paper explains the background to this, setting out how it was done and presenting some headline results. The results also tell us something about contemporary Irish attitudes to the political system.

Ireland's Multiple Interface-Periphery Development Model: Achievements and Limits

This paper argues that the Irish development model of recent years is best described as a multiple interface-periphery one: the strategy was to use Ireland's national sovereignty to exploit the economic possibilities (FDI, access to protected markets, differences in corporate tax regimes, structural funds) inherent in a situation of three-sided peripherality (in respect to Britain, the EU and the US). For a time the model seemed to be a winning one, producing the spectacular economic growth of the Celtic Tiger period and attracting strong international interest. However the challenges of working this model were underestimated, including dealing with its dynamic effect on Irish politics, class relations and state institutions. The post-2008 crisis is in large part a crisis of this development model.

Selling Politics? How the Traits of Salespeople Manifest Themselves in Irish Politicians

This article seeks to uncover if some of the traits most associated with salespeople manifested themselves in the activities of candidates in the constituency of Dún Laoghaire during the 2007 Irish general election. Such a finding would suggest that just as political parties have looked to the marketing profession for their lead in developing political marketing, politicians are looking to, and adopting the traits of those in the sales profession. This would point to the traits that the modern politician must possess in order to get and remain elected. It would also raise significant questions in terms of how candidates present themselves to the electorate, as well as how they go about campaigning and formulating policy.

Matthew Arnold, Edmund Burke, and Irish Reconciliation

Matthew Arnold's readings of Irish politics are heavily influenced by his reading of Edmund Burke. This essay examines his career as a commentator on the state of Ireland as he turned his attention to separate issues such as: (1) Fenianism and the disestablishment of the Irish Church in the late 1860s; (2) the Irish University Question in the 1870s; (3) the Land War in the late 1870s and early 1880s; and (4) Home Rule in the mid-1880s. Despite these differences in immediate object, Arnold continued to take what he considered to be a Burkean approach to Irish politics. In fact, he considered Burke's Irish writings so important that he edited a collection of them for popular consumption during to the Irish Land War. The major ideas Arnold took from Burke's Irish writings were, first, an emphasis on a rhetorical/ethical model for colonial government; second, a critique of the Protestant Ascendancy; and third, an insistence that a failure to reconcile Ireland would threaten the British Constitution itself. This essay will track Arnold's series of “Burkean” interventions into an evolving Irish political crisis, demonstrating along the way that there were persistent slippages between the opposing vocabularies of organicism and mechanization in all of proposals for Irish reconciliation, and that Arnold's Burkean approach to Ireland was integral to his larger thinking about culture and politics.

Unionism, Truth and the Challenge of the Past: A Response to Aaron Edwards

This article responds to Dr Aaron Edwards' comments on my previously published article ‘Unionism, truth recovery and the fearful past’ (2011, Irish Political Studies, 26(3), pp. 361–382). It highlights two main areas of concern – the manipulation of the papers' findings into a broader critique of peace process narratives and that the paper ‘skews’ loyalist paramilitaries' contribution to peace-building. Both points suggest a misinterpretation of the arguments contained in my paper and its relationship to the field of transitional justice.

IMF Surveillance of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger

The demise of the Celtic Tiger economy is one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in recent economic history. The catastrophic failure of the banking system and the deterioration of the domestic economy have left an indelible mark on society and precipitated a remarkable general election in 2011 (O'Leary, 2012, Irish Political Studies, 27(2), pp. 326–340). It has also raised many important questions. Why was it not anticipated? Why was Ireland so badly affected? And what political and economic reforms are necessary to prevent it from happening again? This research note contributes to the debate over the first question, namely the failure to anticipate the crisis, by analysing the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) annual surveillance reports of the Irish economy. The findings indicate that the IMF correctly identified many of the threats that were often ignored domestically, but that the quality of its consultations deteriorated in later years.

Irish Protestant migration and politics in the USA, Canada, and Australia: a debated legacy

In the USA, the rediscovery and celebration of Irish Protestant ancestry has extended in recent years to arguments by some scholars, political journalists, and politicians that there exists today an identifiable Scots-Irish socio-political legacy. This essay explores the history and cultural context of Irish Protestant migration and assesses its contemporary ramifications at the national level and in a critical state-level case (Kentucky). To assist in identifying the factors that have fostered or mitigated Irish Protestant identity/ies, comparisons will be made between the American experience and the very different ones of two other major recipient countries: Canada (and the province of Ontario) and Australia (and the state of New South Wales). Source regions, religious affiliation, the timing and magnitude of mass migration, and settlement patterns have all mattered in determining the socio-political roles played by Irish Protestants in the three former British colonies since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even more important have been the local economic and political contexts, including prevailing political party structures and competition. These factors explain why none of the three case countries, the USA included, bears witness to a coherent, identifiable Irish Protestant socio-political legacy.

Electing Not to Fight: Elections as a Mechanism of Deradicalisation after the Irish Civil War 1922–1938

Much research into the relationship between democratisation and conflict argues that holding elections soon after civil war, when nationalist issues still resonate, is likely to see voters elect to fight. This paper explores a case where elections had the opposite effect. Examination of the relationship between election results and political developments, as well as geographical voting patterns, demonstrates that elections were the primary mechanism for the deradicalisation of Irish politics after the civil war of 1922–23. Elections served as a mechanism for arbitration, selection, and coordination between more and less radical elites and their bases of support. Once the new state had shown its strength it had to accommodate gradual change, while electoral losers had to show they could reconcile change with stability. Elections helped establish credibility in both respects without altering the state-society relationship, suggesting that deradicalisation was dependent on state performance, and thus on some shared conception of the state. This combination of credibility, electoral legitimacy, and state performance, enabled a revolutionary elite, schooled in both constitutional and revolutionary politics, to deradicalise Irish nationalism after independence.

‘New dissidents are but old Provisionals writ large’? The Dynamics of Dissident Republicanism in the New Northern Ireland

This article discusses recent developments in dissident Irish republicanism and some of the arguments advanced to explain its emergence as a factor in Northern Irish politics. In particular it considers those explanations which define these new armed groups as either the latest manifestation of a historically determined Irish republican tradition or simply as ‘residual terrorist groups’ left behind by Provisional republicanism's movement into the constitutional mainstream in the 1990s. It rejects these arguments as ahistorical and schematic, and instead suggests that the dynamics and trajectory of dissident republicanism are shaped instead by the inherent tensions and structures of ‘the new Northern Ireland’. It goes on to compare the contemporary political, social and economic forces that produce the dissidents with the conditions that created the Provisionals as in the early 1970s and concludes that whilst these new groups will continue to pose a threat to the ‘normalization’ of the new dispensation they will not be successful as their republican forebears in mobilizing a significant and sustained challenge to the Northern Irish state.

Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing

Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing Gerardine Meaney The case of Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House raises fundamental questions about the process by which novels become, or fail to become, part of national and academic canons. The extraordinary diaries of the novel’s author also offer an unusually detailed insight into the alchemical processes that transform historical events, personal stories, political activism, social milieu, friendship, love, and desire into fiction. Read today, it is hard to understand how such a well-written novel—one that concerns a defining moment in Irish history, the Anglo-Irish War; that maps tragic structure onto historical circumstance; and that challenges so many preconceptions—has remained obscure and out of print for so long. Reading the diaries, we can see that Jacob’s particular view of the conflict in which she participated generated ambivalent reactions from the dominant cultural institutions that emerged in the new Irish state. As late as May 10, 1936, an editor at Duffy’s publishing house told Jacob that “A House Divided” (the earlier title for A Troubled House) was too sad, and he would not publish it at that time—but might later when he felt he could risk more.1 Later in the same year, however, extracts from the novel were published in the Irish Press, the official organ of the Fianna Fáil party. The relative obscurity of the novel even in scholarly circles has been extended by the fact that, oddly, it was not reprinted in the 1970s and 1980s by any of the feminist publishing houses, such as Arlen House in Dublin, or Virago and Pandora in London. Such presses helped to restore Kate O’Brien to the center of accounts of the twentieth-century Irish novel, and assisted the slow reappraisal of such earlier writers as Katherine Cecil Thurston and Frances Sheridan. Jacob’s obscurity may have been perpetuated by her combination of apparently antithetical ideological commitments to feminism and republicanism, which both connected her to the center of Irish politics and alienated her from it. Her literary style, neither high modernism nor depressed realism, likewise made her hard to classify for literary historians. These oppositions are, of course, a retrospective construction. The Troubled House, seen in the milieu of the dissident political, social, and artistic circles that it represents and which produced it, challenges the simplistic view that the energies that produced massive upheavals in early twentieth-century Ireland simply died of exhaustion in the aftermath of [End Page 70] the civil war. More important, the novel challenges the persistent myth that Irish feminism vanished with the suffrage movement, only to be reinvented ex nihilo in the 1970s. Casting a backward glance at this Irish novel is particularly timely now, when such feminist critics as Freeman, Rohy, and Traub are proposing new modes of understanding literary history and temporality across a broad range of historical periods.2 Jacob’s quest to find a publisher for The Troubled House was a long one; that of finishing it, even longer. Jacob’s friendships with other political and literary women both helped and hindered her progress. On May 31 1924, she went to visit her old friend and former cellmate, Dorothy Macardle. As she notes in her diary, Macardle’s feedback was at turns fierce and perceptive: Afterwards when they were gone I read the Cullen story aloud to her and she abused Mrs C as utterly unlike a real mother—unmaternal—aggressive, tactless, hard, weak—always “butting in.” I felt I must be making a great exposé of myself, but also felt she had a rather conventional sentimental idea of a proper mother. But she was right about one scene with Roddy.3 The “Cullen story” was to go on to have a further working title of “A House Divided” before it was eventually published in 1938 as The Troubled House. The mixture of literary activity and political activism, friendship and disagreement on that evening in 1924 was typical of Jacob and Macardle’s relationship. Both were middle class women whose cultural activism and political interests were transformed by the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War. Both were already established writers...

Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political Party. By Kevin Rafter. Pp x, 368. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2011. €60 hardback; €19.95 paperback.

Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political Party. By Kevin Rafter. Pp x, 368. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2011. €60 hardback; €19.95 paperback.

Deconstructing national leadership: Politicians’ accounts of electoral success and failure in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the 'settled will' of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the 'settled will' repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose.

The Henniker/Dillon/Hardy Affair: Florence Henniker's Letters to John Dillon, 1894–1896

Abstract Thomas Hardy met Florence Henniker at Dublin Castle in 1893 and soon after fell in love with her. Between 1893 and 1895, especially, he pursued her, offering architectural lessons, urging meetings, promoting her creative work, and collaborating with her on two short stories, which appeared in Henniker's 1896 In Scarlet and Grey: Stories of Soldiers and Others. Scholars have assumed that while Henniker did not reciprocate Hardy's feelings, she eagerly accepted his attention and help, but the first story of the collection, The Heart of the Colour Sergeant, together with thirty-five unpublished letters from Henniker to John Dillon, indicate that during the years of Hardy's most ardent interest in her, she was working through other interests — Dillon, in particular. Her letters to Dillon indicate that she not only became a serious student of Irish politics under his tutelage, but also, was tempted by the prospect of an exciting, deeply personal friendship. Dillon was a third party in the Hardy/Henn...

A quiet revolution – International influence, domestic elites and the transformation of higher technical education in Ireland 1959–72

The upgrading of higher technical education which began in the 1960s marked the most influential intervention by the Irish government in the third-level sector since the establishment of the independent Irish state. A series of reforming initiatives extended educational opportunity and transformed the status of technical education at higher level. International pressures undoubtedly proved influential in stimulating policy change. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) encouraged far-reaching reforms through its critical evaluation of educational facilities for technical training in Ireland. But educational reform was not imposed by international agencies on a reluctant corps of national politicians and officials. International influences dovetailed with changing attitudes toward technical education within the Irish political and official elite. Leading politicians and public officials showed an increasing awareness that the previous neglect of technical education was untenable in an era of economic development and educational expansion. It was a timely combination of international scrutiny and domestic political re-appraisal, which triggered a radical restructuring and expansion of higher technical education in Ireland.

Melodramatic Conventions and Atlantic History in Dion Boucicault

Melodramatic Conventions and Atlantic History in Dion Boucicault Marjorie Howes (bio) Dion Boucicault was arguably the most famous and influential man of the theater in the Anglophone Atlantic world between 1840 and 1880. He was a prolific playwright, a celebrated performer, a skilled theatrical director, an intermittent and largely unsuccessful theater manager, an inventive entrepreneur, and a master showman.1 Although born in Dublin, he mostly lived and toured elsewhere, in England, France, and the United States, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen in 1873. After his 1853 arrival in the U.S., Boucicault developed a successful strategy of writing extremely topical melodramas.2 His most popular plays were circum-Atlantic hits, and he made (and lost) several fortunes. Recent decades have seen a substantial increase in scholarly interest in Boucicault, especially in his best-known dramas: The Octoroon (1859), The Colleen Bawn (1860), and The Shaughraun (1874). This essay examines how these performances engaged with a changing Atlantic world. I argue that Boucicault’s most intense and sustained engagement with Atlantic history appears in the generic conventions of his works, rather than in his topical references to issues such as American slavery or Irish politics that have so interested recent scholars. I do not wish to deny that there are differences among Boucicault’s best-known works, or that, compared to the plays of some [End Page 84] other melodramatists, Boucicault’s drama was somewhat less formulaic, more realist, and closer to the “well-made play.” But these three works do share significant features, and I suggest that in important respects we can find their historicity in these conventions, not despite them. By “conventions” I mean generic and textual formulas, such as plot structures, linguistic patterns, and themes. I also refer to conventions surrounding sets and staging, technological innovations, and an emerging spatial imagination. Previous scholarship on Boucicault has been largely preoccupied with a different kind of convention in his dramatic work—racial and ethnic stereotyping. This focus has often prevented scholars from engaging with or even identifying many of the other generic formulas that structure Boucicault’s melodramas. Race and ethnicity remain central to his works, but by introducing new kinds of convention I hope to nudge the scholarly discussions of those categories away from their current emphasis on biology and stereotyping.3 Melodrama is a capacious term and has been defined variously as a mode, a genre, and a “cluster concept.”4 Most scholars agree that melodrama is thoroughly modern—that it responds to modernity, makes modernity visible in some way. However, they differ on exactly what modernity means, or with which features of modernity melodrama engages: a partial list includes the decline of religious modes of thought, the rise of machine culture, shifts in social and political relations, and the development of distinctly modern perceptual modes.5 All these aspects of modernity are arguably relevant to [End Page 85] Boucicault. More specifically, however, the modernity to which his dramas respond is both political and perceptual, illustrated by the two sub-categories of melodrama they belong to: mortgage melodrama and sensation drama.6 Mortgage melodrama is, as Joseph Roach observes, “a specialized performance of Euro-bourgeois anxieties concerning entitlement and dispossession,” a response to political and economic modernity.7 Sensation dramas, which dominated the theatrical marketplace in the 1860s, featured at least one spectacular stage effect and offered audiences new and intense emotional and physical sensations.8 As Roach suggests, mortgage melodramas are obsessed with property, and many of the genre’s conventions revolve around themes of ownership. The basic outlines of the plot involve an initial or threatened dispossession and the eventual restoration of an estate to its rightful owner. In such dramas a “mortgage” is not simply an economic arrangement, but rather denotes a state of affairs that is at once economic, sexual, and personal. Something that should remain the exclusive property of a protagonist—ancestral land, a beloved, the integrity of the heart’s affections—has become potentially alienable and no longer belongs entirely to that figure. The restoration of the protagonist’s ownership—of an estate, of a desired marriage partner, of his or her fate—becomes the central quest of...

Disjunctured narratives: rethinking reconciliation and conflict transformation

Reconciliation has been a notable part of discourses of conflict management and transitional justice in a number of conflictual situations around the world. This article examines the recent emergence of critical theories of reconciliation with particular reference to processes of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. It evaluates the ways in which conflict transformation in Northern Ireland is specific to that context and the variations in the usage of discourses of reconciliation compared with other ‘post-conflict’ societies. The article highlights critical theories of reconciliation which, although largely supportive of the potential of reconciliation, tend to highlight the arguments and conflicts that notions of reconciliation can generate. By examining the ways in which reconciliation is articulated in Northern Ireland through interviews with representatives of the main political parties, the article contends that narrative approaches are best suited to analysis of the issues in Northern Irish politics. The argument developed here suggests that reconciliation in Northern Ireland is part of a ‘disjunctured synthesis’ whereby the main political parties become locked into narratives of reconciliation based on opposition to the perceived position of the other.

Dr Ada English: patriot and psychiatrist in early 20th century Ireland.

Dr Adeline (Ada) English (1875-1944) was a pioneering Irish psychiatrist. She qualified in medicine in 1903 and spent four decades working at Ballinasloe District Lunatic Asylum, during which time there were significant therapeutic innovations (eg. occupational therapy, convulsive treatment). Dr English was deeply involved in Irish politics. She participated in the Easter Rising (1916); spent six months in Galway jail for possessing nationalistic literature (1921); was elected as a Teachta Dála (member of Parliament; 1921); and participated in the Civil War (1922). She made significant contributions to Irish political life and development of psychiatric services during an exceptionally challenging period of history. Additional research would help contextualise her contributions further.

The political career of Michael Tierney, 1920–44

Although Michael Tierney became famous as a controversial, reforming president of U.C.D., he had been a ubiquitous figure in Irish national politics for over twenty years before. A radical member of Cumann na nGaedheal and a key intellectual influence on the early Fine Gael party, he reinvented himself as a political independent, and campaigned for a vocational model of government in Ireland in line with papal teaching. He was that rarity in Irish politics – a political conservative who was also a public intellectual, and who tried to build a political career based on the quality of his ideas rather than tribal loyalties.

Lobbying regulation in Ireland: some thoughts from the international evidence

Throughout the liberal democratic world, the practice of lobbying governments and policy makers is considered integral to the process of policy formulation. Lobbying in Ireland has come to the fore of public policy debates given the catastrophic collapse of the Irish economy since late 2008 and the role played by lobbyists in contemporary Irish politics. This article offers the results of one of the first significant questionnaires on lobbying regulation given to politicians, lobbyists and administrators in the Republic of Ireland. The aim of this article is to present Irish policy makers with a range of options to consider in relation to devising a system of lobbying regulation to promote transparency. We present insights into international best practice in terms of lobbying regulations so that Irish policy makers can reach informed decisions when considering this matter. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

JOURNALISTS AND THE MAKING OF THE GAELIC ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION, 1884–1887

Sports organisations and the media have been intimately bound together since the making of the modern sporting world in Victorian times. The relationship between the media and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) during the formative years of that association was heavily influenced by the nature of Irish politics and society in the 1880s. In many respects, the early development of the GAA was a triumph of propaganda. From its very first meeting, the GAA presented an image of itself as a democratic and nationalist association open to everyone. Many of the most important GAA officials worked as journalists and one even established his own newspaper. On top of that, almost every GAA county board and many GAA clubs used the press to further the GAA. This paper documents the importance of the press and of journalists in the early years of the GAA.