Irish Protestant Research Articles

Irish Protestant identities. Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge. Pp xx, 389. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2008. £60.

Irish Protestant identities. Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge. Pp xx, 389. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2008. £60.

“Facts newly stated ”: John Curry, the 1641 Rebellion, and Catholic Revisionism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1747–80

“Facts newly stated”: John Curry, the 1641 Rebellion, and Catholic Revisionism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1747–80 John Gibney (bio) John Curry was a Catholic physician in Dublin who had arguably entered his profession by default. His grandfather had fought for James II, and the Curry family, who had lost most of their Cavan lands in the 1650s, had been stripped of their remaining holdings in the aftermath of the Williamite war of 1689–91. Consequently, Curry’s father became a merchant, and Curry himself studied medicine in Paris, eventually returning to Dublin, where he acquired a good reputation in his chosen profession. It was in Dublin on 23 October 1746 that he was confronted with a scene that spurred him into another field of endeavor: As he passed through the Castle-yard on the memorial day of the Irish rebellion in 1641, he met two ladies, and a girl of about eight years of age, who, stepping on a little before them, turned about suddenly and, with uplifted hands and horror in her countenance, exclaimed, Are there any of those bloody papists in Dublin? This incident, which to a different hearer would be laughable, filled the doctor with anxious reflections. He immediately inferred that the child’s terror proceeded from the impression made on her mind by the sermon preached that day in Christ-Church, whence those ladies proceeded; and having procured a copy of the sermon, he found that [End Page 248] his surmise was well founded. In a spirit very different from that of the preacher, he immediately, on returning to his house, sat down to give some check to the hatred and asperity revived in these anniversary invectives, from seats set apart for the propagation of truth and benevolence among men.1 The sermon that the little girl heard was presumably one of those preached annually by ministers of the Church of Ireland on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Irish rebellion of 1641.2 The eventual result of what Curry overheard was a sequence of works that collectively made up the most formidable attempt to articulate a Catholic perspective on Irish history in general—and on 1641 in particular—to be undertaken since the seventeenth century. And given the deeply polarized sectarianism that characterized virtually all perspectives on the events of 1641, the significance of what Curry sought to do should not be underestimated. I In October 1641 a combination of fears for the position of the Catholic elite in Ireland, along with the simmering resentments prompted by the colonization of Ulster in the early decades of the seventeenth century, prompted the outbreak of a rebellion in Ulster. It was spearheaded by the Catholic gentry of Ulster, who sought a position of strength from which to negotiate with Charles I on issues of critical concern to them: the security of their lands and the exercise of their religion. But this limited purpose soon gave way to a popular uprising that targeted the British Protestant colonists who had settled in the northern province.3 The massacres and sectarian [End Page 249] attacks that took place were rapidly assimilated into a specifically Protestant tradition of remembrance that interpreted the rebellion as a wholesale attempt to exterminate Protestants in Ireland—an interpretation bolstered by a litany of appallingly brutal (and often exaggerated) atrocity stories that purported to reveal the precise nature of the sufferings inflicted upon them by the Catholic insurgents. But having been fortuitously delivered from extermination by the intervention of the English parliament in the midst of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, for much of the remainder of the seventeenth century and beyond, Protestants in Ireland retained a degree of concern that at some point in the future they might fall victim to another onslaught along the lines of what they perceived to have happened in 1641. This prospect was further complicated by the fact that after the wars of the 1640s and the Cromwellian confiscations of the 1650s from which so many of them benefitted, the Irish Protestant elite had collectively become the wealthiest and most powerful grouping in Ireland. Consequently, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the newly entrenched Protestant...

The Making of an Irishman: John Ferguson (1836–1906) and the Politics of Identity in Victorian Glasgow

John Ferguson dominated Irish Home Rule politics in Scotland for over 30 years. As an Irish Protestant leading a predominantly Catholic nationalist movement, the construction of his personal identity was an active and continuous process, paralleling the attempts of the Irish migrant community to claim its own stake in Scottish society and politics. This essay examines some of the main forces shaping Ferguson's career, considering not only his immediate family and educational antecedents, but also the political context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a highly volatile environment fuelled not only by constitutional demands but by issues such as land reform and the democratisation of the franchise. Here Ferguson would serve as a personal junction point between Irish nationalism and British radical politics, although the dictates and divisions of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the internecine bitterness of local community politics frequently combined to restrict his practical freedom of manoeuvre. It was indeed in his later career as a ‘freelance nationalist’ and Glasgow municipal politician that he was able to deepen his engagement with progressive politics, particularly through his advocacy of the ‘Single Tax’ movement. Above all, Ferguson's case reminds us of the fluid and dynamic nature of migrant identity, grounded in the ability to respond creatively to openings as well as challenges.

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott David Moltke-Hansen (bio) Americans had to invent their nationalism. As David Waldstreicher has indicated, nationalism was a new phenomenon at the end of the Revolution.1 Another closely related feeling, however, was already familiar. Like the Protestant Irish, colonists in British America early developed their attachment to British traditions, institutions, and the monarchy into a culture of patriotism. They had multiple reasons. They wished to be co-equal in self-government and standing with the English in England, and they wanted to claim the benefits of British commerce and military protection against both native populations and foreign invaders. By the late 1760s, they also sought to ally themselves with the colonial policies of the Whig Party in England. To these ends, as Colin Kidd has noted, Americans, like the Anglo-Irish and 18th-century Scots, asserted "a Gothic heritage of liberty, laws and institutions."2 American Revolutionaries, in turn, used that mythic claim to justify their appropriation of the patriot label for themselves in their defense of British institutions and traditions of self-government against the monarchy. They argued that they were acting out of love of the body politic—the patria. In this way, a culture of patriotism continued through the Revolution. But this culture's parades and celebrations were used to promote not loyalty to a distant king or common antecedents, but to a shared future and government and the putatively traditional principles on which these were founded. American patriotism united people despite their widely divergent ethnic, religious, and geographic antecedents, attachments, and interests. Americans were developing a nationalism of hope, ideological commitment, and Revolutionary pride, but not of ethnic identity—not yet. At the same time as the former colonists were transforming their British patriotism into American nationalism, Sir Walter Scott began writing books that promoted British nationalism at home. He had a receptive public. Many in Britain accepted the Gothic heritage evoked by Scott. Moreover, in the wake of the loss of British colonies in America and in the midst of the wars with Napoleonic France (then also starting to explore its "Gothic" roots), a growing number of Britons were eager to embrace any allegiance that would unite ever more closely the English and the Scots across their common border. For Scott and his readers, nationalism was an antidote to, rather than an expression of, ethnic particularism. It also transferred to the state the feelings of attachment, loyalty, and identity that in earlier times had adhered at different levels to monarchs and nobles, to ecclesiastical authorities, and to clans and tribes. In making his case, Scott deconstructed both English and Scottish ethnicity, arguing that lowland and highland Scots were historically different peoples and describing the English as a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples and cultures. The process of amalgamation, furthermore, was continuing both within Scotland and between the Scots and the English. Click for larger view View full resolution Sir Walter Scott Scott's example inspired American writers to think about how literature could be used to promote nationalism. None more closely followed the Scottish writer than William Gilmore Simms of Charleston, South Carolina. Joining the new Young America circle in the late 1830s, he began to flesh out a coherent and consistent set of ideas about the relationship between literature and nationalism. He did this as he wrote southern romances that emulated Scott's Scottish border romances. Gradually, in the face of growing sectional tensions, these vigorously developed and expounded commitments led him as well through American nationalism to southern nationalism. In the end, Simms decided, nationalism should not unite, but rather should separate divergent peoples if and when and as they became strong enough to govern themselves. Americans had developed sufficient strength by 1776, and white Southerners soon would be strong enough to seek independence in their turn. In making this case, Simms did not argue that Americans were essentially a distinct people from the beginning. Instead, he contended that they had developed into a distinct people over time. The same process was playing out for white Southerners. Ethnicities emerged historically through the joint processes of amalgamation and differentiation or speciation...

The role of social categorization and identity threat in the perception of migrants

AbstractThis paper investigates how the categorization of migrant workers shapes their reception. In an experiment with Northern Irish Protestants we manipulated the representation of Poland to make the Catholicism of Polish migrants either more, or less, salient. Furthermore, judgements of Polish migrants were obtained under conditions designed to encourage participants to believe that sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was either resolved, or still a strong feature of the present social landscape. Overall, results showed that when Poland's Catholicism was salient, participants were less welcoming of Polish migrants. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by increases in the level of symbolic threat participants believed the migrants posed to participants' (Protestant) community identity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Jeremiah Jordan M.P. (1830–1911): Protestant home ruler or ‘Protestant renegade’?

The 1886 general election found Parnell at the helm of a well-disciplined nationalist party. In its struggle for home rule, the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) had been helped along the way by the newly formed Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (I.P.H.R.A.), which in July 1886 had no fewer than six M.P.s in its ranks. Jeremiah Jordan, nationalist Member of Parliament for West Clare, was one of the six. Born in 1830 at Tattenbar, near Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, the son of a tenant farmer and a Wesleyan Methodist, he was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. He started a grocery and provision business in Church Street, Enniskillen, and the town’s Young Men’s Society served as a training ground for his intellectual and oratorical skills, as did his appointment as a part-time Methodist lay preacher. Jordan had a passion for the sport of hunting and an intense dislike of idleness.

“Heirs of Freedom” or “Slaves to England”? Protestant Society and Unionist Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Ulster

Based on Ulster Presbyterian immigrant correspondence and recent research in Irish religious demography, this essay argues that Unionist cultural and political hegemony over northern Irish Protestants was constructed largely because of the massive emigrations (mostly to the United States) of Ulster Presbyterians, between the 1790s and the 1850s, who would or could not accommodate themselves to the political and socioeconomic regime fastened on the north of Ireland after the United Irishmen's failed rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union in 1800. Hence this essay directly challenges revisionist scholars who argue that Ulster Presbyterians' post-1798 embrace of the Union and the Orange Order was rapid, inevitable, and natural.

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (review)

Reviewed by: The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (bio) The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. By Jarlath Killeen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. On the faculty at Trinity College, Dublin, Killeen provides a late nineteenth century Irish Catholic context for Oscar Wilde's fairy tales as a way to better understand them. Killeen observes that Wilde's two volumes of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have been marginal to his canon in part because they do not fit into the usual view of Wilde as "a subversive writer" and in part "because children's literature . . . is considered a didactic and conservative form" (1). He starts with an introduction that explores "the critical history of the fairy tales and attempt[s] to explain why they have received relatively little attention" (1). Each of the nine chapters begins with a detailed review of the criticism of the fairy tale that is the chapter's focus, then explains the author's deviation from the standard view of that tale through the inclusion of Irish Catholic history. Unfortunately, Killeen's book lacks a concluding chapter that might present his generalizations about Wilde's fairy tales as a group, or that might address how the first volume of tales differs from the second; however, the final paragraph in the book does summarize his approach to Wilde's tales. Killeen's learned, well-written study includes notes, a bibliography, and index that will be helpful to scholars of Wilde, Irish studies, Catholic studies, and children's literature. Killeen's introduction situates Wilde's stories within the transformation of folk tales into fairy tales that occurred in the 1800s, when middle-class collectors of folk tales turned them from utopian peasant visions into didactic works aimed at children. Killeen contends that many Wilde critics deny that his stories are fairy tales because they see that genre as conservative and moralistic; instead, such critics prefer to align Wilde with the radicalism of the folk tradition (7-10). Killeen differs from such critics in that he regards Wilde's tales as didactic and intended for both children and adults. Killeen posits that Wilde, like his own father and like Yeats, took a Gnostic view towards his readers, "whereby knowledge is transmitted from the initiated to acolytes through codes and symbols" (10) that "operated in some mysterious and magical fashion on the human mind" (11). Wilde's Freemasonry reveals similar assumptions, as did his wife's membership in spiritualist and Theosophical groups (11). Killeen places Wilde within the great Irish short story tradition that emerged from Ireland's long colonial [End Page 82] history; Joyce, like Wilde, writes short stories that bridge "the sacred and the profane," as seen in Joyce's use of the epiphany in Dubliners (16). Wilde's parents, who collected and published Irish folk tales, "contributed significantly to the tradition of Irish Protestant investigation of native religious conventions" (6). Wilde may have gone with his father into western Irish peasants' homes to collect folk tales (7). However, Killeen explains Wilde's surprising attraction to the Catholicism of his Irish tenants and of poor Irish immigrants in London through factors beyond his parents' influence: not only homosexuals but Catholics in England and Ireland have a long history of coding secrets as symbols (171) as well as of "figuring spiritual and sexual heresy to the dominant modes of thought in both countries" (172). The Irish Famine, the unfortunate decline of folk Catholicism among the Irish, nationalistic Marian Catholicism in Ireland, the poverty of Irish immigrants in England, Irish child labor in London, problems in the Catholic Church inside and outside Ireland (such as Irish Puritanism and an international search for power), and the importance of Irish politician Daniel O'Connell are some historical features that Killeen discovers hidden within Wilde's fairy tales; Killeen convincingly turns such traces from Wilde's Irish background into keys to his mysterious stories. For example, Killeen observes that Wilde's "The Devoted Friend" is his fairy tale that has stumped critics the most. Some critics have seen it as endorsing the amoral aestheticism seen in The Picture of Dorian Gray...

Literary History: Objective and Subjective: The Poetics of Auden’s Anthologies

When you read any version of literary history written by any modern English poet--whether an explicit history of the kind presented in a critical essay, or an implicit history of the kind suggested by the poet's general attitudes to the literary past--you are likely to learn the same general truth, no matter which poet you read. What every modern poet tells you is that the whole course of literary history has been moving toward one great goal, and that goal has now been accomplished, triumphantly and conclusively, in the work of the poet whom you happen to be reading. This of course means that the poet's version of literary history is likely to be somewhat different from others that you may be familiar with. William Butler Yeats, for example, explained Irish literary history by asserting that the true central line in Irish writing had been drawn by Jonathan Swift, Bishop Berkeley, and other Irish Protestants like Yeats himself. When Yeats compiled an anthology called The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the book revealed that the most significant modern verse had been written by poets who wrote in a symbolist and visionary style more or less like Yeats's own. A hard-edged war poet like Wilfred Owen, whom everyone else thought of as a towering central figure in modern poetry, did not appear in the book at all. Yeats was so convinced that he embodied the teleology of modern poetry that he gave himself the privilege of rewriting some of the poems in the anthology in the style that he thought they would have been written in had their authors known better. T. S. Eliot, a couple of decades younger than Yeats, wrote dozens of essays in which he implied or explained that the central line of English poetic history extended from John Donne directly to T. S. Eliot himself, who had restored the true methods established by Donne. John Milton, whom you may have thought was a central figure, was in fact an eccentric outsider. William Wordsworth and John Keats were entertaining distractions from the central line, but no more than that. William Shakespeare was obviously too major a figure to ignore, but it appears that everyone other than Eliot had erred in overestimating Shakespeare's ultimate importance. W. H. Auden, who was a few decades younger than Eliot, also wrote his own literary history, but unlike Yeats and Eliot, he went out of his way to make clear exactly what his motives were for doing so, and made clear that his version of literary history was not an objective truth which he was the first to discover, but a way of thinking that he found useful when writing his own poems. And he made clear that his ideas about literary history changed over the years as his ideas about his own poetic agenda changed. He didn't say all this explicitly when he was young, but he went out of his way to say it when he was older. 1956, when he was a few months short of fifty years old, he gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Making, Knowing and Judging, and one of his themes was the difference between the kind of library that you find in a scholar's mind and the kind of library that you find in a poet's mind. the scholar's mental library, The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, is a very big book; in the poet's mental library, the same title exists, but the book has only ten pages. the scholar's mental library, the books are arranged in chronological order of writing; in the poet's mental library, the books are arranged in chronological order of reading. In Memoriam is written before The Dunciad, the thirteenth century comes after the sixteenth. As for the poet's judgments on the contents of his mental library, Auden knew that even his most mature judgments retained something of the attitude he ascribed to undergraduate writers: If an undergraduate announces to his tutor one morning that Gertrude Stein is the greatest writer who ever lived or that Shakespeare is no good, he is really only saying something like this: don't know what to write yet or how, but yesterday while reading Gertrude Stein, I thought I saw a clue or Reading Shakespeare yesterday, I realized that one of the faults in what I write is a tendency to rhetorical bombast. …

An examination of facilitated acquisition and transformation of function in derived relational responding.

Stimulus events often organize behavior in the absence of a direct learning history with that particular event. Many studies have examined indirect learning such as derived relational responding in matching-to-sample procedures and determined that the process of relating develops at approximately the same time as language (Devany, Hayes, & Nelson, 1986; Lipkins, Hayes, & Hayes, 1993). Because of this relationship with language in combination with the success of stimulus equivalence in the teaching of reading and language, it has been posited as one of the basic elements of human language and cognition (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). Thus, researchers have begun to examine the effects of including words and stimuli with pre-established functions, based on assumed contact with the social verbal community, into equivalence procedures. It was quickly determined that these stimuli impact the formation of equivalence classes. This seems to happen in three ways: (a) inhibition of formation, (b) rigid inflexibility of classes, and (c) facilitated acquisition. Inhibition of Class Formation. Stimuli that evoke certain emotional responses are associated with inhibition of class formation, when training that should produce classes of all meaningful stimuli is given. For example, Plaud (1995) found that the formation of snake classes was inhibited in individuals with a snake phobia, but the formation of flower classes was not. More specifically, conditional discriminations were trained that produced equivalence classes among all snake words (Cobra-Rattlers-Python) or all flower words (Yucca-Daffodil-Crocus). Fear relevant stimuli produced inhibition of equivalence responding in anxious individuals; however, non-anxious individuals were not inhibited in equivalence responding for either snake or flower class. Inhibition was also noted when equivalence training procedures were intended to create classes between sexually explicit stimuli (Plaud, Gaither, Franklin, Weller, & Barth, 1998). Both these studies examined the ability of individuals to form equivalence classes in which all stimuli had similar functions. Inhibition was noted when all the stimuli in the class had stimulus functions that evoked emotional responses (sexually explicit stimuli and snakes for snake phobics). Rigid Inflexibility of Classes. Experimental procedures designed to produce equivalence classes containing one member from two different pre-experimental equivalence classes show an inability of these classes to merge, demonstrating the inflexibility of classes of stimuli that evoke pre-experimental emotional responses. This is the counterpart of the insensitivity seen in rule-governed behavior (Matthews, Shimoff, Catania, & Sagvolden, 1977). For example, Watt, Keenan, Barnes, and Cairns (1991) trained equivalence relations between Northern Irish Catholic names, nonsense syllables, and Northern Irish Protestant symbols to individuals with either a Protestant or Catholic upbringing from either Ireland or England. Participants from Northern Ireland, where conflict between the Catholics and Protestants is ongoing, were unable to form equivalence classes including both a Protestant symbol and a Catholic name, but the English participants readily formed these classes. The authors suggest that the prior social learning of the participants interfered with the ability of individuals to form these equivalence relations. Leslie, Tierney, Robinson, Keenan, Watt, and Barnes (1993) tested the effects of pairing threatening situations, nonsense syllables, and pleasant state adjectives in a MTS procedure in anxious and non-anxious adults. All non-anxious participants formed equivalence classes that included one stimulus from each set; however, the anxious individuals did not form equivalence classes given the same amount of training. The authors attributed this difference to previously established behavioral relations interfering with the emergence of equivalence relations in the laboratory. …

Irish in Michigan. "Discovering the Peoples of Michigan" series by Seamus P. Metress, Eileen K. Metress

126 MichiganHistoricalReview Seamus P. Metress and Eileen K. Metress. Irish in Michigan. "Discovering the Peoples ofMichigan" series. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2006. Pp. 92. Appendices. For further reference. Illustrations. Index. Paper, $11.95. "Discovering the Peoples ofMichigan" is a series of short books intended to introduce nonacademic readers to the state's ethnic contributors. Irish in Michigan, which was written by an anthropologist and a professor of public health, delineates patterns of Irish setdement and argues the case for cultural persistence, particularly in terms of Irish republicanism. Chapter one outlines five periods of Irish immigration toAmerica since 1640 and makes brief references to places where persons from Ireland settled in Michigan. The second chapter, on Detroit, is especially useful in its discussion of how the Irish faced far less anti-Catholicism than their East Coast counterparts due to the earlier French Catholic setdement of that area. Chapter three covers Gaelic-speaking immigrants on Beaver Island, and the Irish of theUpper Peninsula and eastern and western Michigan. This chapter is most useful when the authors rely on secondary sources, such as studies of Irish copper miners by William Mulligan and Timothy O'Neil. Genealogists, however, might also appreciate the biographical details drawn from booster publications. Those interested in Protestant Irish ancestors will find little here about them, because, the authors maintain, they either assimilated or belonged to the "English landlord class" (p. 31). Thus, they were not really Irish. The book's final chapter focuses on the maintenance of Irish identity in a time when many Irish people are moving out of Irish neighborhoods. This section often conflates Irish republican activism with ethnicity and insists upon cultural persistence without much evidence. A discussion of Irish organizations and how many people belong to them, particularly in relation to how many people in Michigan claim Irish ancestry,would have been useful. Readers should be aware of thevolume's unusually heavy-handed Irish republican slant. The Metresses are entitled to their political views, but extreme republican politics are reflected throughout the book, as in references not toNorthern Ireland (a name deliberately omitted) but to "the sixnortheastern counties stillunder British occupation" (p. 10). Readers are also informed that the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) was "fought over partition" (p. 10). That is not true. Although die-hard republicans remember itotherwise, Irish republicans divided over whether to swear an oath of allegiance to theBritish king. The Metresses also claim that 1.5 to BookReviews127 2million people died in the Irish potato famine. The best estimate, by Joel Mokyr, is that 1,082,000 to 1,498,000 perished between 1846 and 1851. For thatmatter the authors assert that "a strong case can be made" that the famine was "opportunistic genocide" perpetrated by "English overlords" who exported Irish food to England (p. 7). Cormac 6 Grada, James S. Donnelly, Jr., and Mary E. Daly have long since challenged this nationalist interpretation. The Metresses should have acknowledged the debate over this question of genocide. Educators or those unfamiliar with Irish nationalism might keep these concerns inmind. Catherine M. Burns University ofWisconsin, Madison Joseph L. Peyser and Jose Antonio Brandao, eds. Edge of Empire: Documents ofMichi/imackinac, 1671-1716. Translated by Joseph L. Peyser. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press for theMackinac Island State Park Commission, 2008. Pp. 192.Appendices. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $39.95. Although Jose Antonio Brandao and the late Joseph L. Peyser tided their compilation of Michilimackinac-related documents Edge of Empire, their volume makes clear that the post was central to the survival of New France. The usefully annotated documents in the editors' collection highlight the innerworkings of the fur trade in the pays d'en haut, or "Upper Country," and provide a rare glimpse into everyday life in a far-flung outpost of France's transatiantic empire. The French established Michilimackinac in the heart of Ottawa territory to protect the valuable beaver-pelt trade and to support the missionary efforts of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). The documents in this book illustrate the first decades of this vital post's existence. One document, a "Statement of Expenditures" compiled by Michilimackinac's commander, underscores the post's value to New France...

THE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLISM OF CONQUEST IN IRELAND,c. 1790–1850

ABSTRACTThe question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influentialThe Case of Ireland . . . Stated(1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

Rewi Alley, 1897–1987

Rewi’s parents were idealists. Frederick James Alley, a schoolteacher, was born in New Zealand to Protestant Irish parents; Clara Maria Buckingham had emigrated from England with her parents. They married in 1892, made their first home in Springfield, and in their separate ways worked towards realising their aspirations for a better world. Frederick, a strict disciplinarian, instilled in his children a respect for hard work and education. He was a democrat, a religious non-conformist, a social visionary and a pamphleteer, producing essays on the reform of education, and on land tenure and farming in which he proposed state-owned, mechanised industrial farm units, each with its own community of labourers, mechanics and tradespeople. Alley remembers him as a great believer in social progress, ‘a socialist before his time’ (Rewi Alley: An Autobiography 9). Clara, a governess prior to her marriage, worked for women’s suffrage and in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and represented the Malvern Women’s Institute at the first National Council of Women in 1896.

Alan Mulgan, 1881–1962

Journalist, poet, novelist and critic, Alan Mulgan was a significant force in the world of New Zealand letters in the first half of the twentieth century. Though his work is now little read, it remains historically significant, for it expresses very clearly certain cultural concerns that characterized the period. Alan Mulgan was born in Katikati in the Bay of Plenty of Protestant Irish parents. Life in Katikati, as he later noted in his autobiographical work The Making of a New Zealander, was ‘very simple’; it was marked, in particular, by a firm conviction that England was Home. Mulgan inherited this belief, and he spent the rest of his life, like many in his generation, attempting to reconcile it with the fact that he was a New Zealander living half a world away from England. The sense that he belonged to two worlds marks nearly all Mulgan’s writing, and forms the leitmotiv of his thought. Educated initially in Katikati, Mulgan went with his family to Auckland in the early 1890s. In 1892, thanks to a special scholarship, he entered Auckland Grammar School, where he stayed till 1899. Though able, Mulgan did not do particularly well academically. Unable to go to university, and prevented from making teaching a career by a speech impediment, he chose instead to become a journalist, joining the Auckland Star as a cadet reporter in 1900. In 1904 he moved to Christchurch, where he worked as a reporter and editor for The Press. In 1916, by now married and a father, he returned to the Star as chief leader writer; he also worked as a columnist under the pseudonym ‘Cyrano’ and ran the newspaper’s literary pages, publishing the writings of Robin Hyde and A. R. D. Fairburn among others. From 1924 he lectured in journalism at Auckland University College. Journalism, he later recorded, taught him the importance of accuracy. It also gave him a privileged vantage point during the terrible years of the First World War. The carnage in Gallipoli and northern France, Mulgan later observed, made New Zealanders ‘grow up at a jump’ and encouraged a new sense of nationalism. Little of this new nationalism can be detected in Mulgan’s first book, a coauthored production titled The New Zealand Citizen: an elementary account of the citizen’s rights and duties and the work of government, which placed New Zealand firmly in within the British Empire. More original were Mulgan’s Three Plays of New Zealand, published in 1922. Though slight, these pieces

John Bramhall’s other island: a Laudian solution to an Irish problem

When John Bramhall arrived on the shores of Ireland in 1633 to begin his new job as chaplain to the (also newly appointed) lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, he was probably not yet forty years old. He immediately set about his role with the type of energy and ruthless devotion that came to characterise the Laudian regime that sent him. As John Morrill has indicated, nothing in the previous reign had prepared the Irish Protestant establishment ‘for the onslaught on their church to be mounted by William Laud.’ Historically, one of the problems with the Laudians is that while it is clear what they did, it is less clear why they did it. Typically, and shrewdly, they did not tend to be verbose concerning their motives.

The Catholic Church and the Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland since 1960

The Catholic Church and the Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland since 1960 Oliver P. Rafferty, SJ (bio) No one can doubt the importance of religion as an ingredient in the history of conflict in Ireland. One explanation for this fact is that religion is a "surrogate for ethno-political identity."1 Furthermore, the politics of a divided society, within the Northern Ireland context, serves to keep religion alive. In their respective ways, Catholicism and Protestantism (in their various manifestations) have become symbols of ethnic conflict, and that conflict, even in the absence of direct sectarian violence, ensures that the symbols will continue to have meaning even when people no longer practice the faith they ostensibly profess. From the Catholic perspective, identity is inextricably bound up with the relationship between the institutional church and the nationalist community.2 Although at a theoretical level we can deny the identification of Catholicism with nationalism,3 for many Catholics in Northern Ireland, until at least fairly recently, it was perhaps true to say that their religion was also their political identity. The reasons for this were many and complex. One factor, however, was the tendency of institutional Catholicism to dominate the lives of its adherents in every [End Page 99] aspect. Given the peculiar circumstances of the Northern Ireland state and its official and implicit hostility to Catholicism, the community could rarely differentiate its life in separate religious and political terms,4 despite at times sustained criticism in the community of the institutional church. Hence the spectacle of priestly involvement in political activity, even to the role individual priests played in selecting parliamentary candidates, long after such activity was deemed suitable in any other modern democracy.5 With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, however, and more especially with the emergence of Provisional IRA violence in the 1970s, both the hierarchical church and the nationalist community began to reassess the nature of the relationship between institution and people, as lay Catholics became more assertive about their leadership roles,6 and the church became more hesitant about its historical identification with a by now violent and murderous nationalist ideology. In general terms the Catholic hierarchy is inclined to dismiss the notion that the institutional church poses any political threat to those who are not of its fold.7 The church maintains that it is not a political institution nor does it have specific political objectives in how it relates to Northern Ireland society as a whole. Indeed, by 1926 the robust nationalist and leader of Irish Catholicism Cardinal Patrick O'Donnell, archbishop of Armagh, could declare that the "area of the six counties is now fixed as the area of Northern Ireland . . . and we must work for the general good of the community."8 This would seem to indicate an acceptance by the hierarchy of the reality of the political facts of life in Northern Ireland, and it could be argued that this is how the church did in fact interact with the northern state. There was simply no alternative, and, for the most [End Page 100] part, the bishops taught Catholics to be obedient to the civil powers no matter how fearsome those powers in practice were from the perspective of the Catholic community. Viewed from the perspective of the majority community in the North, however, right from the era of the slogan "Home Rule is Rome Rule," the church has come to occupy the position of the great bogeyman in Protestant-Unionist imagination. Although Catholics do not take seriously the notion that their church is regarded as the enemy of civil and religious liberty,9 nevertheless this has been historically a deeply held conviction by many Irish Protestants. Protestants' fears in this regard were well summarized by the Presbyterian minister and former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church,Dr. Robert Dickinson, at the Opsahl hearings in 1993. Dickson remarked that Protestants see every aspect of the political, cultural, educational, medical, and industrial life of the Republic of Ireland as dominated and often controlled by the power and influence of the Catholic Church.10 Regardless of whether or not this caricature bears much relationship with the reality...

Why Family History?

January/February 2008 · Historically Speaking 45 Why Family History?* Joseph A. Amato Family is the well of self. It makes childhoods, imprints memories, and offers models for a lifetime. Doing family history provides a distinct type of selfknowledge , which is timely and even indispensable in this age of abstractions, ideological battles, and mass culture. Family history shows us the specific historical creatures who shaped our parents and their parents , making us see ourselves, too, as actors in an immediate, lived history—and this is worthy of reflection. Although I was trained as an intellectual and cultural historian of early modern Europe , I have spent more than two decades working on local history, which shares long and open borders with genealogy and family history. Having learned to give life to the dead of other tribes, it followed that I should seek to animate my own. There are challenges, of course. A family history can be limited by narrowness of subject, distorted by gaps of information and evidence, and constricted by the interests and imagination of its creator . Furthermore, family historians must take care that their ideals don't distort their histories. We forget that families were not always composed of two parents and their children. For coundess centuries, families were dedicated to reproduction and economic survival rather than fostering individual emotions and happiness. Until roughly a century ago, the household was a work unit, necessary for survival in both countryside and town. And even with this in mind, it is easy to forget, when contending with sentiment and nostalgia, that variations in circumstances , environment, and institutions determined die stability and form of the family. Beyond satisfying our curiosity about, as Rabelais joked, "die kings and thieves" that alternately bejewel our past, family history provides detailed and concrete ways to talk about society and ourselves. It confirms our family's stories, testifies to duties and indignities borne, and validates individual acts of wrong and evil and die price of risk, loyalty, and sacrifice . Likewise, this same history joins us to other histories, as we discover that we are not of pure heart or certain lineage, of single class or race or ethnicity , or of definite origins or fixed causes. Chances weigh heavily—tiiey are in fact preponderant—that we are of mixed breed, an incalculable and perhaps unfathomable result of diverse combinations and unexplained but indisputable mutations. Woven of * Excerpted fromJoseph A. AmatoJacob's Well: Rethinking Family History . Copyright 2008 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved . An Italian family of berry pickers, Cannon, Delaware, 1910. Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-nclc00097 ]. fad and fancy, commerce and technology, war and revolution, freedom and necessity, our individual histories testify to the singular but crooked paths along which we traveled to the present. We are of the fleshy, spirited, contradictory stuff democratic poet Whitman sang. When we write family history, we join that song. Formed on North American shores for more than 250 years, my family was woven out of strands of Sicilian mountaineers, French Acadian swamp dwellers, English Midlanders, West Prussian farmers , and pre-famine Irish Protestants and Cadiolics. My family's past was composed on the largest looms of North American history, with its laws, economic transformations, industrialization, migrations, and wars. Yet it can only be recreated in die spirit of the long and patient handcraft of quilting, joining bits and pieces from church, work, and cemetery records; ship manifests, censuses, and property tides; excerpts of newspaper articles, personal letters, and notes; and one extensive journal. In the process of reconstructing the family past, I found myself juxtaposing distinct padis of migration, studying numerous localities, examining individual marriages, and pondering the meaning of many stories and singular fates. Like the family histories of many, if not most Americans, mine is a history of mixed ancestry, which has proved, contrary to common prejudice, to be rich in information and filled with surprise. Formed of rural and pre-national peoples, of no single literate or national culture, my family surely was more a creation of nature, environment, and local conditions dian any pure ethnicity. More than anything , our story is coincidental with the history of the American...

Southern Irish Protestants: an example of de‐ethnicisation?

ABSTRACT. The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively, from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past) British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic–Protestant relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.

An Irish Informer in Restoration England: David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–81

An Irish Informer in Restoration England:David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679-81 John Gibney (bio) Personal histories from the early modern era are often obscure, and David Fitzgerald's is no exception. But for a brief period his life comes to light, attracting attention as one of a number of dubious Irishmen to allege before the English parliament in November 1680 that the Catholic Irish, organized and funded by the Catholic Church, intended to massacre Irish Protestants and assist a French invasion of Ireland, after which a combined Franco-Irish force was to attack England and embark upon a similar massacre of English Protestants. The supposed existence of a conspiracy for an Irish rebellion had been part of the allegations made in August 1678 by Titus Oates, a highly dubious figure whose essentially criminal career "included lying, cheating, blasphemy, and sodomizing young boys."1 Oates had been an Anglican preacher, a naval chaplain, and a convert to [End Page 249] Catholicism; he was expelled from two continental seminaries before returning to England to concoct his fabulous if terrifying story. Oates's allegations precipitated and underpinned the Popish Plot in England, the outburst of anti-Catholic fervor prompted by his revelations about a Catholic conspiracy to wipe out Protestantism in the Stuart kingdoms. The most obvious Irish dimension to these events would be the execution in London of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic primate and archbishop of Armagh, in July 1681. Plunkett was convicted on spurious charges of attempting to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland, but even aside from this infamous case, allegations of Irish Catholic plots had been a recurring theme in the events that had unfolded.2 Over time the Popish Plot gave way to the so-called Exclusion Crisis, the intense political struggle that arose between 1679 and 1681 over the vexing question of who would succeed Charles II as king. In 1678 the heir to the throne was a Catholic: Charles's younger brother James, Duke of York, who had been tainted by Oates's allegations. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Catholicism, York's faith was inevitably contentious, and over the next two years a campaign to alter the succession would be conducted both inside and outside the English parliament. This eventually became a concerted effort specifically to exclude York from the succession, and one notable element in this campaign would be the promotion of ostensible Irish informers who could supposedly prove the existence of a plot involving an Irish Catholic rebellion. The reasoning behind this was straightforward: the Catholic Irish had rebelled before, and in 1641 it was believed that they had done so in an appallingly brutal and sectarian manner. Vastly exaggerated accounts of the torture and massacre of British Protestant settlers became the stock perceptions of the 1641 rebellion as it came to occupy a special place in the Protestant imaginations of both Britain and Ireland.3 If the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rested upon the [End Page 250] assumption that a Catholic attack on Protestants in the Stuart kingdoms was imminent, these perceptions of 1641 as a wholesale sectarian massacre made it an obvious model for what this might entail. When in January 1679 an informer alleged that the French and the papacy had plans for an invasion of Ireland at the expense of the Protestant interest there, these claims carried a particular resonance, according to Gilbert Burnet, for "the memory of the Irish massacre was yet so fresh as [to] raise a particular horror at the very mention of this."4 What Burnet had in mind was 1641. The exclusion campaign ultimately rested upon fears of a Catholic monarch derived from a more general fear of an international Catholic threat across Europe, especially in the form of an expansionist Catholic France.5 This dovetailed with a rich vein of English anti-popery that drew upon the memory of critical events in Protestant history in order to illustrate the persistent danger that England faced from Catholicism.6 The Popish Plot could be (and was) incorporated into a pattern of Catholic threats and providential deliverance stretching from the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, through...

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction James S. Donnelly Ver Kreilkamp Often in an issue organized without a predetermined focus, contributions by scholars from different disciplines enrich each other's perspectives, testifying once again to the serendipitous value of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary publication. In this issue of Éire-Ireland, two essays, one by a historian and the other by a literary scholar, examine responses to enduring social and political problems facing Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. Roisín Higgins investigates how state planning for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising reflected a series of national anxieties—the survival of partition, the languishing role of the Irish language, the continuing scourge of heavy emigration—that led to an "undercurrent of uncertainty and ambivalence" surrounding the 1966 commemoration. This ambivalence, argues Higgins, resulted in attempts to disavow for the postwar world any reminders, now termed "anti-modern," of the violent political nationalism that had accompanied the formation of a small sovereign state in the 1916–21 period. In a very different sort of essay, one examining high culture rather than popular commemoration and the working out of state policy, James Matthew Wilson suggests how the mid-century poetry of Denis Devlin reflected a related anxiety about Ireland in the decades since independence. Wilson reads Devlin's theologically inflected modernist political poems as this Irish poet/diplomat's response to the continuing failure of the small Irish nation-state to assert genuine sovereignty in the postwar world. [End Page 4] Through new research and interpretation several essays in this issue challenge accepted historical or literary assumptions. James Donnelly investigates the Rockite movement, a sustained outburst of extreme agrarian violence in the early 1820s. He concludes that although the Rockites gave primacy to the claims of local inhabitants, the movement nevertheless constituted a major regional agrarian revolt exhibiting many supralocal features. Promulgating laws intended to supersede parliamentary statutes even while asserting their loyalty to the king and constitution, the Rockites also expressed nationalistic, sectarian, and anti-English sentiments. In another essay interrogating received opinion, Raphael Ingelbien turns to Sydney Owenson's last novel, The Princess, or the Béguine (1835), to undermine the assumption that with the advent of Daniel O'Connell's repeal campaign in the 1830s, Irish writers revealed their essential conservatism by turning against their own country as a subject for fiction. Calling attention to the affinities that Owenson (Lady Morgan) found between a liberal post-revolutionary European nation like Belgium and O'Connell's Ireland, Ingelbien argues for a reassessment of her political trajectory by demonstrating that in a late work set outside Ireland, this novelist continued to advance a liberal agenda for her own nation. Keri Walsh's study of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction written in the 1930s and 1940s implicitly challenges a more familiar reading of that writer as a conservative Big House novelist. In "Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist," Walsh instead views Bowen as an innovative cosmopolitan, experimenting with the avant-garde techniques of European modernists in order to forge her own distinctive literary style. Caleb Richardson, however, confirms the accepted view of an inward-looking Ireland during the 1940s as he explores a culture retreating into defensive isolation during the World War II era of the "Emergency." In his analysis of the 1942 Senate debate surrounding the censorship of Eric Cross's The Tailor and Ansty, Richardson makes abundantly clear that in the very period when Bowen (and other Irish cultural modernists) were looking beyond Ireland for inspiration, key national figures were preoccupied with protecting the country from what one senator termed the foreign "floodgates of filth." Two essays in this issue engage with the creation of symbolic political spectacle in Ireland. Such historical displays, increasingly [End Page 5] reported in newspapers, influenced public opinion and provided enduring imagery whereby the state or its opponents sought to impress vivid ideological meanings in situations of intense political conflict. Padhraig Higgins examines the growing role of popular commemorative events enabling Irish Protestants during the Volunteer movement of the late 1770s and early 1780s...