Politics In Ireland Research Articles

Ideological Flexibility and Electoral Success: An Analysis of Irish Party Competition

This article argues that Ireland's major party elites enjoy an unusual degree of ideological flexibility, which in turn provides the parties with an uncommon capacity to adjust programmatically when changing electoral opportunities, or challenges, present themselves. Evidence from two originally designed parliamentary surveys, conducted in sharply different contexts in the 2007 and 2011 elections, supports this finding. A closer examination of individual TDs’ policy positions reveals that TDs possess considerable flexibility to adapt their policy appeals. Although parties may appear programmatically similar at the aggregate level, the high degree of internal ideological heterogeneity reinforces that the autonomy individual TDs have to alter their positions within their local electoral context. These findings point to a conclusion that the presence of a high degree of ideological flexibility, especially at the level of individual TDs, not policy positions in themselves, is critical for understanding electoral politics in Ireland. This conclusion stands in contrast to the popular perspective that competition over policy may alter the nature of party competition in Ireland. The findings also provide a deeper appreciation of how Irish parliamentarians are able to assume policy positions among their constituents that often differ from the party line in legislative votes in parliament.

Good-Bye, Twilight : Ireland, Spain, and the Ballad Resurgence

Good-Bye, Twilight:Ireland, Spain, and the Ballad Resurgence Daniel Gomes (bio) Alan Gillis argues that the stereotypical image of Irish culture in the 1930s as stale and insular fails to comprehend how “Ireland continued to be a conflictual arena of competing ideologies” in which radically different political visions for the Free State clashed (13). As the beleaguered safeguards of national sovereignty and economic stability collapsed, dissidents on the far right and left of the political spectrum sought alternatives to what they perceived as Fianna Fáil’s reactionary centrism.1 For these dissidents the question was not simply whether a nationalist or an internationalist stance should be assumed, but how the relation between those stances should be reconfigured in response to the deepening global crisis. This quandary is crucial for understanding the Irish republican involvement in the Spanish Civil War as well as the literature it occasioned. Having ostensibly reached its nadir by the early 1930s, Irish left-wing republicanism was reanimated by Franco’s rebellion against Spain’s Second Republic in July 1936. Rather than understanding this republican resurgence as motivated by the substitution of national concerns for international aspirations, this essay argues that a little-known anthology of Irish leftist writing, Good-Bye, Twilight: Songs of the Struggle in Ireland, indexes a profound uncertainty as to how national and international commitments should be realigned. This uncertainty is most evident in the competing articulations of republican socialism appearing in the anthology as well as in additional writing by authors included in the volume. On the one hand, that ideological movement indicates an effort to transcend internal [End Page 35] animosities by urging united participation in the international Popular Front. On the other, republican socialism might be understood as resuming the unfinished project of liberating Ireland, particularly by disaffected republicans who viewed the Spanish Civil War as a reincarnation of the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Simultaneously attuned to domestic politics in Ireland, ideological fissures, and geopolitical struggles developing abroad, Good-Bye, Twilight exemplifies Gillis’s “conflictual arena” not only of “competing ideologies” but also of the contested terms of their articulation and alignment. If the long-standing assumption that Irish modernist writing entails a total rupture from nationalist confinement has been, by now, decisively overturned, considerably less attention has been paid to the converse: how traditional literary forms were shaped by and responsive to global political conjunctures. One of the more surprising features about Good-Bye, Twilight is the anthology’s concern with the Irish ballad genre. With its connotation of pastoral minstrelsy, that literary form seems an odd mouthpiece for vocalizing affiliation to a leftist vanguard intervening in the Spanish conflict. Yet at this historical moment the ballad’s resurgence owed less to its expression of a bardic idyll and more to its function as a site of contestation whereby the Irish national tradition could be interrogated and revised. In mediating between the competing pulls of national tradition and international realignment, the ballad was equally a means to redefining those categories as well as reconfiguring the relation between them. Good-Bye, Twilight and the Popular Front Although not explicitly referenced by Leslie Daiken in his introduction to Good-Bye, Twilight, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was the impetus behind the anthology’s publication in 1936.2 Comprised of both original and formerly published songs, poems, memorials, and ballads, the volume was issued by the London-based company Lawrence & Wishart, a merger of Martin Lawrence’s press, which served [End Page 36] the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Wishart Ltd., a liberal, antifascist publisher. The merger reflected the Popular Front ethos of the moment, during which a range of leftist and social- democratic parties united in a broad coalition to stem the rapid spread of fascism. Lawrence & Wishart immediately began publishing working-class history, Marxist political economy, and leftist poetry and drama. Particularly influential was the anthology New Writing, which included early works by Christopher Isherwood, Ralph Fox, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Good-Bye, Twilight, then, was a distinctly Irish contribution to the Popular Front culture burgeoning in London. Indeed, Daiken was already involved in this...

Paul Durcan’s Critique of the Sexual Politics of Postcolonial Ireland: Toward a New Irish Womanhood and Manhood

Paul Durcan’s Critique of the Sexual Politics of Postcolonial Ireland: Toward a New Irish Womanhood and Manhood

Teaching, Assessment and Professional Development: Praxis in Ireland's Political Science Community

Reflecting international and national policies, the strategies of individual educational institutions seek to ensure excellent learning experiences for students. This paper explores the strategies used by political science faculty on the island of Ireland to achieve excellence in their teaching and learning. Drawing on the work of Hartlaub and Lancaster [(2008). Teacher characteristics and pedagogy in political science, Journal of Political Science Education, 4(4), pp. 377–393], Henderson et al. [(2011). Teaching old dogs new tricks or simply using the old tricks at the right time, Journal of Business & Economics Research, 1(3), pp. 69–74] and Moore [(2011). How (and what) political theorists teach: results of a national survey, Journal of Political Science Education, 7(1), pp. 95–128], it uses a survey to gather data on the pedagogical techniques and assessment tools most frequently used by political scientists in their undergraduate and postgraduate classrooms. It also documents the influence of professional development, length of service, annual teaching loads and other contextual issues on their choice of techniques and tools. It finds that a mix of traditional and modern approaches to teaching and assessment is used. The lecture and the essay are the most popular teaching technique and assessment tool in the undergraduate classroom. However, more active learning approaches are used by many faculty. Some clear gender differences are observed in terms of professional development, teaching techniques and assessment tools. Finally, the results suggest a strong commitment to innovation, pedagogic adaptability and continuing professional development at a time of educational constraints and cutbacks.

The censorship and suppression of Cork’s nationalist and loyalist newspapers during the Irish Revolution, 1916-1923

The Irish Revolution was an epochal period that saw the Irish nationalist movement seek to obtain independence from the British Empire. It has received extensive scholarly attention, particularly the century-shaping 1916 Rising, the guerrilla war campaign that coloured the War of Independence 1919-1921, and an implosive Civil War between those for and against the Anglo-Irish Treaty, that raged between 1922-1923 and continues to shape present-day politics in Ireland. Key to understanding Cork, the epicentre of revolutionary activity post-1916, is an engagement with its widely-read newspapers of the time. During this period West Cork's Southern Star and Skibbereen Eagle, and Cork City institutions, the Cork Examiner and Cork Constitution, acted as central actors, in conjunction with their role as reporters, in the equally significant battle for hearts and minds. The consequence of the key propaganda role played by these papers would be intense censorship and suppression by both Crown Forces and ...

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

The Religious Upbringing of Children in “Mixed Marriages”: The Evolution of Irish Law

Mixed marriages have long been a vexed issue in Ireland. Although they have been frowned upon by both Christian traditions, in Ireland, church condemnation of them is coupled with a troubled historical backdrop. Conquest and colonization and the English Reformation established religion as a political identity whereby Protestantism became associated with a colonizing alien force, and Catholicism became a symbol of dispossession. The problems surrounding mixed marriages in Ireland, therefore, stem not only from theological objections, but also from perceived political affiliations. Indeed, because religion and politics in Ireland have been inextricably bound up together, such relationships often concurrently transgress social and political lines. In Ireland, most mixed marriage disputes have centered on the religious upbringing of the children of the union where the Catholic church and the state held potentially conflicting positions. Civil law long dictated that the father had an absolute right to decide on the religious upbringing and education of his children, a principle known as “paternal supremacy” and a relic of old English civil law. In contrast, the Catholic church insisted that children of mixed marriages should be brought up as Catholics, irrespective of the faith to which either parent belonged. The disputes examined in this article, all of which came before the Irish courts, shed light not only on the fraught relationship between the Catholic church and state in terms of mixed marriages, but also establish how the outcome of one such dispute, the Tilson case in 1950, irrevocably changed the civil law position on the religious upbringing of children. This judgment, by relying on the relevant articles of the 1937 Constitution, ended the centuries-old tradition of paternal supremacy. From the Catholic church’s perspective, however, the ruling was irrelevant; that denomination steadfastly maintained its position regarding the religious upbringing of children of mixed marriages.

Victimisation and Attitudes Towards Former Political Prisoners in Northern Ireland

The release of ex-combatants and the mechanisms for their re-integration within society has become an increasingly controversial issue in peace settlements. Yet to date, the view of victims concerning such arrangements in post-conflict societies remains unexplored. Mindful of this omission and using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article investigates the relationship between victimisation and attitudes towards the treatment of former political prisoners. Based on the 2011 Northern Ireland Social and Political Attitudes Survey, the results suggest that individual victims—those who directly and/or indirectly experienced violent incidents—are notably less supportive of a punitive approach towards the treatment of former political prisoners than non-victims. Moreover, this is particularly the case when victims from within the Catholic community are considered. The Northern Ireland evidence suggests that victims can act as a positive and inclusive force in terms of the rehabilitation and re-integration of former combatants in societies emerging from conflict.

Language and Politics in Ireland – a Constructive or Destructive Interconnection?

This paper demonstrates that the idea that a language, a culture and a nation are tied together as one single unit just because they share the same name is almost always fundamentally flawed. In Northern Ireland, the tying together of “Irish language”, “Irish culture” and “Irish Nationalism” has led to a mirrored response from opponents of Irish Nationalism, who have sought to present “Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture” as a single entity. Because they are not a single entity, the outcome of this has been the presentation of “Ulster Scots” as something at best unreal and at worst invented. This has merely meant that the identity crisis that some in Northern Ireland are experiencing has continued, while much needed work on promoting “Ulster Scots language” and “Ulster Scots culture” as the distinct entities they are has gone undone.

Dick Fitzgerald – A Revolutionary Like No Other

While the history of the relationship between sport and politics in Ireland has been a long and often turbulent one, few men have embodied this interplay as vividly as Dick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a revolutionary in every sense of the word. His politics were unashamedly republican in form and he was a longstanding member of the Irish Volunteers. At the same time he was an outstanding Gaelic footballer with the famed Kerry team of the early part of the twentieth century and published what was at that time a seminal text on the coaching of the indigenous Irish sporting code. This article captures the essence of Fitzgerald's impactful dealings in Irish sport and politics and argues that he was both an architect and an outcome of an important and revolutionary era within Irish life.

Unlikely Heroes: Katharine Tynan's The Story of Bawn, the Irish Famine, and the Sentimental Tradition

In this article, I argue that the effort to write the ‘unwritten’ Famine is not only visible in canonical Irish writers of the Modernist moment, but also in its less canonical writers and genres – particularly, in this essay, the sentimental fiction of Katharine Tynan. This essay functions to recuperate Tynan's fiction from a qualified reputation understood through her friendship with W.B. Yeats, and informed by his assessment of her work. In particular, an extended analysis of Tynan's The Story of Bawn demonstrates the narrative strategies through which Tynan's sentimental romances offered scathing critiques of Ireland's politics, economics, and gender inequities. Through these strategies, Tynan sought not only to entertain, but to educate middle-class women about their world in a method comparable to the satires produced by the Abbey Theatre and anticipating the strategies that would be taken up by the avant-garde Modernists on the Continent.

The Fractured Island: Divided Sovereignty, Identity and Politics in Ireland

Since the final conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 the violent conflict and military operations convulsing the state of Northern Ireland since 1969 appeared over and peace restored. Despite this, profound mistrust and division remains. This paper examines the factors influencing historic conflict in Ireland with reference to the acceptable forms of governance in a deeply divided society with antagonistic and diametrically opposed concepts of citizenship, allegiance and sovereignty present in the population. The changes have been fundamental and profound: absence of military occupation models, entry into public life and political responsibility of former combatants, development of power-sharing governmental structures and progress of civil society. The fact remains that the Good Friday Agreement was seen by the majority community - the unionist population – as a guarantee to assert its intention and desire to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom (to remain British). In the same manner and in the same way the Agreement was seen by the minority community – the nationalist population – as a guarantee to assert its intention to leave the United Kingdom and to re-unite with the rest of Ireland (to remain Irish). Ireland has never been a uniform or agreed socio-political entity. The nature of Irish society has been a fragmented, divided and polyglot one. The fractured States that emerged from the forced partition of Ireland in 1922 epitomized the crises and issues around sovereignty and identity. Disputed sovereignty in Ireland is analyzed in relation to three key associated factors: ownership, legacies of colonial power and the dynamics of changing demographics.

Women and Politics in Ireland: The Road to Sex Quotas

This article tells the story of how and why legislative candidate sex quotas, more commonly known as gender quotas, were adopted by the Irish Parliament in July 2012. In so doing, it reviews both internal party equality strategies and external party influences. Tracing party data over a two-decade period, the article shows that parties have adopted a range of strategies, in line with their ideological orientation, to address women's political under-representation. For the most part, however, these strategies have been rhetorical and promotional in nature, and have not resulted in significant gains for women in electoral politics. To understand how support for gender quotas was secured, Krook's analytical framework for the adoption of gender quotas is employed, and the conditions favouring the introduction of quotas in Ireland are identified. The article finds that the coming together of a constellation of pressures, notably a political reform discourse, the mobilisation of civic society groups and elite support, facilitated the adoption of legislative candidate sex quotas in 2012, a legislative outcome that could not have been predicted some years earlier.

Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet?

This roundtable features six position papers by key scholars and activists enquiring into the past, present and future of Irish Queer Studies, LGBT/Queer activism and politics in Ireland, and the position of an Irish-based Queer Theory in a global frame. The roundtable addresses such issues as the problematic dominance of US-based Queer Theory for the international field (Ireland included); the relationship between queer activism and academic fields of queer enquiry; the ‘quare pair’ that constitutes the uniquely productive relations between Feminist and Queer Theory and Studies in and about Ireland; the problematics of advocating for social justice and systemic change for LGBT youth during a time of neoliberal focus on the individual and their atomised rights; and the spaces and places from which LGBT, Feminist and Queer activism, pedagogy, critique and knowledge-production emerged most influentially over the last twenty odd years. The roundtable provides us with an invaluable and multiplicitous archaeology of Queer in Ireland, thinks through both the deflations and the generative energies of the present moment in the development of an Irish Queer Studies, and points toward future horizons for the field. Michael O'Rourke, ‘How Queer Is Now’; Aideen Quilty, ‘Naming a Politics of Place on a Queerly Irish Landscape: Remembering WERRC’; Eibhear Walshe, ‘From Gay to Queer in Irish Studies’; Moynagh Sullivan, ‘A Quare Pair: Feminist and Queer Ecologies in Irish Cultural Criticism; Kathryn Conrad, ‘“You Won't Re-route this Fruit”: Northern Ireland, “Queer”, and a Geopolitics of Affection’; Michael Barron, ‘Advocating for LGBT Youth: Seeking Social Justice in a Culture of Individual Rights’.

Business Financing of Politics in Ireland: Theory, Evidence and Reform

This article takes a new perspective on business and politics in Ireland from the comparative literature on business financing of politics. It introduces a theoretical language based on the concepts of ideological and pragmatic donations and discrete and reciprocal exchanges. It goes on to discuss the extent to which the Irish political system generates incentives for these types of behaviour. The empirical core is a quantitative analysis of disclosed donations to TDs between 2002 and 2009, but it also exploits anecdotal sources and official reports. This study concludes that there has been considerable scope for the exchange of brokerage services in reciprocation for small disclosed donations. Current reform proposals will reduce but not eliminate this potential, especially if there is no enumeration of commercial payments and loans received by politicians and parties.

Sir Anthony St Leger and the outbreak of the Midland Rebellion, 1547-8

Henry VIII's death in 1547 did not affect politics in Ireland as dramatically as once thought. Sir Anthony St Leger remained lord deputy for the first fourteen months of Edward VI's reign, even if preoccupied with the Midland Rebellion. This originated in southern Leinster in April 1547, and escalated under the Gaelic Irish chieftains Brian O'Connor of Offaly and Patrick O'More of Leix. It was a serious uprising and St Leger's failure to quell it swiftly, combined with local (as opposed to court) faction, led to his dismissal in 1548. Angry with what he saw as appeasement of the Gaelic Irish, Vice-Treasurer Sir William Brabazon turned on the lord deputy and advocated the appointment of Sir Edward Bellingham as his successor. The English government backed Bellingham, regarding him as less partisan and more capable of defeating the rebels, which he did in autumn 1548.

Sir Anthony St Leger and the outbreak of the Midland Rebellion, 1547-8

Henry VIII's death in 1547 did not affect politics in Ireland as dramatically as once thought. Sir Anthony St Leger remained lord deputy for the first fourteen months of Edward VI's reign, even if preoccupied with the Midland Rebellion. This originated in southern Leinster in April 1547, and escalated under the Gaelic Irish chieftains Brian O'Connor of Offaly and Patrick O'More of Leix. It was a serious uprising and St Leger's failure to quell it swiftly, combined with local (as opposed to court) faction, led to his dismissal in 1548. Angry with what he saw as appeasement of the Gaelic Irish, Vice-Treasurer Sir William Brabazon turned on the lord deputy and advocated the appointment of Sir Edward Bellingham as his successor. The English government backed Bellingham, regarding him as less partisan and more capable of defeating the rebels, which he did in autumn 1548.

Presidential Elections in Ireland: From Partisan Predictability to the End of Loyalty

This article assesses the seven presidential elections held in Ireland between 1945 and 2011 and argues that the best way of understanding these contests is to divide them into two separate categories: the four contests from 1945 to 1973 and the three contests from 1990 to 2011. The first category of presidential elections reflects the entirely stable and predictable pattern of party competition that represented politics in Ireland after Fianna Fáil first came to power in 1932. The second category reflects an entirely different type of politics in Ireland: one where presidential elections took place against a backdrop of a changing party system and an increasingly volatile electorate, where ties of party loyalty would loosen substantially over a 20-year period. The presidential contests of 1990, 1997 and 2011 all show evidence of increasing voter disconnect from the party system, and a shift away from the defining features of previous presidential elections. Predictable political stability has been replaced by a weakening of partisan voting as candidates come under more and more public scrutiny. By assessing the nomination processes, election campaigns and outcomes of Ireland's presidential elections, evidence is shown of striking change in the dynamic of the elections from 1990.

Seeking a Neutral Identity in Northern Ireland's Political Wall Paintings

Recent research has described Northern Ireland as a society in transition. After more than thirty-eight years, Northern Ireland got its first devolved Department of Justice, under the ministerial l...

Book review: The Europeanization of party politics in Ireland, North and South

Book review: The Europeanization of party politics in Ireland, North and South