Young Ireland Research Articles

Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History, by James Quinn

Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History, by James Quinn

Irish Nationalism, Print Culture and theSpirit of the Nation

Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook,Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

Gender and the Nationalistic Ballad: Thomas Davis, Thomas Moore, and Their Songs

Gender and the Nationalistic Ballad: Thomas Davis, Thomas Moore, and Their Songs Timothy M. Love Thomas Davis was a powerful force behind the wave of cultural nationalism that swept Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. A cofounder of the influential Irish weekly The Nation, Davis used the journal as a platform to promote a brand of Irish nationalism distinctive for its nonsectarian appeal. Fiery editorial prose carried his message to the public, but so, too, did poetry and song, modes of cultural expression increasingly linked to nationalist agendas throughout Europe at the time. “Young Ireland,” as Davis and his followers became known, focused much of their attention upon the traditional Irish song.1 Celebrating the genre as an exemplar of their cultural heritage, they harnessed its emotional power to strengthen their political cause. The songs printed in The Nation—most of them chosen by Davis, and many of them outfitted with newly penned and topical texts of his own making—quickly became one of the journal’s most popular features. When Davis’s nationalist campaign began in 1842, however, there was already a reigning “Bard of Ireland” in the figure of Thomas Moore. Moore had ceased publishing new volumes of his popular Irish Melodies songbooks nearly a decade prior, but his legacy remained firmly engrained in the Irish cultural milieu.2 The foremost Irish poet and lyricist of his time, Moore was the first to draw international attention to the beauty of Irish music and to the travesties of the nation’s political woes, crafting popular parlor songs from existing melodies and his original lyrics. A fixture within English aristocratic circles, Moore developed a paradoxical reputation as both a nationalist poet and a drawing-room dandy. [End Page 68] Moore and Davis offered contrasting models of Irish nationalism, a contrast apparent in the content of their songs. In pairing his lyrical poetry with Irish traditional melodies, Moore put forth an overly romanticized image of Ireland as a proud but defeated nation, forever weeping; to many observers, it was an image coded with feminine traits. Davis, with his vigorous and unpolished lyrics, sought to reclaim the narrative of Irish nationalism and to supplant Moore’s lyrical effusions. 3 Thomas Moore began his nationalist life as a radical. As a student at Trinity College, he was associated with the United Irishmen Society within the university and even contributed to the group’s Dublin newspaper, The Press. On December 2, 1797, Moore’s “Letter to the Students of Trinity College” appeared anonymously in the journal’s pages. His strongly worded epistle attacked the professors who outlawed the United Irishmen from Trinity and attempted to rouse his fellow students with fiery language: Can you see poor Ireland, degraded, tortured, without burning to be revenged on her damned tormentors? . . . Can you behold without indignation, that horde of foreign depredators, who murder the happiness of our country, and gorge on the life-blood of Ireland? Moore concluded his letter: “Let us show these ministerial minions . . . that Ireland has sons untutored in the school of corruption, who love her Liberties, and, in the crisis, will die for them.”4 He became close friends with Edward Hudson and Robert Emmett, who were both active in the United Irish cause. In later life, Moore would attribute his love for Irish music to the times he spent with Hudson at the piano, playing through Irish airs.5 By the spring of 1810, with the publication of the third volume of his Irish Melodies, Moore had considerably softened his tone. Prefixed to the volume, Moore’s “Letter on Music to the Marchioness Dowager of Donegal” described the target audience for his songs: there is no one who deprecates more sincerely than I do any appeal to the passions of an ignorant and angry multitude; but that it is not through that gross and inflammable region of society, a work of this nature could ever have been intended to circulate. It looks much higher for its audience and readers—it is [End Page 69] found upon the piano-fortes of the rich and the educated—of those who can afford to have their national zeal a little stimulated, without exciting much dread...

“Somewhere in Infinite Space”: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Oceanic Literature

“Somewhere in Infinite Space”:John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Oceanic Literature Andrew Kincaid The mid-nineteenth century spawned a remarkable series of texts in Irish literature: epic maritime narratives, accounts of actual and vast sea journeys that had no literary precedent since the twelfth-century accounts of St. Brendan and that have had no true geographic parallel since. The aftermaths of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 and the Fenian Rising of 1867 produced a series of detailed transoceanic journals written by prisoners who had been convicted of treason and condemned to transportation to the Antipodes. The Fenian revolt led to sixty-two prisoners being shipped “down under” in 1867 aboard the four-masted frigate, the Hougoumont. The journey of 14,000 miles took eighty-nine days. John Casey and Denis Cashman, both members of the rebel cargo, kept diaries of this navigation around the globe. A third, John Flood, kept a notebook that contains poems, personal musings, and lessons in stenography (presumably to teach others and to help pass the time). Written solely at sea, Casey’s Journal of a Voyage from Portland to Fremantle on Board the Convict Ship Hougoumont and Cashman’s untitled chronicle recount their personal moods and reflections. Cashman, for instance, speaks of “the eternal melancholy” he feels at sea.1 Similarly, Casey remarks on “the everlasting monotony of our days.”2 In addition, their narratives also engage the ecological and sociological environments in which they find themselves. Cashman details, for example, the harsh treatment, from court-martials to floggings, doled out to the nonpolitical criminals. Both Cashman and Casey describe schools of porpoises and dolphins, the wingspan of albatrosses, the majesty of whales following the ship, and the cutting up of a large shark that the prisoners caught and hauled aboard. In these strange events Cashman finds curiosity, beauty, and even a sense of adventure, as when he records, “Then the huge monster opens his terrible jaws [End Page 19] . . . and the sport commences.”3 These moments often contrast with the stale and outworn imagery with which he describes Ireland and its loss, for example, “the green hills, the shady groves and pleasant valleys of that beautiful land far away.”4 These oceanic texts, symptomatic of postfamine Ireland and of rebellion and exile, are unique historical documents, providing us with personal accounts of deportation by prominent figures in the emerging global diaspora. But they are also unique literary documents, equal parts epic and existential lament. The Fenian Rising led to three separate accounts of the Hougoumont, but the government’s punitive reaction to the Young Ireland movement some twenty years earlier produced an even greater oceanic text: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1854). Initially a follower of Thomas Davis, Mitchel wrote for the Nation before proceeding to advocate for a more militant and republican form of Irish nationalism in a newspaper that he founded, the United Irishman. Charged in April 1848 for spreading seditious speeches and articles under the new and hastily drafted Treason-Felony Act (a law designed specifically to arrest him), Mitchel was sentenced to deportation “beyond the seas for the term of fourteen years.”5 Jail Journal records his transportation from Dublin to Van Diemen’s Land. His log opens with the verdict and his immediate delivery to the government steamer Shearwater: “May 27, 1848.—On this day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I, John Mitchel, was kidnapped, and carried off from Dublin, in chains, as a convicted ‘felon.’”6 What follows is a sweeping epic. Mitchel opens his maritime saga on the day he is removed from Dublin’s Newgate prison to the steam frigate Shearwater, moored at the city’s North Wall. Sentenced to “fourteen years in transportation” (JJ 1), he has no idea as to his final destination. He speculates that it may be Gibraltar, or Bermuda, or perhaps Norfolk Island. After a short journey down the eastern coast of Ireland, he is imprisoned on Spike Island, in Cork Harbor, for four nights. Visited by a friendly doctor, he is excused, due to his bad asthma, from “being set to work” (JJ 14) on the impending journey. Mitchel is transferred in Cork to the man...

Frank Roney and the Fenians: A Reappraisal of Irish Republicanism in 1860s Belfast and Ulster

Frank Roney and the Fenians: A Reappraisal of Irish Republicanism in 1860s Belfast and Ulster* Kerby A. Miller (bio) and Breandán Mac Suibhne (bio) Did you ever hear that proverb, “There are none so blind as they who do not wish to see?” John Rea, 1864 This essay is a preliminary reassessment of the Fenian movement in Ulster, especially in Belfast and its hinterland, during the 1860s. It is based largely on contemporary published sources, with Frank Roney’s neglected memoir, which inspired the inquiry, as a central focus. One key contention is that certain claims in Roney’s memoir—for example, about the numerical strength, military efficacy, and denominational composition of northern Fenian circles—which have caused many historians to dismiss it as exaggerated or unreliable, are corroborated by other contemporary printed sources, some of which are well known and widely available. Similarly, some initial probing of newspapers and extensive manuscript collections, notably the Chief [End Page 23] Secretary’s Office Registered Papers (hereafter cited as CSORP) in the National Archives of Ireland, suggests that further research will significantly change historians’ understanding of northern Fenianism. The presentation here of our preliminary findings and conclusions is intended to encourage such research on Fenianism not only in the North but also elsewhere in the country. In 1904 Ira Cross, California’s pioneer working-class historian, first met Frank Roney, age sixty-three, the impoverished and largely forgotten elder statesman of organized labor in the San Francisco Bay area. “I felt myself,” Cross later wrote, “in the presence of one who had found the world filled with misery, poverty, and selfishness, and had tried unsuccessfully to shape it more nearly to his ideals of what it ought to be.” Over the next several decades Cross interviewed Roney many times, and the two men corresponded regularly. Roney, Cross discovered, was “a veritable mine of data concerning [the California] labor movement during the period 1876–86, in which he had played . . . a leading part.”1 Equally important, Roney was also a mine of information about the Irish Republican Brotherhood—the IRB or Fenian movement—in the Ireland and especially the Belfast and Ulster of his youth. Surprisingly, however, few Irish historians have used, or considered reliable, the long memoir that Cross persuaded Roney to write in his last decades. Cross minimally edited Roney’s memoir and published it in 1931, six years after its author’s demise, as Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader: An Autobiography. In the introduction Cross described Roney as a “born leader” and a meticulous organizer whose life had been fired by a hatred of poverty and injustice. This hatred was based partly on his youthful religious beliefs but primarily on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals that had inspired the United Irishmen and the early British trade-union, Chartist, and antislavery movements. Cross also marveled at what he called Roney’s “remarkable memory,” which, without records or notes “to guide him, could recall so many events so accurately” and even “place dates with such uncanny exactness.” Roney himself attributed his powers [End Page 24] of memory to his early habit of avoiding written records owing to the absolute secrecy required by his Fenian activities.2 Francis or Frank Roney was born in 1841, the eldest of eight children. His father William was a self-educated and highly respected master carpenter, builder, and trade-union leader. He was also a devout Catholic and a member of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association; like O’Connell, William Roney was loyal to the crown and hence hostile to Young Ireland and to physical-force nationalism generally.3 By contrast, Roney’s mother was a staunch Irish republican. Although a convert from Presbyterianism to her husband’s religion, she was a “hereditary Covenanter,” and her forebears were unrepentant United Irishmen.4 Her father, later a wealthy tobacco merchant, had fought under Henry Munro at Saintfield and Ballynahinch in 1798 and always regarded the Orange Order “as the foulest blot upon the country.” Likewise, her aunt, who lived in the family home at Saul, near Downpatrick, Co. Down, never rose in the morning or retired at night without praying for the...

Gerard Donovan’s Young Irelanders : Looking for Home in the New Ireland

This article examines Gerard Donovan's representation of the new Ireland in his 2008 collection of short stories Young Irelanders. Spanning the past decade, Donovan's stories chronicle the strangeness of life in a country both familiar and utterly changed, as his characters’ nostalgic introspection enhances the ironic contrast between the new landscape of a booming Ireland and their painful awareness of the fleeting nature of time (“Country of the Grand”; “How Long Until”). On the eve of the 2008 collapse, the new Ireland is a disillusioned avatar of hypermodernity. It is marked by a lost sense of place; cars have replaced the bicycles of former times as a symbol of Irish life, but they have also ushered a radically changed perception of the self in relation to the once familiar landscape of childhood memories and family life (“By Irish Nights”, “Another Life”). America looms large in Donovan’s evocation of lost souls on the road, driving aimlessly in search of an unattainable inner peace (“Harry Dietz”, “Shoplifting in the USA”). Donovan's Irelanders are also lost in time: their present reality eludes them as they delve into childhood memories or strive to regain a sense of collective past (“The Summer of Birds”; “Archaeologists”). The characters’ perception of the outside world, mediated by the artefacts of modern life, further enhances their isolation from other people and from their own former selves. Donovan's elliptic narratives focus on metonymic details to paint a fragmented portrait of the private and public spaces of the new Ireland, and to raise the question of memory and identity against a background of building sites mushrooming like so many question marks.

Fenianism’s Bermuda Footprint: Revolutionary Nationalism in the Victorian Empire

Fenianism’s Bermuda Footprint:Revolutionary Nationalism in the Victorian Empire* Jerome Devitt (bio) Although such rumours are frequently groundless or are set afloat to cover other schemes, or so flatter the conceit of the plotters by exciting alarms, it would be well, considering the desperate wickedness of some of the Fenian outrages, that our people should be well on their guard, and that the proceedings of all unaccredited strangers arriving among us should be carefully watched lest our apparent security should encourage or beget the conception of such a design. Bermuda Royal Gazette, 14 February 1882 In 1882 the Bermuda Royal Gazette published an article under the headline “Fenian Plots” that identified continual threats posed by Irish American nationalists to the tiny mid-Atlantic islands of Bermuda. These threats included the “frequently groundless” plot of the Irish Republican Union (IRU) to rescue John Mitchel, the prominent Young Ireland revolutionary and political journalist, from the prison hulks off the Bermudian coast; the circulation of misinformation by the Fenian Brotherhood to “cover other schemes” such as the invasion of Canada in 1866; and the attempted “Fenian outrages” of the dynamiters that had become prevalent in Britain in the first half of the 1880s. Although none of these plots materialized, they nevertheless had a profound impact on the geostrategically significant island colony. By examining the cumulative impact of these schemes, this essay will demonstrate the previously unacknowledged significance of Bermuda to Irish American revolutionaries [End Page 141] throughout the Victorian period and contribute to the growing historiography suggesting that the strategic outlook of Fenianism was more geographically ambitious than traditional scholarship has recognized.1 While this scholarly approach has been successful in broadening the scope of inquiry and shifting the focus away from individuals and organizations and toward the impact of Fenianism on the broader Atlantic world,2 its concentration has largely been on mainland North America and the Canadian Maritimes.3 By widening this geographic range further to include other Atlantic spaces such as Bermuda, it is possible to examine traditional revolutionary attempts to attack the empire by members of the diaspora in parallel with implicit aspects of Irish imperial experience in the guise of those who defended it from within. Bermuda in this instance thus provides a point of intersection between the formal British empire and the “counter-empire” suggested by Máirtín Ó Catháin.4 In choosing Bermuda as the focal point, I aim to consider what Barry Crosbie has called the [End Page 142] “cross-cultural experiences, ideologies, institutions, and personnel” that were integral to Irish involvement in the British imperial project.5 This essay also argues that Irish physical-force nationalism had a broader political utility for Bermuda’s colonial administrators and their counterparts at Westminster that was centered on the appropriation of imperial resources. Fear of anticolonialism, invasion, and terrorism served a vital function for those administrators, allowing them to significantly upgrade Bermuda’s defensive infrastructure. Central to this discussion is the acknowledgment of the marked disparity between the rhetoric used to dismiss Fenianism and the actual measures taken to meet those potential threats. Any assessment of governmental reactions to Fenianism must consider both of these aspects—rhetoric and reaction. The precise nature of the actions described highlights not only the primacy of the naval responses to imperial threats but also the way in which Irish American revolutionaries viewed the empire in specifically naval and transnational terms. Three interrelated lines of inquiry will be developed here. First, an exploration will be offered of the breadth of interactions between Ireland and Bermuda, particularly along institutional lines. This is designed to serve as a baseline against which the threats can be contextualized within both the imperial and the Atlantic world. The essay will then consider the precise nature of the various threats against Bermuda in order to establish the different ways in which revolutionary Irish nationalists sought to exploit the island. Finally, a consideration will be offered of the civil, military, naval, and diplomatic networks activated by the British authorities across the Atlantic world to counter real and perceived threats to Bermuda. Bermuda, Ireland, and the British Atlantic While the two islands are...

The ‘Navalization’ of Ireland: The Royal Navy and Irish Insurrection in the 1840s

This article examines the role played by the Royal Navy in the deterrence and suppression of Irish nationalist movements in the early Victorian period, particularly Daniel O'Connell's 1843 ‘Repeal Association’ and the 1848 Young Ireland Rising. The navy was seen as ‘encouraging the loyal and overawing the disaffected’ both in how it acted, and in how these actions were reported in the media. The article charts the Irish administration's growing dependence on the navy to guarantee internal security and undertake a broad range of counter-insurgency functions. These ranged from troop transportation to blockading, and from famine relief to coastal and riverine activity to suppress localized threats. It argues that attempts to socio-economically integrate Ireland with the navy were key to its potency as a coercive force in Irish waters. It also suggests that Ireland came to hold an increasingly significant position within the Admiralty's strategic decision-making process, concurrently fulfilling a dual role of naval counter-insurgency and home defence. All of these activities are placed within the competing frames of ‘naval’ and ‘gunboat’ diplomacy, but it is suggested that the domestic focus of Royal Navy activity in Irish waters means that the term ‘naval counter-insurgency’ describes their activity in a more comprehensive manner.

The global dimensions of Irish identity: race, nation, and the popular press, 1840-1880

Though Ireland is a relatively small island on the northeastern fringe of the Atlantic, 70 million people worldwide--including some 45 million in the United States--claim it as their ancestral home. In this wide-ranging, ambitious book, Cian T. McMahon explores the nineteenth-century roots of this transnational identity. Between 1840 and 1880, 4.5 million people left Ireland to start new lives abroad. Using primary sources from Ireland, Australia, and the United States, McMahon demonstrates how this exodus shaped a distinctive sense of nationalism. By doggedly remaining loyal to both their old and new homes, he argues, the Irish helped broaden the modern parameters of citizenship and identity. From insurrection in Ireland to exile in Australia to military service during the American Civil War, McMahon's narrative revolves around a group of rebels known as Young Ireland. They and their fellow Irish used weekly newspapers to construct and express an international identity tailored to the fluctuating world in which they found themselves. Understanding their experience sheds light on our contemporary debates over immigration, race, and globalization.

Young Ireland and Irish Revolutions

This paper gives an overview of the development of the republican armed force tradition in Irish politics from the 1790s. It concludes that while Wolfe Tone and Emmet may have been inspirational, it was the experiences in politics and developments in political theory stemming from the 1840s Young Ireland movement that had the greatest impact. Though the 1848 rebellion led by William Smith O’Brien has often been derided by historians, it was a pivotal event which led directly to the foundation of Fenianism, which in turn led directly to the Land League revolution 1879-82 and indeed the 1916 Rising. The influence of James Fintan Lalor is highlighted as it was Lalor who came up an alternative formula to constitutional agitation arguing that England’s treatment of Ireland had given the Irish a moral right to a legal tabula rasa over both land ownership and constitutional claims.

Building a “Young Ireland”: T. V. Golden and Nebraska’s “Irish Capital,” 1880–1926

Building a “Young Ireland”: T. V. Golden and Nebraska’s “Irish Capital,” 1880–1926

‘The shouts of vanished crowds’: Literacy, Orality, and Popular Politics in the Campaign to Repeal the Act of Union in Ireland, 1840–48

The movement to repeal the Act of Union that gathered steam in Ireland in the 1840s relied on the creation of a politicized reading public in a society in which a majority of the population was illiterate, and newspapers were expensive to purchase. This article seeks to examine the manner in which nationalist activists of the pre-Famine period relied on a developing and vibrant literary culture, which interacted on a day-to-day basis through the dissemination of newspapers in dedicated reading rooms in an increasingly literate and anglicized society. It seeks to draw attention to the interaction of literacy and orality, and the reliance of both the Loyal National Repeal Association and ‘Young Ireland’ on both a democratization of communication, and the establishment of ‘Repeal reading rooms’, which, it argues, were as close to a nationwide network of constitutional nationalist organizational infrastructure as had yet existed in Ireland.

The Fenians: Irish rebellion in the North Atlantic world, 1858-1876

Co-authors Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern aim to revise our understanding of the Fenians, a transatlantic group of physical-force republican Irish nationalists in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain and America. Steward and McGovern eschew interpretations of the Fenians as hopeless revolutionaries or maniacal terrorists. While they accept the portrayal by Irish historian Vincent Comerford of Fenianism as a means to sociability and professional networking for young men, the authors argue that Fenians also possessed “a legitimate desire to fight for Irish independence” (p. xiii). The Fenians attempts to demonstrate the sincere anti-British, nationalist convictions of Irish and Irish American (or “expatriate”) Fenians through a chronologically organized study of revolutionary activity in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. The book succeeds admirably in delineating Fenianism’s origins and its course as a transatlantic revolutionary movement. Yet the authors are most concerned with explaining the movement’s failure to attract a broad base of support. As a result, their analysis at times focuses too much on what Fenian leaders might have done otherwise and not enough on the wider socio-economic, political, and ideological worlds inhabited by the Fenian rank and file. Among the greatest strengths of The Fenians is the authors’ attention to the difficulty of mobilizing a nationalist movement that existed across a variety of state structures. The first third of the book charts the rise and growth of Fenianism in Ireland and America between the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the American Civil War, while the balance of the study navigates between Fenian plotting and activity in Ireland, England, the United States, and Canada. Drawing from the Fenian Papers in the Catholic University archives, Steward and McGovern reveal the incessant infighting and corruption among leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood (Fenianism’s American wing) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB; Fenians in Ireland), as well as the tensions between the two organizations. They also emphasize the relative freedom in which Irish American Fenians operated in comparison with their co-revolutionaries in Ireland. Yet, even in the United States, Fenians had to contend with politicians whose support for Irish nationalism ebbed and flowed with election cycles. It is remarkable, then, that thousands of Irish American Fenians rallied to invade Canada in 1866, and that an American ship—Erin’s Hope—laden with weapons and Irish American Civil War veterans sailed to Ireland in 1867 to aid in an Irish Republican Brotherhood insurrection. That both the Canadian invasions of 1866 and the combined Erin’s Hope expedition and IRB rebellion of 1867 failed does not detract from the authors’ contention that Fenians presented a genuine threat to the sovereignty of Great Britain, to the security of the British Empire, and to the diplomacy of the United States. Steward and McGovern use British and American

The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer (review)

MAURER, SARA L. The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 243 pp. $60.00. In The Dispossessed State, Sara Maurer argues attitudes about property changed in Ireland and Britain during the nineteenth century, creating revolution in thinking about the (1). Writers and thinkers moved from a belief property exists prior to the state to a belief the state comes first, creates the right to property, and then can limit those rights for the common good. In five exhaustively researched chapters, Maurer describes a Manichean struggle between these opposing views in the writings of such figures as Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, George Campbell, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, George Meredith, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, the members of the Young Ireland movement, and many others. Although she does not proclaim her study to be postcolonial or new historicist, it is, in fact, both. For its methodology, it draws heavily upon the techniques of discourse analysis and rhetorical criticism, and lurking behind many of the book's investigations is the Foucaultian belief in discourse we can observe and understand the exercise of power. Her purpose in the book is to redirect the scholarly conversation away from thinking about property purely in terms of capitalism. The discourse surrounding property, she argues, had a role to play in helping to form national identity for both countries during this period. Her assertions about this point are carefully nuanced because she respects its complexity, but as a result the reader must somewhat piece together the consequences of this change in thinking. One clear consequence, however, is the dialogue cast new light on the relationship between Ireland and Britain. Maurer writes the vision of Irish property crafted by Irish nationalists who advocated for an independent Irish nation-state ... strongly attracted the British politicians most responsible for crafting a means to keeping Ireland and Britain united (91). In the Irish conception of property, British writers and thinkers saw an opportunity for uniting the two nations. But unrest in Ireland also exposed tensions between competing English narratives. On one hand England followed the discourse articulated by William Blackstone property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe (qtd. …

‘A Noble Empire in the West’: Young Ireland, the United States and Slavery

Young Ireland nationalists conciliated slaveholding and proslavery Americans in the mid-1840s by situating Irish debates over American slavery within a broader discussion of Ireland's status in the British Empire. As Irish nationalists sought to redefine Ireland's political relationship to Great Britain, many came to see material and rhetorical support from the United States as indispensable to their efforts. Unlike Daniel O'Connell, Young Irelanders proved willing to overlook slavery in the United States because they believed that an Irish-American alliance could be mobilised to critique British imperialism and potentially to gain greater autonomy for Ireland. Debates among Irish nationalists over accepting aid from slaveholding and proslavery Americans, therefore, bring into focus where O'Connell and Young Ireland differed with regard to Ireland's sufferings under the Union and involvement in the Empire.

“Hungarian-Irish Parallels”: The Elevation of Mid-19th Century Nationalist Ireland through Irish-Hungarian Parallels by Young Irelanders

Although documented cultural and social contacts between Hungary and Ireland extend back to the Middle Ages, it is through a series of 19th and early-20th century writings that mutual interest by leading figures of Hungarian and Irish public life in the events of their countries is first revealed. These writings have given rise to the notion of “Hungarian-Irish national parallels”, the validity of which, however, has recently been challenged on grounds of historical accuracy. My paper examines mid-19th century works by Irish nationalists that include references to Hungary, some of which have been used so far to demonstrate Hungarian-Irish parallels. While also considering historical accuracy, I will widen the scope of my study by highlighting the ideological aspects of these references. My aim is to show that national parallels are ideological constructions which may reveal an effort of elevating one’s own nation to the level of another European nation that is viewed as a model in a given historical moment.

Reviving “Eva” of The Nation ?: Eva O’Doherty’s Young Ireland Newspaper Poetry

Eva O’Doherty, or “Eva of the Nation ,” played a significant role in the mid-nineteenth-century Young Ireland movement as a frequent contributor to the radical Irish nationalist press. Through poetry and letters to the editor, she responded to the crisis of the Great Famine and urged unity among fellow nationalists in her call for violent revolution. Later in her life, O’Doherty’s poetry was republished, but her most militant verse was either revised or excluded from collections. Thus, we must examine her work in its original newspaper context to gain a clearer understanding of her role as a radical poet.

‘The true remedy for Irish grievances is to be found in good political institutions’: English radicals and Irish nationalism, 1847-74

This article examines how English radicals reacted to the challenge of Irish nationalism in the mid nineteenth century. The Young Ireland, Fenian and Home Rule movements brought forth responses from across the spectrum of English radicalism, but scholars have neglected this topic, even as they have emphasized the importance of continental nationalisms for understanding English radicalism. This article, drawing on the radical press and manuscript sources, argues that a belief in the exceptional nature of the United Kingdom constitution, together with the growing importance of the imperial interest, convinced English radicals to reject Irish nationalism.

“No ‘Wild Geese’ this time”?: IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War

“No ‘Wild Geese’ this time”? IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War* Gavin Foster (bio) In July 1923, two months after the Irish Republican Army abandoned its armed campaign against the Free State government, Éamon de Valera issued a defiant statement on behalf of the anti-Treaty cause. “There will be no ‘Wild Geese’ . . . this time,” he vowed. “The soldiers of the Republic have been ordered to live and die in Ireland, and they will obey. Living or dead, we mean to establish the right of Irish Republicans to live and work openly for the complete liberation of our country.”1 By referencing the Wild Geese—the folk term for Jacobite soldiers exiled from Ireland after their defeat in the Williamite War—de Valera was telegraphing a deeper historical truth that was on many people’s minds in the aftermath of Ireland’s Civil War.2 Well-versed in Irish history, the “revolutionary generation” knew that failed nationalist risings tended to produce “mini-diasporas” of exiles.3 Along with the Wild Geese, there had been the earlier Flight of the Earls, [End Page 94] thousands of United Irishmen who fled government repression in the 1790s, the scattered remnants of the Young Ireland Rising of 1848, and a stream of Fenian émigrés in the postfamine period. De Valera was optimistic that by maintaining discipline and redirecting energies into the political arena, the republican movement could arrest this historical cycle. Nevertheless, emigration took a heavy toll on the losers of the Civil War. The members of this “Lost Legion”4 primarily ended up in the United States5 where, among other things, they shaped labor history through their sizable presence in New York City’s powerful Transport Workers’ Union.6 Republican émigrés even entered American popular culture by way of Raymond Chandler’s classic detective novel, The Big Sleep, whose menagerie of underworld Los Angeleans includes Terence “Rusty” Regan, an ex-IRA officer turned bootlegger and bodyguard. It has even been suggested that Irish-American support for the IRA during the recent “Troubles” owes a great deal to Civil War exiles who passed their militant republicanism on to their children and grandchildren.7 An episode recalled with great bitterness by the generation of republicans who lived through it, and a significant revolutionary outcome [End Page 95] in its own right, the flight of the republican “Wild Geese” has been all but ignored by historians.8 Several factors have contributed to the scholarly neglect of this episode. For one, political historians tend to pass quickly over the messy aftermath of the Civil War, focusing instead on state formation and the emergence of a viable two-party system from the mid- and late 1920s. A similar lacuna exists within the subfield of Irish migration studies, which has treated transatlantic emigration in the 1920s as an afterthought.9 It might also be argued that as simultaneously a political and a demographic phenomenon, the republican exodus falls between the cracks of political and migration history as each is typically conceived. Although a small body of literature bridges this divide by examining the demographic consequences of revolutionary violence, most of these studies are concerned with the departure of southern Unionists, ex-service men, members of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary, and others tainted by their association with British rule.10 Of course, republican activists were merely one current in a much larger outflow of emigrants from Ireland in the 1920s. But given their experience of internment and defeat and their continued fraught relationship with the new state, republicans faced unique pressures and conditions that shaped their collective identity as exiles rather than as emigrants per se. These push factors included police harassment and government repression, poor employment prospects and poverty [End Page 96] due to blacklisting, and a broader sense of postrevolutionary disillusionment.11 Yet given the minimal research on the subject, the relative importance of political, economic, and other catalysts to republican emigration remains unclear. What follows is the first sustained analysis of the IRA’s emigration problem following the Civil War. Volunteers (as members of the IRA were known) were joined overseas by thousands of republican noncombatants, but strictly speaking the...

JAMES H. MURPHY (ed.) The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV. The Irish Book in English, 1800-1891.

The year 1800 holds more than ordinary century-end meaning for the history of Ireland. It marked the signing of the Act of Union, and with that the termination of a great deal of legal autonomy. Ireland came under British copyright legislation, and thus there came to an end Dublin's highly profitable eighteenth-century trade in printing cheap books for the British market. The Dublin printing trade collapsed within a few months. The conclusion of this volume is signalled by the death of Parnell. So, in a period marked by two seeming disasters, and dominated in the middle by famine, emigration, and arguments about home rule, the editors had to seek to find a literary way through the often all-absorbing world of politics. It is a period bounded by Maria Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent, 1800; Belinda, 1801) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891) and Katharine Tynan (Ballads and Lyrics, 1891). Irish subjects, Irish expatriates, and Irish literary revivals, including the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s, are themes running through this volume.