Irish Politics

Urban Schism, Social Strains: Exploring the Collective Identities of Youth in Contemporary Belfast

by David Drissel

"A Terrible Beauty": Yeats and the Easter 1916 Rising

by Jim Clarke

Opening lecture at the 2012 Saor Ollscoil na hEireann Summer School on the 1916 Rising, 24th May 2012, 8pm.

'Slightly Constitutional' Politics: Fianna Fáil's Tortuous Entry to the Irish Parliament, 1926-7

by Donnacha Ó Beacháin

Parliamentary History (Wiley-Blackwell); Oct2010, Vol. 29 Issue 3, pp. 376-394

Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a... more Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a single-party government. Despite this impressive electoral and parliamentary history, the party's constitutional origins are fraught with ambivalence towards Irish state institutions. Fianna Fáil's early years, perhaps eclipsed by subsequent electoral successes, have received relatively little attention from historians and most general works content themselves with a couple of lines about the oath of allegiance with an underlying assumption that entry to the Irish parliament was inevitable. The aim of this article is to show how the process that brought Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics was haphazard and unpredictable. Through extensive use of party literature and parliamentary party minutes from the 1920s, this article presents a detailed account of Fianna Fáil's evolving attitude towards the oath of allegiance and how it succeeded in overcoming ideological reservations to take its seats in the Irish Free State legislature.

Was Sinn Fein Dying? A Quantitative Post-Mortem of the Party's Decline and the Emergence of Fianna Fail

by Donnacha Ó Beacháin

Irish Political Studies
Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2009, PP. 385–398

This article calls for a reappraisal of the consensus surrounding the split within Sinn Féin in 1926 that led to the... more This article calls for a reappraisal of the consensus surrounding the split within Sinn Féin in 1926 that led to the foundation of Fianna Fáil. It demonstrates that quantitative factors cited to show Sinn Féin’s ‘terminal’ decline – finances, cumann (branch) numbers, and election results – and to explain de Valera’s decision to leave Sinn Féin and establish a rival republican organisation, Fianna Fáil, do not provide sufficient objective grounds to explain the republican leader’s actions. The article demonstrates that Sinn Féin’s election results during the period in question (1923–26) were encouraging and the decline in finances and cumann numbers can be explained by the fact that the base year used to compare progress was 1923, an election year. Moreover, the article compares the performance of Sinn
Féin to the first five years of Fianna Fáil (1926–31) to show that what has been interpreted as terminal decline can also be attributed to normal inter-election lulls in party activity. Correspondingly, subjective factors – e.g. personal rivalries, differences in ideology, organisational style and levels of patience in terms of achieving political power – were most likely the
determining factors rather than organisational decline

From Revolutionaries to Politicians: Deradicalization and the Irish Experience

by Donnacha Ó Beacháin

Radical History Review, Winter2003, Issue 85, pp. 114-123

Class Conflict and the United Irish League in Cork, 1900-1903

by John O'Donovan

Offered to 'Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society', 2011

This paper examines the social undercurrents that drove the United Irish League during the first five years of its... more This paper examines the social undercurrents that drove the United Irish League during the first five years of its existence in Cork. It argues that that UIL was characterised by a number of socio-economic cleavages, some of which broke out into intranationalist violence. It also demonstrates that the UIL was not wholly representative of the Irish nationalist agrarian community.

Anglo-Irish Relations, Elite Conservative Rhetoric, and Citizenship Identities

by Andrew Scott Crines

(Forthcoming)

The Irish State & the Bethany Home - submission to Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn (24 May 2011)

by Niall Meehan

Submitted to Ruairi Quinn TD, Minister for Education, at Leinster House meeting, 24 May 2011, by delegation consisting of Derek Leinster, Noleen Belton, Patrick Anderson McQuoid, Niall Meehan, Joe Costello TD, Robert Dowds TD.

‘The institution is kept very well is clean & comfortable… It is well recognised that a large number of... more ‘The institution is kept very well is clean & comfortable… It is well recognised that a large number of illegitimate children are delicate… from their birth’

Winslow Sterling Berry, Deputy Chief Medical Adviser, Department of Local Government and Public Health, Ireland, after visiting Bethany Home, Orwell Road, Rathgar, Dublin, 25 January, 6 October 1939 (see p. 8).

‘A beautiful institution…, seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean… I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it.’

JamesDeeny, Chief Medical Adviser, Department of Health, Ireland, after visiting Bessborough Mother and Babies Home, Cork, in the mid to late 1940s (see p.11).

-----------------------
See also,
Church & State and the Bethany Home
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Papers/277737/

'The Further One Gets From Belfast', a second reply to Jeff Dudgeon

by Niall Meehan

Irish Political Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, February 2012

I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirteen civilians and four... more I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirteen civilians and four British Army personnel in West Cork in late April 1922. I am grateful also to IPR for facilitating the discussion.

Dudgeon ignored my remarks (IPR November 2011) on Peter Hart’s errors and misrepresentations concerning the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. I do not know if that means he now accepts my argument. Dudgeon concentrates instead on vindicating Hart’s view of the ‘April killings’ in West Cork in 1922, seen as ‘emblematic’ of IRA attacks on Protestants during the War of Independence period.

In the course of his reply, Dudgeon attempted to demonstrate that Irish Republicanism is anti-Protestant, even though republican ideology and action ‘claim[s] to be non-sectarian’.

During the late 18th Century some Irish Protestants founded The Society of United Irishmen and a significant number, mainly Presbyterian, broke from an assumed allegiance to the colonial system of Protestant supremacy. This tradition of Irish Republican separatism was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. It was influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the first uprisings in human history to be influenced by secular as distinct from religious ideology. The subsequent 1798 United Irishmen inspired rebellion failed and was brutally suppressed.

These Protestant republicans were considered caste traitors. The best-known modern example is the last Protestant Editor of the Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, who considered himself a republican in the Wolfe Tone tradition. According to Major Thomas McDowell, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor and a fellow Belfast born Protestant, Gageby was (as reported in 1969 to the British Ambassador to Dublin), ‘a renegade or white nigger’.

According to Dudgeon, republicans practice ‘(fake) non-sectarian[ism]’. It is in essence devious, a kind of Roman Catholicism of the fundamentalist Protestant imagination. This view requires empirical proof. Depicting most of the late April 1922 West Cork killings as sectarian and as part of a pattern is therefore important to Dudgeon, who is an Ulster Unionist. Since the Ulster Unionist Party cannot easily shake off accusations of consistent sectarian practice in Northern Ireland (because it is a fact), events like the April killings are a basis for suggesting that the competing Irish ideologies cancel each other out, while confirming a need for ethnic separation. It is a rationale for partition on the basis of sectarian equivalence, a familiarity that breeds contempt.

I will look at this question of IRA sectarianism in two parts, first in terms of the April killings themselves, second with regard to whether they were ‘emblematic’ (Dudgeon’s term) of a consistent practice.

[The rest, including Jeff Dudgeon's piece, is in the attached PDF. Also included, an article from the same IPR edition on General Frank (FP) Crozier, first Commander of the Auxiliary Division, by Manus O'Riordan]

Irish Foreign Policy

by Ben Tonra

co-edited and written with:

Michael Kennedy is the Executive Editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. He has published widely on twentieth-century Irish diplomatic, political and military history.

John Doyle is Head of DCU's School of Law and Government and a senior lecturer in Internationa lRelations. He is the founding co-director and a board member of DCU's Centre for International Studies. He is also the editor of Irish Studies in Internationa lAffairs.

Noel Dorr is the Chairman of the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee on International Affairs. He is a former secretary-general of the Department of Foreign Affairs and served as the Irish ambassador to the United Nations. He has published widely on Irish foreign policy.

Description

The first contemporary and authoritative textbook presenting major themes and analysis of Irish... more Description

The first contemporary and authoritative textbook presenting major themes and analysis of Irish foreign policy within a contextual framework of history, political science, economics and international relations.

    Structured along the traditional lines of comparative foreign policy.

    Introduces the historical context and presents the policy-making processes and actors.

    Themed chapters address context, contemporary policy issues and future challenges in relation to Ireland’s foreign policy across a number of critical areas.

    Discusses Ireland’s foreign policy challenges posed within the international system and through its membership of the European Union.

    Case studies that focus on a specific period or issue are used throughout the text and are illustrative of larger themes within Irish foreign policy.

    Written in an open and accessible style by leading academic analysts and practitioners of Irish foreign policy.

Written For:
Undergraduate and Master’s students of:
• Foreign Policy
• Irish History and Politics
• International Relations
• Development Studies
• Peace and Conflict Studies
• Comparative Foreign Policy.

The Grassroots Gatherings: networking a movement of movements

by Laurence Cox

In Red and black revolution 12 (April 2007): 17 - 21

Historical overview of the key network of the Irish anti-capitalist movement. Historical overview of the key network of the Irish anti-capitalist movement.

Another world is under construction? Social movement responses to inequality and crisis

by Laurence Cox

Irish Left Review, May 17 2010

Edited version of a plenary lecture to the UCD School of Social Justice / Egalitarian World initiative conference... more Edited version of a plenary lecture to the UCD School of Social Justice / Egalitarian World initiative conference "Equality in a time of crisis". The paper analyses the history of "social partnership" in Ireland and its legacy for social movements before considering possible ways out of the crisis movements now find themselves in.

Gramsci in Mayo: a Marxist perspective on social movements in Ireland

by Laurence Cox

Paper to "New agendas in social movement studies" conference, NUI Maynooth, 2011

This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the... more This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the complexities and peculiarities involved in theorising movements in the Republic of Ireland. In particular, it argues that it is fundamentally mistaken to attempt to analyse movements in isolation, as though they can be understood without relation to their historical and local context.

The paper starts by relating Gramsci’s Sardinia to Ireland and Mayo in particular, in the experiences of peripherality, local nationalism, clientelist power relations and popular culture (as well as noting Gramsci’s few comments on Ireland). It proceeds to discuss two commonly misused Gramscian categories (intellectuals and hegemony) and one underused one (good sense) to sketch out a processual theory of movement capable of accounting for movements-become-states (as in Ireland) as well as movements-from-below and the co-optation of movements.

Exploring the historical formations of Irish hegemony, the paper notes how rarely Irish social movements writing attempts serious comparison of Irish movements with those abroad, and suggests some key specificities which can be accounted for in Gramscian terms. In particular, it notes the combination of movement-become-state (Catholic nationalism), the extent of continued popular mobilisation in nationalist and religious institutions during the “Irish counter-revolution” (historically parallel to continental fascism), the subordination of other movements to developmentalist nationalism (shared with much of Latin America), and the combination of practical cooperation with sotto voce critique - contrasted with the dramatic ruptures of the independence movement.

A shift in hegemonic relations came with the feminist challenge to religious and gendered power structures and the massive local assertions of urban working-class communities in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the ecological confrontation with developmentalism at Carnsore. This broke the localist, religious and mobilising aspects of earlier state policy and ushered in a shift where these movements came to accept the leadership of modernising technocratic elites in return for limited policy gains and (crucially) funding. Irish social partnership thus comes to seem less a late outlier from the continental pattern of Keynesian neo-corporatism and rather a holding pattern parallel to the limited “democratisations” of Latin American states post-dictatorships.

While this period created scope for the development of radical movements outside this consensus, their mobilising power was substantially constrained by the broader pattern of co-optation. The attack on partnership from above, and subsequent recession, is in the process of creating a strange new movement landscape. On the one hand, NGO and union leaderships are keen to retain elements of partnership at any cost, in a dog-eat-dog process shaped by the dependence of professional elites on state funding for survival. On the other hand, radical forces are finding that the attack from above on the earlier hegemony creates scope for enlargement, but in a situation where they lack the organisational capacity to make the necessary connections.

The paper concludes by contrasting three possibilities. One is that of an Irish “M-15”, Icelandic or Tahrir Square experience of mass popular mobilisation against failed elites. The second is that of Ireland following the East European and post-Soviet model of substantial demobilisation following the collapse of authoritarian power structures which claimed to speak for the mass of the people. Finally, the paper returns to Mayo and the Rossport struggle, arguing that as in Latin America over the last ten years it is the direct confrontation with specific nexuses of power relations which is most likely to prove a strategic source of change.

Revolution in the air: images of winning in the Irish anti-capitalist movement

by Laurence Cox

(with Liz Curry). Irish Journal of Sociology, 18 (2). pp. 86-105, 2010.

This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action... more This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian (“Grassroots’) wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory democracy along with feminist, environmental and anti-war concerns as central. Using Wallerstein’s proposed transition strategy for anti-systemic movements, it argues that Irish alter-globalisation activists are realistic about popular support and state power, and concerned to link short-term work around basic needs with the construction of alternative institutions and long-term struggles for a different social order.

When is an assembly riotous, and who decides? The success and failure of police attempts to criminalise protest

by Laurence Cox

(with Ealáir Ní Dhorchaigh). 241 - 261 in William Sheehan (ed.), Riotous assemblies: riots, rebels and revolts in Ireland. Cork: Mercier, 2011

This chapter explores the sensitive topic of police violence at political protests in Ireland in more recent times and... more This chapter explores the sensitive topic of police violence at political protests in Ireland in more recent times and in particular the question of when and how it is legitimised. Long experience of discussing the matter with students, colleagues, journalists and members of the public makes it clear that many people see police acts using force as per se legitimate and therefore not ‘violent’, a term thus reserved for illegitimate acts. Yet police behaviour can be contested publicly and on occasion found to be illegitimate (by expert opinion, by media commentators, by internal inquiries or indeed by courts of law). The question of how the use of force is legitimised – and what conditions make this achievement of legitimacy more or less likely – is then an interesting one, as is the broader question of why a police decision is made to use force in the first place, and at what level.

News from nowhere: the movement of movements in Ireland

by Laurence Cox

210-229 in Social Movements and Ireland. Linda Connolly and Niamh Hourigan (eds.). Manchester University Press, 2006

A social movements analysis of the alterglobalisation / anticapitalist movement in Ireland. A social movements analysis of the alterglobalisation / anticapitalist movement in Ireland.

‘Irish isn’t spoken here?’ Language policy and planning in Ireland

by Philip McDermott

(2011) McDermott, P. "‘Irish isn’t spoken here?’ Language policy and planning in Ireland". In English Today, Vol 27, No.2. pp25-31

This paper offers an overview of the development of language policy relating to the Irish language in both the... more This paper offers an overview of the development of language policy relating to the Irish language in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

After the War of Independence, some further questions about West Cork, April 27-29 1922

by Niall Meehan

Irish Political Review, Vol 23, No3, March 2008

In The Irish Political Review (February 2008), Jack Lane commented on an RTE 'Hidden History' documentary on the July... more In The Irish Political Review (February 2008), Jack Lane commented on an RTE 'Hidden History' documentary on the July 1921 IRA execution of Brothers named Pearson at Coolacrease, Co Offaly. Lane observed, ‘The devil is in the detail’ provided by researchers Pat Muldowney and Philip McConway, but largely ignored by the programme makers. Jack Lane goes on to comment on later killings of loyalists in Dunmanway, West Cork, between April 27-29 1922, while the Truce between Irish and British forces was in force. The killings took place four months after a split over the terms of the Anglo Irish Treaty, two months prior to the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. The killings are important to those who suggest that the Irish War of Independence was a largely sectarian or ‘ethnic’ conflict. Jack Lane correctly points to the pivotal role of Peter Hart’s 'The IRA and its Enemies' (1998) in promoting this view, one shared by the historian Roy Foster and some journalists who assiduously promote it. The April 1922 killings in Cork are used to give the impression that the same thing happened elsewhere, for instance the Coolacrease killings in Offaly in July 1921. However, while correctly pinpointing the April 1922 events as ‘the elephant in the parlour’, Jack Lane engages in speculation in which the ‘detail’ is left behind. In this article I look at some of the detail  in Peter Hart's analysis in 1998 and compare it to his PhD version some six years earlier.

See also:
Troubled History
A tenth anniversary critique of Peter Hart's The IRA and its Enemies
http://gcd.academia.edu/NiallMeehan/Books/75341/Troubled-History--a-tenth-anniversary-Critique-of-Peter-Hart-s--The-IRA-and-its-Enemies-

Reply to Jeffrey Dudgeon on Peter Hart

by Niall Meehan

Irish Political Review, November 2011, Vol 26 No 11

Jeffrey Dudgeon supports the late Peter Hart’s analysis of the West Cork IRA during and after the War of Independence.... more Jeffrey Dudgeon supports the late Peter Hart’s analysis of the West Cork IRA during and after the War of Independence. Dudgeon made three specific observations in two IPR editions (Oct 2010, Sept 2011) in response to Jack Lane and to Brendan Clifford.

In The IRA and its Enemies (1998) Hart alleged that sectarian motives accompanied the abduction and disappearance of three people in Ballygroman (north of Bandon near Ovens) and the shooting dead of ten more west of Bandon from 26 -29 April 1922. Dudgeon supports Hart’s reporting of these pre-Civil War killings and also Hart’s reconstruction of the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. Hart called ambush commander, Tom Barry, a lying serial killer. Hart controversially concluded that the IRA fought a war of sectarian ethnic supremacy.

I will respond to Dudgeon’s Kilmichael Ambush remarks before looking at those on April 1922. I also comment on Dudgeon’s defence of a book inspired by Hart’s research, Gerard Murphy’s, The Year of Disappearances (2010).

To read on.... download PDF

See also here:
‘Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography’
and
‘Distorting Irish History Two, the Road from Dunmanway’, on the April 1922 killings.

Analysing the Irish State: Sources and Resources

by Diarmuid Torney

November 2007

Co-authored with Niamh Hardiman
Published by UCD Geary Institute (Dublin)