The First World War was the biggest conflict in Irish history. More men served and more men died than in all the wars before or since that the Irish fought in. Often forgotten at home and written out of Irish history, the Irish soldiers and their regiments found themselves more honoured in foreign fields. From the first shot monument in Mons to the plaque to the Royal Irish Lancers who liberated the town on Armistice Day 1918, Ronan McGreevy takes a tour of the Western Front. At a time when Ireland is revisiting its history and its place in the world, McGreevy looks at those places where the Irish made their mark and are remembered in the monuments, cemeteries and landscapes of France and Flanders.
Once assumed to be a driver or even cause of conflict, commemoration during Ireland's Decade of Centenaries came to occupy a central place in peacebuilding efforts. The inclusive and cross-communal reorientation of commemoration, particularly of the First World War, has been widely heralded as signifying new forms of reconciliation and a greater "maturity" in relationships between Ireland and the UK and between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland. In this study, Jonathan Evershed interrogates the particular and implicitly political claims about the nature of history, memory, and commemoration that define and sustain these assertions, and explores some of the hidden and countervailing transcripts that underwrite and disrupt them. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Evershed explores Ulster Loyalist commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, its conflicted politics, and its confrontation with official commemorative discourse and practice during the Decade of Centenaries. He investigates how and why the myriad social, political, cultural, and economic changes that have defined postconflict Northern Ireland have been experienced by Loyalists as a culture war, and how commemoration is the means by which they confront and challenge the perceived erosion of their identity. He reveals the ways in which this brings Loyalists into conflict not only with the politics of Irish Nationalism, but with the "peacebuilding" state and, crucially, with each other. He demonstrates how commemoration works to reproduce the intracommunal conflicts that it claims to have overcome and interrogates its nuanced (and perhaps counterintuitive) function in conflict transformation.
Dermot Meleady's authoritative second part of his full-length biography of John Redmond, the first to be published in 80 years, begins in 1901 shortly after his election as chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the Westminster Parliament, and ends with his death in 1918. The book details Redmond's reconstruction of the Party following its reunification after the destructive decade-long Parnell split, and his refashioning of it as a political weapon for winning Irish Home Rule. It follows his role in successfully passing the Conservatives 1903 Land Purchase Act which greatly accelerated the transfer of land ownership from Irish landlords to Irish farmers. His successes and failures in the years of the 1906 10 Liberal Government are also fully documented, but when the Liberals move in 1911 to remove the House of Lords veto, the stage is set for the passage of the third Home Rule Bill, the paramount goal of Redmond s endeavours. The events of the following turbulent five years the increasingly militant resistance of Ulster Unionism to Home Rule, the outbreak of the Great War and the unforeseen Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 as much a blow against Home Rule as against British rule cast him down from triumphant prime-minister-in waiting to the status of Ireland s lost leader. Through exhaustive research in Redmond's personal papers, Dermot Meleady has produced the definitive story of one of the most tragic figures in twentieth-century Irish political history.
Originally published in 1960 and edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Shaping of Modern Ireland was a seminal work surveying the lives of prominent early twentieth-century figures who influenced Irish affairs in the years between the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 and the Easter Rising of 1916. The chapters were written by leading historians and commentators from the Ireland of the 1950s, some of whom personally knew the subjects of their essays. This volume draws its inspiration from that seminal work. Written by some of today’s leading figures from the world of Irish history, politics, journalism and the arts, it revisits a crucial phase in the country’s history, one that culminated in the Easter Rising and the Revolution, when everything ‘changed utterly’. With chapters on men and women of the stature of Carson, Connolly and Markievicz, but also industrialists such as Guinness who contributed to ‘shaping modern Ireland’ in the social and economic sphere, this book offers an important contribution to the renewal of the debate on the country’s history.
A ground-breaking history of the twentieth century in Ireland, written on the most ambitious scale by a brilliant young historian. It is significant that it begins in 1900 and ends in 2000 - most accounts have begun in 1912 or 1922 and largely ignored the end of the century. Politics and political parties are examined in detail but high politics does not dominate the book, which rather sets out to answer the question: 'What was it like to grow up and live in 20th-century Ireland'? It deals with the North in a comprehensive way, focusing on the social and cultural aspects, not just the obvious political and religious divisions.
The first full-length study to explore the impact of the Great War on the lives of women in Ireland. Fionnuala Walsh examines women's mobilisation for the war effort, and the impact of the war on their employment opportunities, family and domestic life, social morality and politicisation.
Revolutionary Ireland, 1912-25 analyses the main events in Ireland from the initial crisis over the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 to the consolidation of partition Ulster with the settling of the boundary issue in 1925. Written with particular reference to the needs of students in further and higher education, each chapter contains an easy to follow narrative, guides to key reading on the topic, sample essay and examination questions and links to web resources. The main text is supported by an appendix of contemporary sources and a range of additional information including a chronology of significant events, maps, a glossary of key terms and an extensive bibliography. This comprehensive text will allow students to get to grips with this turbulent and fascinating period of modern Irish history.
This concise study of Ireland’s revolutionary years charts the demise of the home rule movement and the rise of militant nationalism that led eventually to the partition of Ireland and independence for southern Ireland. The book provides a clear chronology of events but also adopts a thematic approach to ensure that the role of women and labour are examined, in addition to the principal political and military developments during the period. Incorporating the most recent literature on the period, it provides a good introduction to some of the most controversial debates on the subject, including the extent of sectarianism, the nature of violence and the motivation of guerrilla fighters. The supplementary documents have been chosen carefully to provide a wide-ranging perspective of political views, including those of constitutional nationalists, republicans, unionists, the British government and the labour movement. The Irish Revolution 1916-1923 is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.
This fascinating history looks at how the lives of ordinary Dubliners were affected by these three major events Why did so many working-class Dublin men join the British Army? How did the city's 92,000 Protestants fare in this turbulent time? Dubliners fought on both sides in the Easter Rising. What were their motivations? How did Sinn Féin and the Catholic Church marginalise Labour in the battle for political control of the city after the Rising? Why did so many Dubliners benefit from the British war effort, especially tenement families and working women? Pádraig Yeates discusses each of these in detail and also looks at how the population fed itself during hard times, the impact of the war on music halls, child cruelty, prostitution, public health and much more. The Dublin as we know it was shaped in these years. And this captivating book takes you back to those times to shine a new light on the city today.
