This text aims to provide an assessment of the First World War in Ireland and its consequences, arguing that this is the key to understanding the complexities of the Irish nation today. The author explores how the War transformed the nature of the Irish and Ulster.
Gibbons uncovers the origins of the Partition of Ireland. The Partition of Ireland in 1921, which established Northern Ireland and saw it incorporated into the United Kingdom, sparked immediate civil war and a century of unrest. Today, the Partition remains the single most contentious issue in Irish politics, but its origins—how and why the British divided the island—remain obscured by decades of ensuing struggle. Cutting through the partisan divide, Partition takes readers back to the first days of the twentieth century to uncover the concerns at the heart of the original conflict. Drawing on extensive primary research, Ivan Gibbons reveals how the idea to divide Ireland came about and gained popular support as well as why its implementation proved so controversial and left a century of troubles in its wake.
This book examines the interrelated dynamics of political action, ideology and state structures in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, emphasising the wider UK and European contexts in which they are nested. It makes a significant and unique contribution to wider European and international debates over state and nation and contested borders, looking at the dialectic between political action and institutions, examining party politics, ideological struggle and institutional change. It goes beyond the binary approaches to Irish politics and looks at the deep shifts associated with major socio-political changes, such as immigration, gender equality and civil society activism. Interdisciplinary in approach, it includes contributions from across history, law, sociology and political science and draws on a rich body of knowledge and original research data. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of Irish Politics, Society and History, British Politics, Peace and Conflict studies, Nationalism, and more broadly to European Politics.
For Ireland the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era marked by war, economic transformation, and the making and remaking of identities. By the 1630s the era of wars of conquest seemed firmly in the past. But the British civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century fractured both Protestant and Catholic Ireland along lines defined by different combinations of religious and political allegiance. Later, after 1688, Ireland became the battlefield for what was otherwise Britain's bloodless (and so Glorious) Revolution. The eighteenth century, by contrast, was a period of peace, permitting Ireland to emerge, first as a dynamic actor in the growing Atlantic economy, then as the breadbasket for industrialising Britain. But at the end of the century, against a background of international revolution, new forms of religious and political conflict came together to produce another period of multi-sided conflict. The Act of Union, hastily introduced in the aftermath of civil war, ensured that Ireland entered the nineteenth century still divided, but no longer a kingdom.
Circumstances placed John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party at the center of British politics in 1912. After more than a century of struggle, Irish nationalists looked likely to return a parliament to Dublin that would allow the Irish people, as one nation, to determine their own domestic affairs. Staunch Ulster Unionists stood in opposition, determined to reject Home Rule for their region. Alongside them were Unionist Party members who declared that such an action would destroy the British Empire, wreck the constitution, and possibly foment a civil war. Over the next decade, the Home Rulers saw their cause betrayed and their party destroyed. Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill all served to undercut Redmond and his supporters in the interests of political expediency. Four years of war in Europe, followed by four years of conflict in Ireland, led to a more radical approach to the Irish question that allowed Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army to make the nationalist cause their own. By 1922, Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, James Craig and their followers took possession of a divided Ireland embittered by the enmity of two Irish identities and the strains of factional strife.
The sequel to the New York Times bestselling epic Dread Nation is an unforgettable journey of revenge and salvation across a divided America. After the fall of Summerland, Jane McKeene hoped her life would get simpler: Get out of town, stay alive, and head west to California to find her mother. But nothing is easy when you’re a girl trained in putting down the restless dead, and a devastating loss on the road to a protected village called Nicodemus has Jane questioning everything she thought she knew about surviving in 1880s America. What’s more, this safe haven is not what it appears—as Jane discovers when she sees familiar faces from Summerland amid this new society. Caught between mysteries and lies, the undead, and her own inner demons, Jane soon finds herself on a dark path of blood and violence that threatens to consume her. But she won’t be in it alone. Katherine Deveraux never expected to be allied with Jane McKeene. But after the hell she has endured, she knows friends are hard to come by—and that Jane needs her too, whether Jane wants to admit it or not. Watching Jane’s back, however, is more than she bargained for, and when they both reach a breaking point, it’s up to Katherine to keep hope alive—even as she begins to fear that there is no happily-ever-after for girls like her.
In the aftermath of the horrors of the Irish Famine, the grim, distrustful relationship between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom deteriorated into a generations-long argument about 'Home Rule'. The unprecedented nature of the Irish problem made it extraordinarily difficult for either side to reach a compromise. For many years actual independence seemed inconceivable. And then, as these bitter disputes continued, it became clear that under no circumstances would the Protestants be party to any of it. The Partition is a remarkable, clear-sighted and thoughtful account of how two unthinkable events - full Irish independence and the creation of the state of Northern Ireland - came to pass. The Irish nationalist claim to leave ran into a loyalist demand to remain, threatening large-scale violent resistance. Here Charles Townshend lays out what is ultimately a tragic story, as partition became the only answer to an otherwise insoluble problem. The settlement of the Irish question conjured up heroes and villains, led to civil war and finally to Ulster's catastrophic Troubles. The hard border has always been seen as a failure of both British and Irish statecraft, but has endured now for a century. The Partition brilliantly brings to life the contingency and uncertainty that created it.
The ongoing Irish peace process has renewed interest in the current social and political problems of Northern Ireland. In bringing together the issues of gender and inequality, Women Divided, a title in the International Studies of Women and Place series, offers new perspectives on women's rights and contemporary political issues. Women Divided argues that religious and political sectarianism in Northern Ireland has subordinated women. A historical review is followed by an analysis of the contemporary scene-- state, market (particularly employment patterns), family and church--and the role of women's movements. The book concludes with an in-depth critique of the current peace process and its implications for women's rights in Northern Ireland, arguing that women's rights must be a central element in any agenda for peace and reconciliation.
Written by a leading group of scholars in the field, this unique volume examines post-Agreement Northern Ireland. It shatters the myth that Northern Ireland is 'a place apart' - its conflict the result of peculiarly local circumstances. Northern Ireland is compared with other divided societies in four continents, including the Aland Islands, the Basque Country, Canada, Cyprus, Corsica, East Timor, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South Tyrol and SriLanka. The collection shows that comparative analysis is essential for understanding the dynamics of Northern Ireland's conflict and ethnic conflict in general. It also shows the value of comparative analysis for conflict management. The contributors offer a wealth of suggestions on how toconsolidate or change the landmark Agreement that Northern Ireland's political parties reached in April 1998.
"This book offers a distinctive perspective on peace processes by comparatively analysing two cases which have rarely been studied in tandem, Ireland and Korea. The volume examines and compares Ireland and Korea as two peace/conflict areas. Despite their differences, both places are marked by a number of overlaid states of division: a political border in a geographical unit (an island and a peninsula); an antagonistic relationship within the population of those territories; an international relationship recovering from past asymmetry and colonialism; and divisions within the main groupings over how to address these relationships. Written by academics and practitioners from Europe and East Asia, and guided by the concepts of peacebuilding and reconciliation, the chapters assess peace efforts at all levels, from the elite to grassroot organisations. Topics discussed include: historical parallels; modern debates over the legacy of the past; contemporary constitutional and security issues; civil society peacebuilding in relation to faith, sport, and women's activism; and the role of economic assistance. The book brings Ireland and Korea into a rich dialogue which highlights the successes and shortcomings of both peace processes This book will be of interest to students of Peace and Conflict Studies, Irish Politics, Korean Politics, and International Relations"--