Remembering the “Father of Irish Republicanism”

Éire-Ireland

Field Day Review 7 2011, 2011

The early 1980s were a momentous era in recent Irish political history. The post-Hunger Strikes rise of Sinn Féin threatened British policy in Northern Ireland and—alongside severe economic problems—also endangered what establishment figures called political and social ‘stability’ in the Irish Republic. In the same period, moreover, the appeal of Irish Republicanism resurged among the traditionally and (from the Dublin élite’s perspective) dangerously ‘green’ Irish in the United States. In one or both parts of divided Ireland, a combination of censorship, repression, mass migration, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 maintained ‘acceptable levels’ of violence and dissent. At the same time, however, the British and Irish political establishments also relied on academics and journalists. Their task was to ‘revise’ and destabilize ‘traditional’ Irish and Irish-American understandings of the history and contemporary implications of British imperialism and Irish resistance—on the grounds that popular perceptions of past events, such as the Great Famine and Partition, generated ideological, emotional, or even practical support for militant Irish Republicanism. In an essay published in 1983, Dr. Raymond James Raymond (latterly, Ray Raymond), a young Irish historian teaching in the United States, succinctly described what, he contended, should be modern Irish history’s principal functions. It should refute, he avowed, one or more of three Irish nationalist beliefs, all of which he characterized as ‘romanticized and un-historic’. These beliefs were: first, ‘[that] the history of Ireland is a history of British oppression’; second, ‘[that] the British presence in Ireland has been disastrous for the Irish people’; and third, ‘[that] Irish freedom had to be achieved through violence’. Such scholarly opinions naturally seemed authoritative, and, indeed, in the early 1980s no young historian of Ireland appeared to have a brighter future and greater potential influence, especially in the United States..... To discover what happened next.... read on. Field Day Review, 7, 2011, Editors: Seamus Deane & Ciarán Deane, Paperback: 270 pages, ISBN 978-0-946755-51-6

Cultural Studies, 2024

In this article we develop a ‘hauntological’ reading of republicanism in postcolonial Ireland. This reading takes as its object the ways in which the politics of remembering – and remembering republican politics in particular – is equally a politics of time. Exploring the politics of republicanism through the lens of entangled temporalities, we develop an understanding of a particular mode of political desire. This republican political desire holds open the demand for a radical interrogation of the (post)colonial given. As such, it takes the form of a ‘dangerous memory’. Through the concept of a ‘dangerous memory’, we excavate a certain republican politics of refusal, that haunts the legitimacy and automatic reproduction of the postcolonial settlement and the attendant proprietary relations of inequality that it formalizes – culturally, politically, economically and legally. This theoretical interpretation of Irish republican hauntology is empirically explored through three historical layers and entangled temporalities that are organized around the ghosts of Roger Casement, a radical republican figure. The dangerous memories of Casement not only disrupt the canonical or official interpretation of Irish republicanism, but also open up the left-republican possibility to further interrogate the postcolonial present, both in Ireland and beyond.

PhD thesis, 2014

PhD thesis

Journal of Conflict Studies, 1994

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. Cette étude propose un bilan de la tradition de la force armée républicaine dans la politique irlandaise depu...

2020

Theobald Wolfe Tone continues to occupy a hugely significant place in Irish history as the widely recognised founder of the modern republican movement. Yet his political ideas have largely been dismissed as inconsistent and ill-formed, insofar as they have been properly assessed at all. The aim of this thesis is to provide new insights into Tone’s ideas through textual analysis of his written works, both in published and in manuscript form. It begins by contextualising Tone’s early life, including his time studying in London, considering his early pamphlets and essays. Chapter Two argues that his understanding of Irish identity was based not on early romantic ideas about nations, but a more archetypal republican interpretation of citizen-state relations. Chapter Three offers the first full analysis of his engagement with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicanism during his spell in the new American republic, while also addressing similarities between his arguments and those of the...

2009

In TRIALS OF IRISH HISTORY, Evi Gkotzaridis brings her original insights into theory and philosophy to bear upon the controversial question of the revision in Irish history. In an incisive restaging of the passionate joust that took place between revisionists and traditionalists in the shadow of the 'Troubles', the author prizes open conflicting intellectual notions about the function of history in a divided society. She compares the Irish Kulturkampf with similar discussions in Germany and France in order to identify and magnify the strengths, weaknesses and temptations hidden in the arguments propounded by each side. Here for the first time, the historical and the theoretical fuse in an attempt to enter the minds of those trailblazer historians who in 1938, against considerable odds, including the painful memory of the Irish Civil War, the cultural contraction of the first decades of independence, the estrangement between two regimes and the devastation of the Second World War, spearheaded an unpoliticized Irish history. Drawing on hitherto unused archives, the book shows how the venture to disenthrall Irish and European history from the fiend of official propagandas proved challenging and perilous. TRIALS OF IRISH HISTORY also unveils a crucial chapter in the history of Irish revisionism when the 'new historians' clashed with the Bureau of Military History over the handling of oral records related to the War of Independence - refuting later accusations of collaboration with the Political Establishment laid at the door of the revisionist school. TRIALS OF IRISH HISTORY represents a spirited defence of the first revisionists. While it recognizes that revisionism is a path littered with booby traps which needs to be trod carefully, it nonetheless commends the courage and ingenuity of those historians, by showing how the postmodern interpretative turn at the end of the 20th c has by and large vindicated it. At once playful and responsible, it shows that if facts cannot be trusted because, to use the phrase of Hubert Butler, they are just seasonings to theoretic puddings, scholastic theories can also be misused to invigorate sentimental and foregone political conclusions.