Captain Rock

2014

So-called threatening letters were a form of media, frequently produced in agrarian social conflicts in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Ireland. This thesis analyses a collection of such letters, or notices, as a means of accessing the subjectivities of some of the participants in those conflicts. The production of the notices is associated with a series of peasant-based social movements, generically known as whiteboys, which existed circa 1760 to 1850. The specific collection of notices examined in this thesis was amassed by the state authorities in the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first section addresses the contexts within which the notices were generated. I argue that a central part of those contexts was, at least by the early-nineteenth-century, a stalled transition from the feudal to capitalist modes of production. In part then the threatening letters were part of a resistance to primitive accumulation and proleta...

New Hibernia Review, 2008

Contemporary observers were all but unanimous in assigning responsibility for the origins of the Rockite movement to the harsh behavior of a single man: Alexander Hoskins, the chief agent of Viscount Courtenay's 34,000-acre estates centered around the small town of Newcastle West, about ten miles from the Kerry border in County Limerick. 2 A longtime resident of Newcastle who authored a pamphlet titled Old Bailey Solicitor declared that the agent's administration was "a reign of tyranny and oppression, of meanness and artifice, that defies the page of history to produce a parallel." 3 The chorus of bitter complaints against Hoskins arose partly from his abuses and irregularities as a magistrate, usually in connection with his management of the Courtenay estates. Eventually, as many as fourteen out of sixteen local magistrates told a high-ranking police official that the government should strike Hoskins's name out of the commission of the peace (OBS 60). Echoing this strong opinion among the local landed elite, William Gregory, the civil under-secretary at Dublin Castle, declared flatly in November, 1820, "I believe nothing can be more oppressive than the conduct of Lord Courtenay's agent." 4

A 2015 conference presentation, presented at the Annual Seminar of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, looking at how the spread of the British model of agrarian capitalism was restricted in pre-1850 Ireland, at how this restriction was the result of class struggle, and at how resisting peasants bolstered their morale through myth.

Journal of Agrarian Change, 2009

Irish Economic and Social History, 1986

Canadian Social Science, 2013

Our paper entitled "Identity Crisis in Northern Ireland" reflects upon the changes emerged on the identity of the Irish people in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the guerrilla warfare which the nationalists waged against unionists and the British subjects in Belfast for several decades in the twentieth century. According to Sheridan's and George's films, the ethnocultural conflict in Northern Ireland unveiled the patriarchal, racist and homogeneous paradigms of such nationalist organizations as the IRA whose overdependence on violence in its resistance to the British revitalizes the Machiavellian principle of "ends justifying means" and nurtures racism and cultural bigotry. Sheridan and George, we conclude, advocate the culturally tolerant and diverse ideology of multiculturalism to counteract the essential homogeny and chauvinism of nationalism as practiced by the IRA.

2016

This article explores the violence surrounding the collapse of the Munster Plantation in 1598. It situates this event in the wider context of violence in early modern Ireland, and highlights both similarities and differences in the violence seen there, and in other, better-explored Irish episodes of violence. It also argues that while the memory of those earlier settlers was apparently forgotten or silenced, violence in 1598 played an important role in how later violent incidents in Ireland were narrated, particularly the 1641 rebellion, and that as such Munster played an important role in New English identity-building in the early modern period.

2011

In its investigation of social and political violence during the Irish Civil War, this thesis tackles the diverse range of deliberate, frightening and harmful actions-largely neglected by military and political histories of the conflict-that surfaced in local communities in Ireland during 1922-23. Through a three-county study of Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford, in the province of Munster, this thesis examines and explains violence perpetrated alongside and away from armed encounters between the anti-Treaty republican army and Free State forces. It identifies three main categories of violence: arson (the burning of houses, crops and infrastructure), intimidation (including boycott, damage to property, verbal and written threats, animal maiming, cattle driving and land seizure) and violence against the person (bodily damage or death through physical contact or the use of weapons). The thesis charts, where possible, the frequency of the violent act and, in exploring the symbolism and strategies involved in arson, intimidation and violence against the person, identifies two key functions of social and political violence. For one, targeted violence was used, during the Irish Civil War, to regulate community relations: state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing did not take place, but the religious and political minority (Protestants, ex-Servicemen and other British Loyalists) were deliberately persecuted, resulting in their flight from Munster. Land is another powerful motif in the thesis; the second key function of violence was to challenge attitudes towards rural issues and force redistribution outside the official channels. The thesis also places the Irish Civil War in perspective: the prolific bloodshed, sexual violence and gruesome torture witnessed in Central Europe, after World War I, did not become the norm in Ireland. Animals and private property bore the brunt of the severest actions in the three Munster counties. By bringing to light victims' experiences of violence recorded in largely unexplored compensation claims, this thesis captures the complex questions of loyalty and identity-facing armed actors and officials, as well as civilians-that beset the violent and chaotic establishment of independent Ireland. received through the Research Preparation Master's and Doctoral Award schemes. Thanks also to the British Association of Irish Studies for a travel bursary, which enabled me to carry out archival research in Dublin. The students, tutors, administrative and support staff at Queen's have made it a wonderful College to be a part of as an undergraduate and graduate; thanks to Dr John Davis for his wise words over the years and the Governing Body for travel grants. Prof. Roy Foster's brilliant Further Subject on Irish nationalism here at Oxford stimulated my interest in the Revolutionary period in Ireland. I thank him for this and for his guidance as my Master's and D.Phil. supervisor; comments on draft thesis chapters helped shape and direct my research and writing. I am extremely grateful to Dr Tim Wilson for accepting the role of co-supervisor during Prof. Foster's leave, and for giving me the encouragement and direction I needed to complete the final year of research and the writing-up process. He has offered tremendous support, commented on drafts (and re-drafts) and helped more than anyone else in making me think conceptually and comparatively about violence in Ireland. I also owe a great deal to Dr Matt Kelly. Not only was he an inspiring undergraduate tutor, but his discovery of a 1924 pamphlet on house burnings gave me a fascinating topic for an undergraduate dissertation, which developed into this doctoral thesis. He encouraged me to pursue postgraduate study and has continued to offer support: I was delighted to present my research at the Conference of Irish Historians in Britain (organised by Matt and Dr Ian McBride at the University of Southampton, 17-

2016

Eamon de Valera was first elected to public office in a by-election in East Clare in July 1917. Having recently been released from prison in one of the first post-Rising amnesties, de Valera comfortably defeated Patrick Lynch, a lawyer and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s chosen replacement for the constituency’s previous representative, Major Willie Redmond. De Valera’s 1917 victory prefigured Sinn Féin’s ascendancy in the following year’s general election. Drawing primarily on the ephemera collections of the National Library of Ireland and the Contemporary Documents collection of the Bureau of Military History, this paper studies the tropes and imagery used in propaganda employed by de Valera in this election. The paper clusters de Valera’s propaganda around a number of recurring (and intertwining) themes: • Historical time and mythology; • The Irish Language; • Masculinity; • Land and Agrarian Economics. Across all of these themes, I argue, de Valera was presented as a saviour for the Irish nation, a man steeped in the Irish national past, and the one who would protect voters from the evils of British rule and restore dignity to a humiliated nation. Such imagery and language, I suggest, deserve a central place in any analysis of Sinn Féin’s electoral victories at the outset of the War of Independence.

Globalresearch.ca, 2023

"My unlucky countrymen have always had a taste for justice, a taste as inconvenient to them, situated as they always have been, as a fancy for horse-racing would be to a Venetian." The raised or clenched fist is a symbol of unity and solidarity that became associated with trade unionism and the labour movement going back to the 1910s in Europe and the USA. Soon after, it was taken up as a symbol of political unity by socialist, communist and various other revolutionary social movements. The clenched fist is ever more powerful than the individual fingers and in art it has been used as a metaphor for strength in unity of the peoples’ movements.