Mujeres Libres (Free Women): Anarchist Feminism in Spain

Irish Historical Studies, 2018

This multi-authored collection takes an inter-disciplinary approach to contextualising the life and work of IRA leader and Irish public intellectual Ernie O'Malley. In doing so, it both builds on and challenges Richard English's 1999 biography of O'Malley. 1 Rather than focusing on Ernie's life as a whole, the collection seeks to enhance our understanding of the source materials his life's work has bequeathed to later generations, and how they have shaped, and will continue to shape, literary and historiographical views of the Irish revolution. Much of the work is primarily concerned with Ernie's memoirs of the revolutionary period, most particularly the first volume, On another man's wound, which deals with events prior to the Anglo-Irish Truce of 11 July 1921. This is underlined by the fact that the editor of the collection, Cormac K. H. O'Malley, Ernie's son, contributes an excellent essay tracing the evolution of his father's book. Of particular interest is Cormac's examination of the development of Ernie's literary style through surviving diaries and personal papers (42). Given this focus on Ernie O'Malley the republican militant, perhaps the collection might have benefitted from a treatment of Ernie's revolutionary activity as it appears in source material other than that which was generated by himself. This would be particularly useful, as the relevant chapter of the Richard English biography concentrates on Ernie's mentality, rather than his actions, during this period. 2 This is a minor criticism, however, for there is much ground covered in this book. The early part of the work is primarily concerned with the Modern Ireland element of the title. The first three essays illuminate our understanding of Ernie's intellectual life through: an exploration of his interest in Joyce by Luke Gibbons (3), a chronicle of his interest in art by Róisín Kennedy (17) and a treatment of his interest in photography by Orla Fitzpatrick (28). Whether by accident or design, two common threads unite these essays. Firstly, Ernie's interest in nurturing a distinctively Irish modernist culture and, secondly, his belief that modernism could be used to reach back to connect to a pre-colonial Gaelic Irish nation. Eve Morrison contributes a chapter on the testimonies of separatist veterans collected by Ernie O'Malley, and how they compare to those of the state-run Bureau of Military History (124). This succinct treatment of both projects deserves to be on every postgraduate Irish history student's reading list, not least for its investigation of "separatist veterans culture", and how personal relationships, friendships or enmities, affect the source base. Perhaps the most thought-provoking essay in the collection is Nathan Wallace's exposition of Ernie O'Malley's influence on cultural representations of the IRA of the revolutionary period (55). Wallace examines the elements of Ernie's persona that feature in the lead character of Ken Loach's The wind that shakes the barley, while being careful not to overstate his case, for, as Wallace notes, there is much of other Cork IRA leaders, such as the Hales brothers and the memoirist Tom Barry, in Loach's Damien O'Donovan (59-61). Wallace also usefully compares the modernism of the republican veteran turned writer Frank O'Connor with that of Ernie O'Malley, describing how each writer came to see their youthful involvement in the Civil War in a different light (66-8). If there is one criticism to be made of this piece, it is that Wallace opens with a fairly weak strawman by stating that both Loach's movie and Ernie's memoir offer an alternative view of the republican militant, showing a "multi-faceted intellectual guerrilla fighter", who is neither "an ideological fanatic nor a romantic supporter of a doomed cause" (56). The fact is that the intellectual, complex IRA man is a familiar cultural trope in film, literature and pulp fiction. Wallace, or one of his fellow essayists, might also have noted that the portrayal of an intellectual scholar working amongst the people as a guerrilla organiser was a familiar narrative formula in the Anglophone world during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Two

'Remembering Noël Browne, 1915-1997', NUI Galway, 13-14 November 2015

It was the source of numerous revolts and wars for seven hundred years, with neither Cromwellian conquest nor Union managing to fully subdue the islanders.

From a special issue of of the Journal of World-Systems Research on "Ireland in the World-System" There is a conventional view among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and the end of the Civil War in 1923. The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a ‘Revolution.’ As Immanuel Wallerstein has suggested, though, ‘revolution’ is a problematic heuristic device. While the term carries connotations of a sudden rupture or break with the past, the events usually studied under this rubric often have deep temporal and structural roots. In this vein, and drawing on Gramsci's notion of a 'revolution without a revolution', this paper seeks to understand the events in Ireland of 1912-23, not as a sudden rupture with the past but as the culmination of a much longer period of (often British-backed) capitalist development in post-Famine Ireland. Declan Kiberd has argued that Irish nationalists have often displayed a tendency to remain trapped within the very codes they sought to oppose. Irish nationalists spoke of a ‘break’ with Britain, but in many respects what they demanded was simply the right to manage the country themselves along the same capitalist lines. The nationalist mainstream did not seek an economic or social revolution; this paper seeks to understand the structural reasons why this was so. Moreover, as both John Hutchinson and Stephen Howe have argued, conventional ‘revisionist’ Irish historians are ‘methodological nationalists’, given their uncritical use of ‘the nation’ as their basic unit of analysis. This paper argues that Irish nationalist politics in the decades before 1912 is better understood via categories such as class, gender, capitalism and the pervasive power of the British state. As such, as well as pursuing a reassessment of the project of Irish historical development and state-building, this paper also seeks a reassessment of the project of (an equally statist) Irish historiography.

This paper discusses the relation between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British-based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English-speaking anarchist-communist networks at the time, and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide community of anarchist activists, mostly exiled, who resided in London at that time. Extending current interdisciplinary literature on transnational anarchism, we argue that anarchist views of nations, while rejecting the novel notion of the nation-State, were associated with anti-colonial struggles and with republican anti-monarchical and egalitarian notions. Based on primary sources, we discuss the intersections between these Britain-based anarchists and anti-colonial Irish radicals, by engaging both with their writings and their international networks of solidarity, thus exploring the complex intermingling of anarchism, anti-colonialism and republicanism.

2016

This multi-authored collection takes an inter-disciplinary approach to contextualising the life and work of IRA leader and Irish public intellectual Ernie O'Malley. In doing so, it both builds on and challenges Richard English's 1999 biography of O'Malley. 1 Rather than focusing on Ernie's life as a whole, the collection seeks to enhance our understanding of the source materials his life's work has bequeathed to later generations, and how they have shaped, and will continue to shape, literary and historiographical views of the Irish revolution. Much of the work is primarily concerned with Ernie's memoirs of the revolutionary period, most particularly the first volume, On another man's wound, which deals with events prior to the Anglo-Irish Truce of 11 July 1921. This is underlined by the fact that the editor of the collection, Cormac K. H. O'Malley, Ernie's son, contributes an excellent essay tracing the evolution of his father's book. Of particular interest is Cormac's examination of the development of Ernie's literary style through surviving diaries and personal papers (42). Given this focus on Ernie O'Malley the republican militant, perhaps the collection might have benefitted from a treatment of Ernie's revolutionary activity as it appears in source material other than that which was generated by himself. This would be particularly useful, as the relevant chapter of the Richard English biography concentrates on Ernie's mentality, rather than his actions, during this period. 2 This is a minor criticism, however, for there is much ground covered in this book. The early part of the work is primarily concerned with the Modern Ireland element of the title. The first three essays illuminate our understanding of Ernie's intellectual life through: an exploration of his interest in Joyce by Luke Gibbons (3), a chronicle of his interest in art by Róisín Kennedy (17) and a treatment of his interest in photography by Orla Fitzpatrick (28). Whether by accident or design, two common threads unite these essays. Firstly, Ernie's interest in nurturing a distinctively Irish modernist culture and, secondly, his belief that modernism could be used to reach back to connect to a pre-colonial Gaelic Irish nation. Eve Morrison contributes a chapter on the testimonies of separatist veterans collected by Ernie O'Malley, and how they compare to those of the state-run Bureau of Military History (124). This succinct treatment of both projects deserves to be on every postgraduate Irish history student's reading list, not least for its investigation of "separatist veterans culture", and how personal relationships, friendships or enmities, affect the source base. Perhaps the most thought-provoking essay in the collection is Nathan Wallace's exposition of Ernie O'Malley's influence on cultural representations of the IRA of the revolutionary period (55). Wallace examines the elements of Ernie's persona that feature in the lead character of Ken Loach's The wind that shakes the barley, while being careful not to overstate his case, for, as Wallace notes, there is much of other Cork IRA leaders, such as the Hales brothers and the memoirist Tom Barry, in Loach's Damien O'Donovan (59-61). Wallace also usefully compares the modernism of the republican veteran turned writer Frank O'Connor with that of Ernie O'Malley, describing how each writer came to see their youthful involvement in the Civil War in a different light (66-8). If there is one criticism to be made of this piece, it is that Wallace opens with a fairly weak strawman by stating that both Loach's movie and Ernie's memoir offer an alternative view of the republican militant, showing a "multi-faceted intellectual guerrilla fighter", who is neither "an ideological fanatic nor a romantic supporter of a doomed cause" (56). The fact is that the intellectual, complex IRA man is a familiar cultural trope in film, literature and pulp fiction. Wallace, or one of his fellow essayists, might also have noted that the portrayal of an intellectual scholar working amongst the people as a guerrilla organiser was a familiar narrative formula in the Anglophone world during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Two

Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, 2019

In my paper I argue that the Irish nationalist newspaper, Irish Freedom, was on the left wing of Irish nationalism (as Bulmer Hobson said) and that it fused both Anarchist (not Anarcho-Syndicalist) and nationalist thinking to create what I call Anarcho-Nationalism. The paper refutes Sean O'Casey's traditional view of Bulmer Hobson and his IRB colleagues as being hostile to Labour, while at the same time outlining how this mistaken impression was arrived at. It shows how this was due to Hobson and many of his colleagues' absolute hostility toward state socialism - as opposed to other forms of socialism. Finally, it explains the short-lived duration of Anarcho-Nationalism as a result of Hobson's own demise.

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.

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...