British and Irish History

During the reign of James II/VII Stuart (1685-1688), the political, diplomatic and cultural relations between the British court and the Italian states flourished as never before. This was due above all to the Roman-Catholic faith of the king and the lively personality of his consort Maria Beatrice d’Este («Mary of Modena»), while the growing English economic power was acquiring commercial dominance in the Mediterranean area. With the help of thousands of unpublished papers, the book by Alessandro Cont reconstructs the British diplomatic network in Italy during this period, the personalities and orientations of the ministers of Italian princes accredited to the court of Whitehall, the queen’s dynastic policy and the peculiar characteristics of her Italian entourage of chaplains, servants, artists and musicians.

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.

The kings of East Anglia and Northumbria both died at the hands of the Great Heathen Army in the late 860s; one became a renowned martyr saint and one a villain. The latter, the Northumbrian Ælla, also became the antagonist in legends concerning the ancestors of the Uí Ímair, principal successors of the northern Great Army and leaders of the tenth-century Insular Norse.  According to a previously neglected text, 'De Northumbria post Britannos', another of northern England’s great dynasties claimed descent from Ælla. The Eadwulfings of Bamburgh were based in northern Northumbria, and appear to have gained leadership of their political community in the late ninth or early tenth century. With the rival position held by the Uí Ímair in the south, it is possible that Ælla’s later reputation and associated legends arose as a bi-product of tenth-century political conflict.

Following the appointment of its first aristocratic Grand Masters in the 1720s and in the wake of its connections to the scientific Enlightenment, ‘Free and Accepted’ Masonry rapidly became part of Britain’s national profile and the largest and arguably the most influential of Britain’s extensive clubs and societies. The new organisation did not evolve naturally from the mediaeval guilds and religious orders that pre-dated it, but was reconfigured radically by a largely self-appointed inner core.  Freemasonry became a vehicle for the expression and transmission of the political and religious views of those at its centre and for the scientific Enlightenment concepts that they championed.  It also offered a channel through which many sought to realise personal aspirations - social, intellectual and financial.

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

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"‘This book illuminates the fascinating life of Eva Gore-Booth. Often lost in the shadow of her more famous sister, Constance, Eva finally emerges as a key figure. Historian Sonja Tiernan has written an exciting and vibrant life of this extraordinary woman, at once an intrepid feminist, pacifist and advocate for social justice.’
Professor Maria Luddy, University of Warwick

This is the first dedicated biography of the radical Irish writer and political activist, Eva Gore-Booth. A vast body of material from private collections and state archives has been used to uncover this remarkable life history.

Born into West of Ireland Anglo-Irish landed gentry, Gore-Booth dramatically rejected her aristocratic heritage, choosing to live and work amongst the poorest classes in industrial Manchester. Her pioneering work on behalf of barmaids, circus performers, flower sellers and pit-brow lasses is traced here with clarity and enthusiasm. The story of Gore-Booth's life is captivating and provides new insights into key political issues of early twentieth century Ireland and Britain. A prolific author who enjoyed a place within W.B. Yeats' literary circle, Gore-Booth also fostered a well-deserved reputation as a determined and successful political activist, at one stage defeating no less an adversary than Winston Churchill. This ground-breaking book reveals Gore-Booth’s experiences of militant pacifism during the Great War, her campaign to reprieve Roger Casement's death sentence, her instrumental role in the fight for sexual equality in the English workplace and her unwavering struggle for Irish independence. Her close bond with her sister, Countess Markievicz, an iconic and sometimes divisive Irish nationalist, offers the reader a new dimension into Markievicz's personal life.

Comprehensive and engaging, this book establishes Eva Gore-Booth as a significant player in Irish and British politics and as a major figure in literary, women’s and trade union history."

This paper aims to manifest the ways in which Colm Tóibín deals with Irish nationalism and culture through the memories of his protagonist in 'The Heather Blazing'. Drawing on his own and his father’s childhood memories as well as his first-hand experiences of working as a journalist at the Irish Supreme Court, Tóibín creates a fictional realm which is sharply divided by the conflicting perspectives of the past and present Irish societies. This realm is embodied in the protagonist, Eamon Redmon, a high court judge. As a figure who was raised at the core of nationalist ideology and Catholic conservatism, Redmon is unable to establish an identity which fits the modernized and liberalized Irish community of the late Twentieth century. His mind is replete with the vestiges of Irish nationalist spirit and conservative culture as revealed through the narratives of his memories. Even though he seems to have abandoned his religious and nationalist views, his memory functions as a secure store which he recurrently visits. In his memory, concepts of moral / cultural conservatism and patriotism are personified in his father and Éamon De Valera, the prominent Irish politician after whom Redmon is named. From a broader perspective, Redmon’s personal memory represents the collective memory of the whole Irish nation which has been transformed into an internationalized / liberalized secular country while arguably bound to its traditional identity.

Sunday Times 13 July 2014

In Justine McCarthy's article about Joyce McSharry, who was separated from her mother in the Bethany Home in 1951, the solicitor David Phelan of Hayes & Sons disclaimed knowledge of an irregular 'Adoption Agreement' written by the firm (Quest for lost mother ends at graveside, News, last week).
    In the 'Agreement' Ralph Walker of Hayes & Sons, nephew of Bethany Home residential secretary Hettie Walker, was named as the 'attorney' of Joyce's mother, Emily Sheppey.
    This was so as to arrange a future legal adoption without consulting Emily.
    Derek Leinster and I wrote to Hayes & Sons between 2010-11.
    The firm also wrote the 'Adoption Agreement' which saw Derek handed to a dysfunctional family in 1945.
    In 2011 a representative volunteered without explanation that he approached a retired partner to see if he could shed light on the mystery. The person concerned is a son of the Bethany Matron. She witnessed the 1951 'Agreement' and remained as matron until the home closed in 1972.
    He too was “not aware of the existence of any records relating to Bethany Home”.
    I wrote again on July 3 with regard to the Emily Sheppey 'Agreement', indicating that this indicated ongoing engagement between the home and the firm.
    I am informed that such documentation should not be destroyed and also that, if destroyed, a record would normally be kept.
    Mr Phelan wrote to me at 8.39pm on Friday July 4th that unsuccessful "searches have been carried out", and that therefore "there is nothing more we can do".
    I suggested to Mr Phelan that "If the documents have been removed from your firm you are unlikely to find them in it".
    I also asked Mr Phelan to consider calling in the authorities if he concludes that important documentation was removed in a possibly unauthorized manner.
    Whatever he decides, Children separated from their parents in the Bethany Home would appreciate if Mr Phelan could provide them with more information.

Niall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College Dublin.

On 18 April 2019, by-stander Lyra McKee was killed while a group of teenagers and young men rioted against the PSNI in the Northern Irish city of Derry. During these riots, two masked gunmen of the “New IRA” fired up to ten shots at three PSNI Land Rovers. The recruitment of teenagers into the ranks of dissident Irish republicans has raised concern that a new generation of young adults born after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement is prepared to continue acts of political violence in Ireland. This article will examine the motivations and ideology of teenagers and young adults in dissident Irish republican organisations. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews with members of the dissident republican youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann in the Dublin region. The interview data show four broad motivational factors for teenagers and young adults to join the republican youth organisation, Na Fianna Éireann, in the Republic of Ireland. These four are: First, working-class background, with its related deprivation and social problems (such as criminality and drug addiction); second, the importance of family links and social networks; third, social media as an introduction to republicanism; and, fourth, fascination with Irish history.

This book chapter examines Herbert Remmel’s childhood experience which juxtaposed Hitler’s Germany and de Valera’s neutral Ireland. Born in 1936 in Cologne he experienced the war from the perspective of a child. As a fortunate nine year old, he escaped the bombed out Rhineland by taking advantage of a humanitarian operation involving the Irish Red Cross and the Save the German Children Society (SGCS). He landed off the mail-boat from Liverpool at Dun Laoghaire in Dublin on 27 July 1946 as a member of the first group of approximately 80 German children arriving under the scheme. Herbert’s experiences with his two Irish foster families instilled in the young German boy a deep and intimate appreciation of Ireland, its society, the Irish sense of place, the people’s traditions, the Irish rural way of life and Irish nationalism. Though only in Ireland for just under three years, the interlude was indelibly imprinted on his being and identity. His experience granted him rare insights into both his native fatherland, Germany, and his fostering motherland, Ireland.

Edgerton has written what could prove to be one of the most influential books on the history of the Second World War. In a majestic study, Edgerton has successfully shown us that we still have a lot to learn about the conflict. He claims that many of the well-established ideas about Britain's capability of waging war, and the perceptions we have of those in government during the conflict could now be open to reinterpretation and reassessment. He does this with painstaking accuracy and insightful enquiry, producing a truly gripping study of the conflict, the planning behind the military efforts, and how Britain sought to use the knowledge of the leading experts from all fields to secure victory.

This book looks at the impact of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, the greatest flu the world has ever known, on Irish society and politics, at a time when that society was going through the trauma of the war and the rapid move towards independence. The book also looks at contemporary medical understanding of the disease, and how it punctured the new-found confidence of the medical profession in bacteriology, as how they failed  to find an effective treatment.  Most poignantly, it looks at the patient experience of disease, through a series of oral history interviews,  seeing how families sometimes lost several members, and economic circumstances were often changed by the loss of one or both parents. It tells the story of small children who survived against the odds, and lived well into their nineties or hundreds to tell the tale.  The story of the pandemic in Ireland interweaves with the other contemporary significant events in Irish society, and its impact on these events has curiously been largely ignored. Throughout, the work sets the Irish experience of the pandemic in an international context. Review of Stacking the Coffins here: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526122698/

One hundred years after the influenza pandemic of 1918, scholars continue to assess the medical history, public health response, and social impact of the disease. Milne (Maynooth Univ., Belfast), however, is the first to publish a full-length treatise of the 1918 influenza in Ireland, examining the ways the illness politically affected Ireland's move toward independence; influenced public health decisions and delivery; and radically altered the lives of individual Irish people, still reeling under the trauma of the First World War. Based on Milne's 2009 doctoral dissertation, this text demonstrates an admirable and comprehensive understanding of previous work on the epidemic, including Alfred Crosby's benchmark study America's Forgotten Pandemic (2nd. ed., 2003); Niall Johnson's Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic (2006); and Jeffery Taubenberger's genetic research of the virus (included in the anthology The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19, edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray, 2003). Milne also adeptly handles novel primary research, including a close study of contemporary Irish newspapers and oral history interviews with survivors and family members of victims.'
D. A. Henningfeld, emerita, Adrian College, Choice
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers

'Milne brilliantly reports on interviews she has done with survivors or with the families of people who died in the pandemic. Her material, collected in 2006 is unique, and gives an understanding of the contemporary suffering and long-lasting pain associated with bereavement that cold statistics cannot give.'
Professor Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Oslo Metropolitan University

'Stacking the coffins is a superb new book on how this influenza affected Ireland. [.] I cannot recommend it enough.'
Dr Maurice Gueret, Editor of the Irish Medical Directory

'The Irish part of the disease's global history has long been overlooked, as have the experiences of the families and communities it afflicted. By telling their stories, Milne's thorough book makes an important contribution to our social and medical history.'
Christopher Kissane, The Irish Times

'Stacking the Coffins is an excellent and very accessible study of a crisis that can be over­shadowed in hindsight by the drama of war and political upheaval, but which had a profound impact on those who lived through it. By taking a genuinely holistic approach, it illuminates much besides its subject matter. It is a study of a society in the grip of a crisis and, as such, offers a significant and distinctive contribution co an understanding of Irish life in a period usually defined by its revolution.'
John Gibney, Books Ireland, November 2018
'Long in the making, this is the definitive study of a major but largely neglected disaster that ravaged Ireland a century ago. Milne tells the story with empathy, objectivity, and flair. She is thorough and convincing on the Great Flu's peculiar demography and on its chronology and geography, and excellent also on how officialdom tried to cope with the crisis and on how the politics of the day influenced the discourse around it. A real highlight is the chapter on the oral history of the Flu, which includes interviews with a few centenarians! A very fine book on an important topic.'
Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Ireland: A New Economic History and Famine: A Short History

'"Take regular meals to keep the body in peak condition, and if you get home wet or late take a hot glass of lemonade immediately. Inhale eucalyptus from a piece of cotton wool several times a day. Go to bed immediately if you get the flu." Such was the medical advice in the midst of the 1918 influenza epidemic, Ida Milne reports, which would have provided little solace in the face of the worst holocaust of disease in modern times. Milne has produced a fascinating account, based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, including oral histories, of responses to this epidemic in Ireland. The chapter dealing with oral histories is particularly poignant and priceless. In this book, Milne explores the ways in which the epidemic penetrated and impacted on all aspects of Irish society, at a time when the country was going through rapid and sometimes traumatic societal and political changes. The book makes an important contribution to the modern social history of health and medicine and to the history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Throughout she ponders: "why was a disease that dominated the columns of newspapers, was so immersed in the popular psyche, connected to the growing nationalism, a disease which was part of a big international story, left out of Irish historiography for almost 100 years?" Milne admirably remedies that omission.'
Professor Linda Bryder, University of Auckland

'Stacking the Coffins is an important new addition to the social history of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Milne carefully uncovers the ways in which influenza heated a bubbling stew of war, politics, and a failing medical system in Ireland. Stories of suffering told by survivors bring human voices and experiences to the cold count of 20,000 Irish dead. The survivors' vivid memories, and Milne's meticulous mining of archival sources, reveal a forgotten crisis that ruptured families and played a role in reconfiguring twentieth-century Irish society.'
Ann Herring, Professor Emerita, McMaster University

'The first-hand memories of over 25 people who lived through Ireland's "Black Flu" alone make this book moving, dramatic and engrossing reading.'
Howard Phillips, University of Cape Town, author of 'Black October': The Impact of the Spanish Flu Epidemic on South Africa

This book examines the experiences and interconnections of the Reformations, principally in Denmark-Norway and Britain and Ireland (but with an eye to the broader Scandinavian landscape as well), and also discusses instances of similarities between the Reformations in both realms. The volume features a comprehensive introduction, and provides a broad survey of the beginnings and progress of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations in Northern Europe, while also highlighting themes of comparison that are common to all of the bloc under consideration, which will be of interest to Reformation scholars across this geographical region.

A Review of Éamonn Ó Ciardha & Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds) The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0-7190-8608-3, Hardback, 304pp; £70. This multidisciplinary collection of essays emerged from a conference marking the 400 th anniversary of the Ulster Plantation. Numerous other plantation schemes had been implemented in Ireland during the previous century, but the end of the Nine Years' War, the union of crowns under King James I and VI, and the 1607 Flight of the Earls opened the gate for an Irish colonial project like no other. It was a massive venture in social engineering and one which would bring English, Scottish, and Irish peoples of Catholic and Protestant belief to live side and side. Fresh investigation into the momentous seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster has been long overdue and, fortunately, the essays included in this volume provide a great display of the scope and quality of research which can be done on this topic. The editors' introductory chapter clearly establishes the aims of the collection and lays the important groundwork on which the succeeding essays build. Jenny

Drummers for the Devil? The Black Soldiers of the 29th (Worcestershire) Regiment of Foot, 1759-1843.
By JD. Ellis.
JSAHR. Eighty. Autumn 2002. No.323. Pages 186-202.
This article explores the employment of soldiers of African and Asian origin as enlisted drummers by one British infantry regiment from the 1750s to the 1840s.

Janet McNeill’s fiction has experienced a recent revival, led by London-based publisher Turnpike Books, which reissued three of her novels between 2014 and 2015, with a fourth due in autumn 2019. The Maiden Dinosaur (1964/2015) is her best-known book, and it depicts Northern Ireland at a transitional moment in its history, during the post-war period and preceding the recommencement of the Troubles. McNeill explores vestigial systems of power that endure in Northern Ireland amidst the shifting gender, class, religious, and political contexts of the early 1960s. This essay analyses her rendering of the middle-class Northern Protestant house, and argues that it is a metonym for patriarchal structures that pervade mid-century Belfast society. McNeill examines how the women of her generation manoeuvre within this circumscribed space, and her novel represents an aesthetic gesture of self-liberation.

For the last three years I have been working on my current book project, which is titled Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction. I am nearly finished with a full draft, and I just completed my introduction. If any of you have time to read it, and it is short, here is what I would like to know. One, is the introduction clear? In other words, based on the introduction, do you get a clear sense of what I intend to argue in the book? Second, does it make you want to read the book? Put differently, does it sound like the book would be worth reading? I will be immensely grateful for any feedback.

This paper examines the evidence for ironworking in the town of Kilkenny during the late medieval period. It takes into account both the written and archaeological sources for ironworking and is based on recently completed doctoral research into iron production in Ireland in the period from c. AD 1200 to 1600 (Rondelez 2014a). Other aspects, such as the ethnicity of the smiths, the fuel used for ironworking and the iron trade, are also discussed. inTRODucTiOn From steel blades for cutting timber, stone, textile and food to weapons for waging warfare, from humble nails to horseshoes, anchors and chains, iron played a vital part in late medieval life. As such, the blacksmith's forge, where the manufacturing and repair of these objects took place, played a central role in the medieval economy. Kilkenny is exceptional because its main forge, which for at least a century, and possibly more, had a monopoly on ironworking inside the town, is well documented, both through archival sources and excavations. The same sources suggest the introduction of coal in Kilkenny around 1400 and give insights into the connections between smithing technology and ethnicity.

In Dublin, my new colleagues and students at TCD have provided me with a platform to write, think, and teach, and I consider it a privilege to be able do so. ere are three people to whom I owe more than mere thanks. Marianne Elliott was a source of unwavering support and encouragement as my PhD supervisor. Roy Foster had faith in my work at a vital moment, and James H. Murphy has questioned, cajoled, and inspired many aspects of this work-even its title.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was common for British Army regiments to recruit Black males to serve as enlisted military musicians. The Irish regiments of the Crown also engaged in the practice, and this study will focus on the Black bandsmen of the 87th (Prince of Wales’s Irish) and 89th (Princess Victoria’s) Regiments of Foot, the antecedent regiments of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. For a more detailed exploration of Black military musicians in Ireland and Irish regiments see Ellis, JD. “The Black, the Red and the Green: Black Red-Coats and Ireland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Irish Sword 23, no.323 (2003): pp. 409-25. Also see www.academia.edu/

This article examines the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), in the advancement of gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the CPGB was the first major organization of the British labour movement—and the British left—to advance a policy of gay rights, its participation in the gay liberation movement has tended to be neglected by scholars. In contrast to the general perception of the CPGB in the last decade (or so) of its existence as a party of declining influence and cohesion, easily ignored by the mainstream of the labour movement, we argue that the embrace of gay rights provided communists with a means of pushing for a diversification of labour politics. This coalesced in the mid-1980s with the co-founding of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) by the communist activist Mark Ashton. With the recent scholarly and public interest in the LGSM and its impact upon the Labour Party's attitude to gay rights, this article aims to reveal that the 'pre-history' of the group is firmly rooted in the CPGB/YCL and the Eurocommunist section of the British communist movement. The year 2014 saw the 13th anniversary of the beginning of the 1984–5 miners' strike and the establishment of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). The moment was used to launch the British film Pride, which tells the story of LGSM. One of the controversial points of the film's narrative was the silence over the co-founder of LGSM Mark Ashton's membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain

A more diversified approach to cultural remembrance in Ireland is suggested here. By distinguishing between legacies of 1798 in the Rebellion's three main arenas, it is possible to identify three distinct, if also interrelated, modes of memory: public memory in the East, folk memory in the West, and social amnesia in the North. Initially these may seem to be local variants of invented collective memory, yet investigation allows for more complicated observations, which may serve to problematize our understanding of practices of remembrance in Ireland.

Old Middle Modern/Late... Cumbric  10 th , 11 th century, very little material which causes difficulties in exact dating Cornish 600-800 800-1200 Plant names in Leiden MS, 9 th c. glosses; 1100 Vocabularium Cornicum 1200-1575 1380 three-day drama cycle Ordinalia (Origo Mundi); poetry; 1450 rhyming poetry; translations; 1504 Beunas Meriasek 1575-1800 1611 play Gwreans an Bys (Origo Mundi); language in decline, no longer means of communication, no Bible

The Revolution Papers is a weekly newspaper that tells the story of the Irish revolution from 1916 to 1923 by reproducing newspapers covering key events in the period. As editor, I write a review of the newspapers in each issue. This review is from our first issue which was published on 28 December 2015. For further details, please visit http://therevolutionpapers.ie/

This paper focuses on the difficulties Kathleen O'Brennan faced as a political radical and foreigner operating as an Irish republican activist in the United States. In 1920, O'Brennan constructed for herself and the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America's War Aims an American identity rooted in popular conceptions of the American Revolution. This let her work more effectively at the same time that it allowed feminists, radicals, and leftists to campaign for U.S. recognition of the Irish Republic in the face of opposition from the conservative Friends of Irish Freedom and American nativists. Yet once Irish republican politicians established the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, thus shaping their own acceptable American identity, they made it difficult for the radical O'Brennan to act as an Irish nationalist in the United States. In defiance, O'Brennan and Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly formed American auxiliaries of the Irish White Cross. Irish politicians and their American organization, however, foiled O'Brennan's efforts by branding her un-American, and, therefore, un-Irish. O'Brennan's activities show that displays of American patriotism and American character served as political tools in the transatlantic Irish republican cause, but the movement ultimately depended on who could best use American identities for their own ends.

This article provides guidelines for understanding Irish socialist playwright Sean O'Casey as a disabled author, through analysis of the first volume of his autobiography, _I Knock at the Door_ (1939). The narrative describes the author’s experience as a poor child with a painful disease of the eyes, likely trachoma. Like O’Casey’s other works, the book strongly criticizes the inequalities brought about by capitalism. It also describes how ableist medical, religious, and educational authorities further contributed to his sense of alienation.

The article is a chapter in _Disability Experiences_, edited by G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz. The collection provides overviews, historical and cultural contexts, and themes of hundreds of first-person disability memoirs, autobiographies, and other personal narratives.

All cultures have in their mythologies tales of heroic births which set the culture’s hero figures apart from the common people. Celtic mythology is no different, and in fact may offer some of the prototypical fantastic birth scenarios to be found in mythology in general. The compact, matter of fact, and yet fantastical tale of Cú Chulainn’s birth offers a fine example of the Celtic peoples’ ability to relate the mysteries of nature and the supernatural in a manner that appears not only to suspend disbelief, but perhaps to even transcend it. The story is short and yet exhibits several of the characteristics which Alwyn and Brinley Rees outline in their work Celtic Heritage as being typical of heroic birth tales. Throughout this discussion, references will be made to Rees and Rees’ postulated heroic birth motif and in general to other ideas offered by the authors which may be seen as relevant to the tale.

In 1918-19, with Ireland in transition from British rule towards independence, the Local Government Board for Ireland, the body responsible for the supervision of Poor Law dispensary system and sanitation, faced what turned out to be the last great crisis before its abolition.  The 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which killed at least 20,057 people and infected an estimated 800,000 on the island, placed an enormous stress on the under-funded, over-stretched and awkwardly structured health system. This chapter will explore how the influenza crisis was handled in Ireland, and will suggest that during the influenza epidemic, the Local Government Board for Ireland was widely perceived as being either unwilling or incapable of devising a plan of action to deal with the epidemic. The LGB was portrayed, through reports from Boards of Guardians’ meetings in the newspapers, as being quite obstructive to Boards of Guardians as they tried to cope with increased demands on medical staff and resources during the crisis. In the absence of a centralised crisis management strategy emerging from the LGB, local authorities fulfilled their statutory obligations in relation to sanitation, while a range of voluntary healthcare providers, from hospitals and charitable societies to landlords and neighbours, devised localised strategies to feed and nurse the ill.

Poets throughout Irish history used their poetry as an outlet to vent their frustrations, fears, hopes and dreams. Aogán Ó Rathaille was no different. Through the turmoil of rapid changing government and culture in Ireland, Ó Rathaille paints a picture of the effects the historical events had on him and his peers. Having been born in 1675 and died 1729, Ó Rathaille lived through the Jacobite defeat at Boyne in 1690, the Treaty of Limerickand the British failure to follow through with the terms of the Treatyin 1691, the Penal Laws, the persecution and dispossession of Irish Catholics, and the Declaratory Act of 1720. With each of these historical events, the Protestant minority in Ireland gained more power at the expense of the Catholic minority. With the Protestant Ascendancy also came the destruction of the native Irish Gaelic culture which was to be replaced by the culture of an elite English society. Aogán Ó

Review of Robin Bury, 'Buried Lives, the Protestants of Southern Ireland, History Press of Ireland, 2017.

This survey of 20th Century southern Protestant experience notes that it began badly for Protestant landlords. Their huge estates were sub-divided for purchase by unappreciative mainly Romanist tenants.
    Then things went further downhill.
    Bury’s narrative asserts that IRA attacks on individual Protestants during the 1919-23 War of Independence and Civil War were sectarian. Southern Protestant testimony rejecting this perception is ignored, alongside other contrary evidence...... (the rest in PDF)

This article reexamines the offer of resignation by British cavalry officers at the main British Army base in Ireland rather than engage in 'active operations' against anti Home-Rule citizens in Ulster. While no orders had been issued the outcome of the event was to hamstring Liberal Party efforts to impose its authority. Often presented as a minor event perpetrated by mostly Anglo-Irish officers the article shows that this is not, in fact, correct. While the simplest resolution would have been to accept the resignations, analysis of the mutineers' backgrounds shows why this course of action would have been impossible. The article also shows that Easter Rebellion in 1916 was a logical consequence of the mutiny and that Casement's analysis of the crisis at the Curragh impelled him into action. The article also suggests that the crisis also influenced German calculations on the likelihood of Britain being able or willing to take action in the event of an attack on and quick defeat of France in any European war in July 1914. "The officers stationed at the Curragh are of the unanimous opinion that further information is essential before being called upon at short notice to take any decision regarding 'active operations' in Ulster. If, 'duty as ordered' involves active military operations against Ulster, then the following 65 officers here stationed would respectfully, and under protest, prefer to be dismissed."1 Officers stationed at Curragh Camp 21 March 1914 'The cause is not far to seek. A constitution to be maintained intact must be the achievement and pride of the people themselves; must rest on their own free will and on their own determination to sustain it, instead of being something resident in another land whose chief representative is an armed force-armed not to protect the population, but to hold it down. We had seen the working of the Irish constitution in the refusal of the army of occupation at the Curragh to obey the orders of the crown'.

Though some may judge Jonathan Swift’s stylistic sarcasm as a scathing critique of a lack of action on the part of the Irish peasantry, and of the hedonism of the rich, his essay highlights the landowner’s power to act. By defining Ireland’s peasants and their aristocratic landlords alike in terms of wardrobe and nourishment, Swift’s metaphors in “A Modest Proposal” complicate the role each caste has played in the drastic state of the country’s society. Through outrageous imagery and acting in a caricature of the nobility, Swift presents the lower classes as the gentry sees them: ever fixed and objectified. In contrast, Swift’s gentleman enjoys the freedom of transition, unlike the impoverished masses who are defined by their poor status, and powerless to change their state of existence. As evidenced by his sophisticated language and the deeper meanings his ironic tone belies, Swift must align his appeal to the sentiments of the upper class, who alone can begin to enact change.

PhD Thesis examining the role of the Irish Executive and other branches of British state and military power in responding to the Fenian Rising in 1867. Includes chapters that examine: the Suspension of Habeas Corpus, the Irish Constabulary, the British Army and Militia, and the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and Coast Guard.

A biometric passport, also known as an e-passport, ePassport or a digital passport, is a combined paper and electronic passport that contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of travelers. It uses contactless smart card technology, including a microprocessor chip (computer chip) and antenna (for both power to the chip and communication) embedded in the front or back cover, or center page, of the passport. Electronic passports include contactless chip which stores personal data of the passport holder, information about the passport and the issuing institution. In its simplest form an electronic passport contains just a collection of read-only files, more advanced variants can include sophisticated cryptographic mechanisms protecting security of the document and / or privacy of the passport holder. The passport&#39;s critical information is both printed on the data page of the passport and stored in the chip. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is used t...

Achill yawls, originally introduced to Ireland as ships' boats aboard Norwegian merchantmen, developed into distinct working vessels along Achill Island's shores during the 19th century. These boats were subsequently modified for recreational racing in the mid-20th century. Despite changes to their design, they are often nostalgically viewed as traditional symbols of an Achill islander identity, though their popularity may have been prompted by late-19th-century British legislation. The authors take an ethnographic approach in interpreting Achill yawls over time, contextualizing their social functions through an exploration of primary historical and photographic archives, extant vessels, and interviews with Achill islanders.