Imagining Ireland's Independence

Imagining Ireland's Independence
Author: Jason K. Knirck
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780742541481

The key turning point in modern Ireland's history, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 has shadowed Ireland's political life for decades. In this first book-length assessment of the treaty in over seventy years, Jason Knirck recounts the compelling story of the nationalist politics that produced the Irish Revolution, the tortuous treaty negotiations, and the deep divisions within Sinn Féin that led to the slow unraveling of fragile party cohesion. Focusing on broad ideological and political disputes, as well as on the powerful personalities involved, the author considers the major issues that divided the pro- and anti-treaty forces, why these issues mattered, and the later judgments of historians. He concludes that the treaty debates were in part the result of the immaturity of Irish nationalist politics, as well as the overriding emphasis given to revolutionary unity. A fascinating story in their own right, the treaty debates also open a wider window onto questions of European nationalism, colonialism, state-building, and competing visions of Irish national independence. Treaty Documents

Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904–1945

Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904–1945
Author: Lili Zách
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030778134

Offering a unique account of identity formation in Ireland and Central Europe, this book explores and contextualises transfers and comparisons between Ireland and the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It reveals how Irish perceptions of borders and identities changed after the (re)birth of the small states of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the creation of the Irish Free State. Adopting a transnational approach, the book documents the outward-looking attitude of Irish nationalists and provides original insights into the significance of personal encounters that transcended the borders of nation-states. Drawing on a wide range of official records, private papers, contemporary press accounts and journal articles, Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904-1945 bridges the gap between historiographies of the East and West by opening up a new perspective on Irish national identity.

Afterimage of the Revolution

Afterimage of the Revolution
Author: Jason Knirck
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299295834

Ascending to power after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a violent revolution against the United Kingdom, the political party Cumann na nGaedheal governed during the first ten years of the Irish Free State (1922–32). Taking over from the fallen Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, Cumann na nGaedheal leaders such as W. T. Cosgrave and Kevin O'Higgins won a bloody civil war, created the institutions of the new Free State, and attempted to project abroad the independence of a new Ireland. In response to the view that Cumann na nGaedheal was actually a reactionary counterrevolutionary party, Afterimage of the Revolution contends that, in building the new Irish state, the government framed and promoted its policies in terms of ideas inherited from the revolution. In particular, Cumann na nGaedheal emphasized Irish sovereignty, the "Irishness" of the new state, and a strong sense of anticolonialism, all key components of the Sinn Féin party platform during the revolution. Jason Knirck argues that the 1920s must be understood as part of a continuing Irish revolution that led to an eventual independent republic. Drawing on state documents, newspapers, and private papers—including the recently released papers of Kevin O'Higgins—he offers a fresh view of Irish politics in the 1920s and integrates this period more closely with the Irish Revolution.

Imagining Ireland's Pasts

Imagining Ireland's Pasts
Author: Nicholas Canny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 019253663X

Imagining Ireland's Pasts describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. Imagining Ireland's Past: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries details how authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress.

The Republic

The Republic
Author: Charles Townshend
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0713999837

A gripping narrative of the most critical years in modern Ireland's history, from Charles Townshend The protracted, terrible fight for independence pitted the Irish against the British and the Irish against other Irish. It was both a physical battle of shocking violence against a regime increasingly seen as alien and unacceptable and an intellectual battle for a new sort of country. The damage done, the betrayals and grim compromises put the new nation into a state of trauma for at least a generation, but at a nearly unacceptable cost the struggle ended: a new republic was born. Charles Townshend's Easter 1916 opened up the astonishing events around the Rising for a new generation and in The Republic he deals, with the same unflinchingly wish to get to the truth behind the legend, with the most critical years in Ireland's history. There has been a great temptation to view these years through the prisms of martyrology and good-and-evil. The picture painted by Townshend is far more nuanced and sceptical - but also never loses sight of the ordinary forms of heroism performed by Irish men and women trapped in extraordinary times. Reviews: 'Electric ... [a] magisterial and essential book' Irish Times About the author: Charles Townshend is the author of the highly praised Easter 1916:The Irish Rebellion. His other books include The British Campaigns in Ireland, 1919-21 and When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Making of Iraq, 1914-21.

Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination

Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination
Author: Eve Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre:
ISBN: 0198869169

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid twentieth-century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work, and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels ofthis period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and EvelynWaugh, and also for many lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White.The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship asit features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course ofEngland's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by Englishliterary modernism.

Michael Collins

Michael Collins
Author: Anne Dolan
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2018-10-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178841053X

'It was the most providential escape yet. It will probably have the effect of making them think that I am even more mysterious than they believe me to be, and that is saying a good deal.' Michael Collins knew the power of his persona, and capitalised on what people wanted to believe. The image we have of him comes filtered through a sensational lens, exaggerated out of all proportion. We see what we have come to expect: 'the man who won the war', the centre of a web of intelligence that 'brought the British Empire to its knees'. He comes to us as a mixture of truth and lies, propaganda and misunderstanding. The willingness to see him as the sum of the Irish revolution, and in turn reduce him to a caricature of his many parts, clouds our view of both the man and the revolution. Drawing on archives in Ireland, Britain and the United States, the authors question our traditional assumptions about Collins. Was he the man of his age, or was he just luckier, more brazen, more written about and more photographed than the rest? Despite the pictures of him in uniform during the last weeks of his life, Collins saw very little of the actual fight. He was chiefly an organiser and a strategist. Should we remember him as a master of the mundane rather than the romantic figure of the blockbuster film? The eight thematic, highly illustrated chapters scrutinise different aspects of Collins' life: origins, work, war, politics, celebrity, beliefs, death and afterlives. Approaching him through the eyes of contemporaries and historians, friends and enemies, this provocative book reveals new insights, challenging what we think we know about him and, in turn, what we think we know about the Irish revolution.

Ireland

Ireland
Author: Paul Bew
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2007-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198205554

The modern Irish question is defined by many as a case of a great and supposedly liberal nation supposedly mistreating a smaller one. This text embodies a new approach to this issue, analysing key issues from religious discrimination and famine, to the passions of both nationalism and unionism.

Remembering the Revolution

Remembering the Revolution
Author: Frances Flanagan
Publisher: Oxford Historical Monographs
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 019873915X

Remembering the Irish Revolution chronicles the ways in which the Irish revolution was remembered in the first two decades of Irish independence. While tales of heroism and martyrdom dominated popular accounts of the revolution, a handful of nationalists reflected on the period in more ambivalent terms. For them, the freedoms won in revolution came with great costs: the grievous loss of civilian lives, the brutalisation of Irish society, and the loss of hope for a united and prosperous independent nation. To many nationalists, their views on the revolution were traitorous. For others, they were the courageous expression of some uncomfortable truths. This volume explores these struggles over revolutionary memory through the lives of four significant, but under-researched nationalist intellectuals: Eimar O'Duffy, P. S. O'Hegarty, George Russell, and Desmond Ryan. It provides a lively account of their controversial critiques of the Irish revolution, and an intimate portrait of the friends, enemies, institutions and influences that shaped them. Based on wide-ranging archival research, Remembering the Irish Revolution puts the history of Irish revolutionary memory in a transnational context. It shows the ways in which international debates about war, human progress, and the fragility of Western civilisation were crucial in shaping the understandings of the revolution in Ireland. It provides a fresh context for analysis the major writers of the period, such as Sean O'Casey, W. B. Yeats, and Sean O'Faolain, as well as a new outlook on the genesis of the revisionist/nationalist schism that continues to resonate in Irish society today.