This collection of essays investigates instances of radicalism in the Catholic church in Ireland between 1660 and 1970. The subject is examined through the lives of nine clerics who came into conflict with Church and state authorities on political and social issues. The clerics studied here were all prominent figures at local or national level, and two of them were executed in the eighteenth century.

The third volume of The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism examines the period from the defeat of the Jacobite army at the battle of Culloden in 1746 to the enactment of Catholic emancipation in 1829. The first part of the volume offers a chronological overview tracing the decline of Jacobitism, the easing of penal legislation which targeted Catholics, the complex impact of the French Revolution, the debates about the place of Catholics in the post-Union state, and - following the mass mobilisation of Irish Catholics - the passage of emancipation. The second part of the volume shows that this political history can only be properly understood with reference to the broader transformations that occurred in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The period witnessed the expansion of Catholic infrastructure (pastoral structures, chapel building, elementary education and finances) and changes in Catholic practice, for example in liturgy and devotion. The growing infrastructure and more public profession of Catholicism occurred in a society where anti-Catholicism remained a force, but the volume also addresses the accommodations and interactions with non-Catholics that attended daily life. Crucially, the transformations of this period were international, as well as national. The volume examines the British and Irish convents, colleges, friaries and monasteries on the continent, especially during the events of the 1790s when many institutions closed and successor or new ones emerged at home. The international dimensions of British and Irish Catholicism extended beyond Europe too as the British Empire expanded globally, and attention is given to the involvement of British and Irish Catholics in imperial expansion. This volume addresses the literary, intellectual and cultural expressions of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. Catholics produced a rich literature in English, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh, although the volume shows the disparities in provision. They also engaged with and participated in the Catholic Enlightenment, particularly as they grappled with the challenges of accommodation to a Protestant constitution. This also had consequences for the public expression of Catholicism and the volume concludes by exploring the shifting expression of belief through music and material culture.

A New History of Ireland is the largest scholarly project in modern Irish history. In 9 volumes, it provides a comprehensive new synthesis of modern scholarship on every aspect of Irish history and prehistory, from the earliest geological and archaeological evidence, through the Middle Ages, down to the present day. Volume VII covers a period of major significance in Ireland's history. It outlines the division of Ireland and the eventual establishment of the Irish Republic. It provides comprehensive coverage of political developments, north and south, as well as offering chapters on the economy, literature in English and Irish, the Irish language, the visual arts, emigration and immigration, and the history of women. The contributors to this volume, all specialists in their field, provide the most comprehensive treatment of these developments of any single-volume survey of twentieth-century Ireland.

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Scotland and England produced such well-known figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke. Ireland’s contribution to this revolution in Western thought has received much less attention. Offering a corrective to the view that Ireland was intellectually stagnant during this period, The Irish Enlightenment considers a range of artists, writers, and philosophers who were full participants in the pan-European experiment that forged the modern world. Michael Brown explores the ideas and innovations percolating in political pamphlets, economic and religious tracts, and literary works. John Toland, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and other luminaries, he shows, participated in a lively debate about the capacity of humans to create a just society. In a nation recovering from confessional warfare, religious questions loomed large. How should the state be organized to allow contending Christian communities to worship freely? Was the public confession of faith compatible with civil society? In a society shaped by opposing religious beliefs, who is enlightened and who is intolerant? The Irish Enlightenment opened up the possibility of a tolerant society, but it was short-lived. Divisions concerning methodological commitments to empiricism and rationalism resulted in an increasingly antagonistic conflict over questions of religious inclusion. This fracturing of the Irish Enlightenment eventually destroyed the possibility of civilized, rational discussion of confessional differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland again entered a dark period of civil unrest whose effects were still evident in the late twentieth century.

The eighteenth century is in many ways the most problematic era in Irish history. Traditionally, the years from 1700 to 1775 have been short-changed by historians, who have concentrated overwhelmingly on the last quarter of the period. Professor Ian McBride's survey, the fourth in the New Gill History of Ireland series, seeks to correct that balance. At the same time it provides an accessible and fresh account of the bloody rebellion of 1798, the subject of so much controversy. The eighteenth century was the heyday of the Protestant Ascendancy. Professor McBride explores the mental world of Protestant patriots from Molyneux and Swift to Grattan and Tone. Uniquely, however, McBride also offers a history of the eighteenth century in which Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter all receive due attention. One of the greatest advances in recent historiography has been the recovery of Catholic attitudes during the zenith of the Protestant Ascendancy. Professor McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland insists on the continuity of Catholic politics and traditions throughout the century so that the nationalist explosion in the 1790s appears not as a sudden earthquake, but as the culmination of long-standing religious and social tensions. McBride also suggests a new interpretation of the penal laws, in which themes of religious persecution and toleration are situated in their European context. This holistic survey cuts through the clichés and lazy thinking that have characterised our understanding of the eighteenth century. It sets a template for future understanding of that time. Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents Introduction Part I. Horizons - English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities - The Irish Enlightenment and its Enemies - Ireland and the Ancien Régime Part II. The Penal Era: Religion and Society - King William's Wars - What Were the Penal Laws For? - How Catholic Ireland Survived - Bishops, Priests and People Part III The Ascendancy and its World - Ascendancy Ireland: Conflict and Consent - Queen Sive and Captain Right: Agrarian Rebellion Part IV. The Age of Revolutions - The Patriot Soldier - A Brotherhood of Affection - 1798

This pioneering study of Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Luke Gibbons argues that this found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure will appeal to Irish studies and Post-Colonial specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.

While Irish historical writing has long been in thrall to the perceived sectarian character of the legal system, this collection is the first to concentrate attention on the actual relationship that existed between the Irish population and the state under which they lived from the War of the Two Kings (1689-1691) to the Great Famine (1845-1849). Particular attention is paid to an understanding of the legal character of the state and the reach of the rule of law, with contributors addressing such themes as: how law was made and put into effect; how ordinary people experienced the law and social regulations; how Catholics related to the legal institutions of the Protestant confessional state; and how popular notions of legitimacy were developed. These themes contribute to a wider understanding of the nature of the state in the long eighteenth century and will therefore help to situate the study of Irish society into the mainstream of English and European social history.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.

While there have been many books written about the IRA since 1916, comparatively little attention has been paid to the organisation during the 1960s, despite the fact that the internal divisions culminating in the 1969 split are often seen as key to the conflict which erupted that year. This book, newly available in paperback, redresses that vacuum and through an exhaustive survey of internal and official sources, as well as interviews with key IRA members, provides a unique and fascinating insight into radical Republican politics which will be of interest to those interested in Irish history and politics. The author looks at the root of the divisions which centred on conflicting attitudes within the IRA on armed struggle, electoral participation and socialism. He argues that while the IRA did not consciously plan the northern 'Troubles', the internal debate of the 1960s had implications for what happened in 1969.

A major new account of one of the leading philosopher-statesmen of the eighteenth century Edmund Burke (1730–97) lived during one of the most extraordinary periods of world history. He grappled with the significance of the British Empire in India, fought for reconciliation with the American colonies, and was a vocal critic of national policy during three European wars. He also advocated reform in Britain and became a central protagonist in the great debate on the French Revolution. Drawing on the complete range of printed and manuscript sources, Empire and Revolution offers a vivid reconstruction of the major concerns of this outstanding statesman, orator, and philosopher. In restoring Burke to his original political and intellectual context, this book overturns the conventional picture of a partisan of tradition against progress and presents a multifaceted portrait of one of the most captivating figures in eighteenth-century life and thought. A boldly ambitious work of scholarship, this book challenges us to rethink the legacy of Burke and the turbulent era in which he played so pivotal a role.