In the 1990s, Irish society was changing and becoming increasingly international due to the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger'. At the same time, the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland also fuelled debates on the definition of Irishness, which in turn seemed to call for a critical examination of the birth of the Irish State, as well as a rethinking and re-assessment of the nationalist past. Neil Jordan's Michael Collins (1996), the most commercially successful and talked-about Irish film of the 1990s, was a timely contributor to this process. In providing a large-scale representation of the 1916-1922 period, Michael Collins became the subject of critical and popular controversy, demonstrating that cinema could play a part in this cultural reimagining of Ireland. Locating the film in both its historical and its cinematic context, this book explores the depiction of events in Michael Collins and the film's participation in the process of reimagining Irishness through its public reception. The portrayal of the key figures of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera comes under special scrutiny as the author assesses this pivotal piece of Irish history on screen.

In this astonishing and at times terrifying book, acclaimed writer and political commentator Martin Dillon examines for the first time the true role of religion in the conflict in Northern Ireland. He interviewed those directly involved--terrorists like Kenny McClinton and Billy Wright and churchmen like Father Pat Buckley--finding that the terrorists were more forthcoming than the priests and ministers. Dillon charts the history of the paramilitary forces on both sides and exposes the shocking covert role of British intelligence. He finds that, ultimately, both the church and government have failed their communities, allowing men and women of violence to fill a vacuum with bigotry and violence.

O'Doherty was immediately averse to supporting the IRA and felt, at the beginning of the Troubles, a loss of moral bearings, when both the state and the insurgents were in murderous form

Irish history sounds a long litany of grievance and vengeance—lost battles, escaped earls, and institutionalized injustice. The gun, certainly in this century, has played a prominent part. In The Gun in Politics, J. Bowyer Bell presents the story of one Ireland—the Ireland of the Troubles—and about an approach to understanding political violence. In particular, he examines the Irish Republic Army, the longest-enduring unsuccessful revolutionary organization. He de-scribes the covert world of gunmen and the great game they play in the street. His is a lively, telling account of sophisticated weapons transfer, of the impact of civil war on society, and of appropriate democratic responses to terrorism. Bell's association with active Republicans, his endless tea seminars at the United Irishman, drinks at Hennessy's, and constant conversation throughout Ireland on political matters over a period of twenty years has provided the author with unique background for this guide to a fascinating, though brutal, undercurrent of Irish history.

This is an introduction to the best available scholarship within Irish politics, featuring the most influential and significant articles which have been published on Irish politics during the past twenty years. Each article is accompanied by a new commentary by another leading scholar which addresses the impact and contribution of the article and discusses how its themes remain crucial today. The book covers all the most important topics within Irish politics including political culture and traditions, political institutions and parties and the peace process. The combination of the best original scholarship and contemporary commentaries on the core political issues makes Irish Political Studies Reader an invaluable resource for all students and scholars of Irish politics.

This is the most wide-ranging study ever published of political violence and the punishment of Irish political offenders from 1848 to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. Those who chose violence to advance their Irish nationalist beliefs ranged from gentlemen revolutionaries to those who openly embraced terrorism or even full-scale guerilla war. Seán McConville provides a comprehensive survey of Irish revolutionary struggle, matching chapters on punishment of offenders with descriptions and analysis of their campaigns. Government's response to political violence was determined by a number of factors, including not only the nature of the offences but also interest and support from the United States and Australia, as well as current objectives of Irish policy.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the intersection of support for Irish freedom and the principles of Catholic social justice transformed Irish ethnicity in Boston. Prior to World War I, Boston’s middle-class Irish nationalist leaders sought a rapprochement with local Yankees. However, the combined impact of the Easter 1916 Rising and the postwar campaign to free Ireland from British rule drove a wedge between leaders of the city’s two main groups. Irish-American nationalists, emboldened by the visits of Irish leader Eamon de Valera, rejected both Yankees’ support of a postwar Anglo-American alliance and the latter groups’ portrayal of Irish nationalism as a form of Bolshevism. Instead, ably assisted by Catholic Church leaders such as Cardinal William O’Connell, Boston’s Irish nationalists portrayed an independent Ireland as the greatest bulwark against the spread of socialism. As the movement’s popularity spread locally, it attracted the support not only of Irish immigrants, but also that of native-born Americans of Irish descent, including businessman, left-leaning progressives, and veterans of the women’s suffrage movement. For a brief period after World War I, Irish-American nationalism in Boston became a vehicle for the promotion of wider democratic reform. Though the movement was unable to survive the disagreements surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, it had been a source of ethnic unity that enabled Boston’s Irish community to negotiate the challenges of the postwar years including the anti-socialist Red Scare and the divisions caused by the Boston Police Strike in the fall of 1919. Furthermore, Boston’s Irish nationalists drew heavily on Catholic Church teachings such that Irish ethnicity came to be more clearly identified with the advocacy of both cultural pluralism and the rights of immigrant and working families in Boston and America.

Irish Political Prisoners presents a detailed and gripping overview of political imprisonment from 1920-1962. Seán McConville examines the years from the formation of the Northern Ireland state to the release of the last border campaign prisoners in 1962. Drawing extensively and, in many cases, uniquely on archives and special collections in the three jurisdictions, and interviews with survivors from the period, McConville demonstrates how punishment came to embody and shape the nationalist consciousness. Irish Political Prisoners 1920-1962 commences with the legacy of the Anglo Irish and Irish Civil Wars - militancy, division and bitterness. The book travels from the embedding of Northern Ireland’s security agenda in the 1920’s, and the IRA’s search for a role in the 1930’s (including the 1939 bombing campaign against Britain) to the decisive use of internment during the war and the border campaign years. This volume will be an essential resource for students of Irish history and is a major contribution to the study of imprisonment. .

This book examines the role of history teaching in Irish secondary schools in the period 1922-72. It assesses what objectives were the most important in history teaching and what interests school history was designed to serve. The emphasis is on the political, cultural, social and economic factors that determined the content of the history curriculum and its development. The primary focus is on the politics and policy of history teaching, including the respective contributions of church and state to the formulation of the history programmes. It is argued that a particular view of Ireland’s past as a Gaelic, Catholic-nationalist one informed the ideas of policy makers and thus provided the basis of state education policy, and history teaching specifically. The conclusion drawn is that history teaching was used by elite interest groups, namely the state and the church, in the service of their own interests. It was used to justify the state’s existence and employed as an instrument of religious education. History was exploited in the pursuit of the objectives of the cultural revival movement, being used to legitimise the restoration of Irish as a spoken language.

In the midst of great expansion and economic growth in the eighteenth century, Ireland was deeply divided along racial, religious, and economic lines. More than two thirds of the population were Catholic, but nearly all the landowners were Anglican. The minority also comprised practically the entire body of lawyers, officers in the army and navy, and holders of political positions. At the same time, a growing middle class of merchants and manufacturers sought to reform Parliament to gain a real share in the political power monopolized by the aristocracy and landed gentry. Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution remains one of the few in-depth studies of the effects of the Revolution on Ireland. Focusing on nine important years of Irish history, 1775 to 1783, from the outbreak of war in colonial America to the year following its conclusion, the book details the social and political conditions of a period crucial to the development of Irish nationalism. Drawing extensively on the Dublin press of the time, Maurice R. O'Connell chronicles such important developments as the economic depression in Britain and the Irish movement for free trade, the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, the rise of the Volunteers, the formation of the Patriot group in the Irish Parliament, and the Revolution of 1782.