Intro to Ireland Final

Commons

- 'Commons' was akin to the modern Scottish game of shinty: it did not allow handling of the ball that was wooden and hard; it used a narrow-bladed crooked stick. A winter game, it was played by both Presbyterians and Catholics and it was confined to the northern third of the island, especially Antrim, Derry and Donegal

rundale and clachan system

- A clachan (Irish baile or 'village') was a nucleated group of farmhouses, where land-holding was organised communally, and often with considerable ties of kinship between the families involved. Although the misleading English word 'village' was used to describe the baile, these clusters of farmhouses were not classic villages, in that they lacked any service functions-church, pub, school or shop. While the houses might have adjacent vegetable gardens (Irish: garrai), they were surrounded, on the best available patch of land, by a permanently cultivated infield - a large open-field, without enclosures, with a multiplicity of 'strips' separated by sods or stones, in which oats or potatoes were grown. - Each family used a variety of strips, periodically redistributed, to ensure a fair division of all types of soil - deep, shallow, sandy, boggy, dry. Outside the infield, and generally separated from it by a sturdy wall, was the outfield - poorer, more marginal, hilly or boggy ground where an occasional reclamation might be made for the purpose of growing potatoes (especially as population soared). The rest of the townland (or lease holding) was treated as a commonage; grazing was organised communally using the old Gaelic qualitative measure (the 'collop' or 'sum') to define the amount ofstock each family was allowed to have on the pasturage (so as not to overstock it). Occasionally, if the outfield spread into high mountain pastures, cattle might be moved there in the summer, attended by young boys or girls who lived in summer huts. This was called the booley (Irish: buaile) and was especially important for butter-making. This 'system of village partnership' also required a 'rude system of village law'- 'a certain code of laws established by the inhabitants for adjudicating the differences that may arise among them'. Foremost among these were the allocation of turbary [turf] and grazing rights, and the equitable division of the infield. The periodic redistribution of strips in the infield underpinned environmental egalitarianism. This system as a whole was called 'rundale' (a Scottish word) by contemporaries and was practically universal on the poorer land of the west of Ireland in the pre-Famine period. Rundale was a viable functional adaptation to a specific set of ecological and demographic circumstances. - These ecological settings were overwhelmingly marginal - on mountainous, hilly, or boggy areas. In the glacially-scoured environment of the west of Ireland, the use of a permanently cultivated infield and a periodically cultivated outfield was an intelligent and ingenious adaptation to environmental conditions, where tiny patches of glacial drift were frequently embedded in extensive bogs or mountains. Collective use of the infield maximised utilisation of the limited amount of arable land provided by those drift pockets. Because it was permanently cultivated, the infield was nurtured by drawing on the non-arable sector for resources - manure, sand, peat, sods and seaweed - establishing a balanced nutrient flow and maintaining the fertility of the infield.

the Celtic Revival

- A further part of reGaelicisation occurs in art: the Celtic Revival: this is in part inspired by the rediscovery of the material heritage of Ireland - landmark pieces like the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara brooch: these inspired a whole new range of costume jewellery:72 inspired a profusion of popular Celticity - now reduced to the level of kitsch but enormously liberating then: look at any Irish graveyard now with its stone forest of Celtic cross style gravestones - as opposed to earlier flat slabs: important in demonstrating the high cultural achievements of pre- conquest Ireland, and therefore eminently suitable as a signature style of post- colonialism: also linked easily to the medievalism of Victorian England: Ruskin's superb Stones Of Venice73 with its veneration of the Gothic: William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement; the Gothic Revival in architecture led by A. W. Pugin - The return to Catholicism of the Oxford Movement and Newman [who worked extensively in Ireland in Newman House]: the Pre-Raphaelites return to medieval art: Matthew Arnold's veneration of the Celtic over the Saxon in literature: quickly taken up by Yeats; and develops into the Celtic Twilight of poems like 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree': when we hear Yeats reciting it, it is declaimed in a highly liturgical, deliberately elevated way. Irish arts and crafts movement was more public than domestic, unlike its American and English counterparts. It was established in 1894 and held seven exhibitions between 1895-1925. The 1904 show constituted a breakthrough, showing the work of 100 exclusively Irish artisans, including the Dun Emer Guild [1902] and An Tur Gloine [1903] The Dun Emer Guild was founded in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson and the Yeats sisters, Lily and Elizabeth; it achieved tremendous results, especially in embroidery work. - The highpoint of the Celtic Revival and the Irish Arts and crafts movement was An Tur Gloine [The Glass Tower]. It produced an outstanding efflorescence of stained glass in the work of Harry Clarke, Michael Healy and Evie Hone. It was established in Dublin in 1903 by Sarah Purser, under the insistence of Edward Martyn, with the aim of replacing imported industrially produced German mass manufactured products which dominated Victorian Catholic churches

SHANNON SCHEME

- Ambitious engineering scheme to dam the Shannon at Ardnacrusha in Co. Limerick and to generate hydro-electricity, thereby demonstrating the ability of independent Ireland to deliver a giant project4. The massive hydro-electric scheme on the River Shannon became a potent symbol of a new post-Treaty Ireland, as an indigenous source of energy to power industrial development. Built between 1925 and 1929, the project consisted of a dam and power station at Ardnacrusha, near Limerick. Construction photographs show a massive landscape of upturned rock and soil with a head and tail race excavated by a huge array of mechanical plant. The dam itself sits before the river with its concrete facing and spiral iron turbine casings, the whole edifice brutalist in style. The contract for the scheme was signed with the German engineering firm of Siemens-Schuckert in 1925, at a cost of £5.2 million, a massive sum when we consider that the entire government expenditure for the year 1926 to 1927 was only £24 million. The Irish Statesman saw the Shannon as a point of departure between the old Ireland and the new, expressing its certainty that the 'Irish people' would appreciate the attempt to have 'one of their great economic problems' solved 'in the big modern way' - Masterminded by the uncompromising cabinet minister Patrick McGilligan and the engineer Thomas McLaughlin: employed 5,000 Irish workmen and 500 Germans: the Irish painter Sean Keating5 produced a series of paintings of the project in progress; a fundamental act of practical nation building, motivated by an intense patriotism: paved the way for the electrification of rural Ireland by the late 1940s - a major achievement

Dance by 1900

- By the end of the nineteenth century, a remarkable transformation occurred in Irish dance, spearheaded by Fionán MacColuim (1875-1966).32 Thus, the 'Highlanders', 'Lancers' and 'Flings' of Donegal and the sean-nós (old style) dance style of Connemara were rejected in favour of a Munster-based canon of Irish dance, just as 'Munster' Irish was promoted as the canonical dialect by the (Munster-dominated) Gaelic League. - This new canon of Irish dance involved a number of principles. Invented group dances like 'The Walls of Limerick' and 'The Siege of Ennis' were adapted as ideal for large social occasions, because they involved large numbers and traversed the whole floor (unlike the traditional style, which valued the ability to 'dance on a sixpence' in the tightly restricted domestic space). - The stepping style was simplified and rigidified to eliminate the vulgar batter (seen as English clog dancing in disguise) and to curtail flamboyance (as in the theatrical arm-flailing of the Connemara style). - The tempo of the music was also slowed, to create a more stately, refined style. The distaste for the batter was also because of its raw male sexual libido, an insistent theatrical performance of masculinity, displayed in covert competition with other males - These developments were linked to the movement away from 'house' and 'cross- roads' dances to hall-based céilis, a move approved and promoted by the Catholic clergy, and culminating in the Dance Hall Act of 1935. . The Carrigan Committee of 1931 attributed great moral perils to 'the opportunities afforded by the misuse of motor cars for luring girls'. - The impact of the 1935 Act was draconian, making it practically impossible to hold dances without the sanction of the trinity of clergy, police and judiciary. Both the setting as well as the style of the new Irish dances acted to damp down sexuality. The invented dance style was purposely asexual, involving minimal physical contact, as opposed to the full-blooded, full-frontal engagement of, for example, the traditional sets. - This evolution from passion to pallor, from erotic to neurotic almost buried the existing forms. Increasingly, and predictably, the new form appealed most to pre-pubescent children, a development aided by the Gaelic League-sponsored dancing schools in the 1920s. This had three repercussions: insistence on Irish language competence as a prerequisite for teaching excluded the last of the old style dancing masters; a competitive element was introduced which increasingly confined dancing to the stage rather than the dance floor; a new costume-culture was invented - elaborately 'Celtic' in style, making the children look as if they had been 'bespattered by the Book of Kells' 33 (while an added refinement of pinning on medals won in competition gave them the incongruous look of retired Field Marshals. - The astonishing success of Riverdance in the 1990s derived from the fact that it jettisoned this rigid tradition of Irish dance, and reconnected it to the vibrant, sexualised pre-Famine forms, which permitted arms movement, for example

The Great Famine

- By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the diet of the labouring poor had become ever more potato-dependent. As oats became a cash crop and as cows were increasingly beyond their capacity, their diet was stripped of oatmeal and milk. - This pushed them into a mono-cultural dependence on the potato and increasingly on the lumper, a coarse variety which required little manure. By the 1830s, one-third of the population (three million people) relied on potatoes for over 90% of their calorie intake. - Only in the north- eastern oatmeal zone did the potato not triumph utterly. The presence of cheap food, fuel and housing had permitted the population to expand prodigiously between 1760 and 1815, in retrospect, the golden age of both the potato and the Irish poor. That golden age faded in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, when a sharp depression hit the area. Agricultural prices halved, the fickle herring deserted the west coast (where they had been abundant between 1780 and 1810), the linen industry was dislocated by the advent of factory-based spinning and weaving - a succession of hammer blows, accentuated by a series of west summers and bad harvests. The combination of a distressed linen sector and a volatile agricultural situation spawned a shifting underclass in Irish society in the immediate pre-Famine years. Their prospects were essentially limited. While a minimum existence was under written by the potato, their room to manoeuvre was limited as expectations increased. This period witnessed the explosive expansion of mud cabin shanty towns, bogside squatter colonies like the Erris 'troglodytes' or the wretched settlers oozing into the wet deserts of the Bog of Allen, voracious assaults on commonages, or on the limits of cultivation which were pushing up over 1,000 feet. The bog fringe became the location of the dispossessed, eking out a living on the existential and environmental margins of the society from which they had been extruded in a relentless modernising process.. - The cumulative impact of these changes strengthened dangerous tendencies. Firstly, in the pre-Famine period, the more solvent tenants tended to emigrate, thereby weakening the social structure. Secondly the prolonged depression drained existing capital resources and damaged resilience in the face of crisis years. Thirdly, the weakening of other cash inputs forced tenants to sell all their oats, and dragged them increasingly towards dependence on the potato and indeed into dependence on the inferior 'lumper.' The ecological knife-edge was therefore constantly sharpening, pushing those communities ever closer to a potato precipice. Between 1810 and 1845, all potato varieties declined in favour of the lumper - a high bulk variety which could tolerate poorer soils, and above all required little manure. The resulting dense monoculture was also more susceptible to disease. Once oats left the diet, the dependence on the potato was dangerously deepening, especially as the emaciated economy was squeezed by an inexorable demographic regime.

NEWMAN AND THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

- Cardinal John Henry Newman20 belonged to the British reaction to the French Revolution: rediscovery of older roots of European thought and its heritage in religion, art, architecture: opposed the corrosive effects of rationalism: ordained Anglican clergyman: at Oxford 1816-1845: with John Keble and Edward Pusey, started Oxford Movement to revitalise English Anglicanism: 'My battle was with liberalism,' 'national apostacy' and secularism: 'Wonder is not religion or we should be worshipping railroads': he converted to Catholicism in 1845: ordained as RC priest in Rome in 1847: founded Catholic University in Dublin in 1852: Rector 1854-58: series of lectures in 1852 which became the Idea of a University: argued that a university should not just be an academy (dedicated solely to research) nor a seminary (technical training): had to meld theology and philosophy and educate the whole person: university as a teaching of knowledge and wisdom (applied knowledge) not just the purveyor of practical or professional training for mercenary purposes - wanted to reconnect England with the Greek virtues rather than the Roman ones - the practical, getting and spending imperial values, which had corrupted the splendour of the early Republic, and lay like the sword of Damocles over England as a warning to the materialist rapacity and acquisitiveness of the British Empire. He commissioned Newman Chapel as a signature building to symbolise 'the great principle of the University, the indissoluble union of philosophy with religion.' He worked with his Professor of Fine Arts John Hungerford Pollen; opened on 1 May 1856: Newman was pleased: 'The church is the most beautiful one in the three Kingdoms': it is one of the few Greek-inspired Catholic church in an Ireland besotted with Roman models: strongly influenced by Augustus Pugin22 and John Ruskin23

MICHAEL DA VITT AND THE LAND LEAGUE

- Davitt's case, radical memory meant an awareness of historic loss and the need to take responsibility for it. He used his personal Famine experiences as the spur to undermine that Irish landlordism which he blamed for his predicament - Davitt was the son of evicted peasants who had emigrated from County Mayo to the Lancashire textile town of Haslingden as a result of the Great Famine. He went to work in a textile mill at the age of nine and lost his right arm in a factory accident two years later in 1857. - As a teenager he joined the Fenian movement in 1865, was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude for gun- running. After his release from Dartmoor prison in England in December 1877, he returned to County Mayo, where he was 'greeted as a returning hero with torch-light parades and cheering crowds.' His goal was to organise 'a war against landlordism for a root settlement of the land question. - As this statement suggests, Davitt was not only a fervent nationalist but an internationalist.52 He sympathised with India's struggle for freedom and defended the rights of Aborigines against the depredations of white Australians many of them Irish immigrants or Australians of Irish extraction. He also spoke out forcefully against the vicious anti-Semitic pogroms in early twentieth-century Russia and supported the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Palestine. - A relentless foe of British imperial policy in southern Africa,

Bogsiders

- Derry and especially the Bogside, now took centre stage. For centuries, the Bogside had been a festering Catholic slum. - Now the Bogsiders declared a No-Go area for police and painted a celebrated slogan 'You are now entering Free Derry'. An eighteen-year old apprentice butcher named Martin McGuinness led the local IRA in 'The Battle of the Bogside', in which locals fiercely resisted attempted police incursions. In Belfast, the even more outnumbered Catholic communities were under siege, as outraged Unionists vented their spleen on them. On 15 August 1969, an angry Protestant mob surged from the Shankhill into the Lower Falls, mingling with the B-Specials and armed with Sterling sub-machine guns and Webley revolvers. As they advanced across the interface, they burned out Catholic homes and shot into windows. Only the old timers in the IRA like Joe Cahill were armed to stop them - the entire weaponry available to the Belfast IRA was a Lee Enfield 303, four handguns and an ancient Tommy gun. A lone IRA man, Martin Meehan, firing from a vantage point in a local school at the advancing Protestant mob, halted them. The slogan 'IRA = I Ran Away' allegedly appeared on gable walls in Belfast the next day: infuriated northerners believed that the IRA as a necessary protection had been hijacked in the 1960s by Marxist-oriented southerners, who had sold it out, and they were determined to regain control of it. Catholic communities felt defenceless before the loyalist onslaught and the British army came into Belfast initially to 'save' the Catholics, and were initially welcomed by them with cups of tea.

four new features of Irish- America

- First, there was the quantum leap in numbers, as two million flooded in between 1846 and 1855-luckily coincident with a great U.S. boom. This sheer weight of numbers gave the Famine generation a defining role in the evolution of the ethnic self- image and social views of Irish-America. Its hard bitten, working class status, its militant Catholicism, its unflinching nationalism, its minority psychology, its racism were to survive relatively intact until the 1950s, aided by Irish group cohesion, labour affiliation and attachment to the Democratic Party. - Second, ninety percent of the new emigrants were Catholic. This created a higher visibility for Catholicism in America (where the percentage of Catholics tripled from four to twelve per cent between 1840 and 1880). Prior to the Famine, Catholics were a fringe group, a curiosity in America, numbering about half a million. There was only one Catholic chapel in New York City in 1800 but twelve new chapels were added in the 1840s, another ten in the 1850s and by 1860, one in four of New Yorkers was Irish-born. It also allowed the Catholic church to establish itself as the distinctive Irish-American institution and it created a Protestant backlash, in which anti-Irish nativism consolidated Irish group consciousness around Catholicism. - Third, Irish-America in the post-Famine period became more industrialised (as America itself industrialised) and more regionalised (as industry became concentrated in the northeast). Thus post-Famine Irish-America became more self conscious, defensive and institutionalised. But as it did so, it also nourished a distinctive Irish sub-culture that humanised the gothic horrors of the great industrial cities. At neighbourhood level, this revolved around the parish and the pub; at a more formal level, it involved the Trade Unions, the Fraternities, and the political machine of the Democratic Party. Physically, it found expression in a burgeoning infrastructure of schools, churches, hospitals and orphanages. - Fourth, the post-Famine Irish had a much greater nationalist sensibility. This facilitated an exceptional group distinctiveness, which quickly formed around the pre-existing Irish-American leadership. Schooled in the O'Connellite tradition of sectarian solidarity, the Irish emigrants were more politicised than most other nineteenth-century emigrant groups. Given their Irish apprenticeship in mass democratic politics, the Irish emigrants were pre-adapted to become successful in the American political sphere, where they successfully used the Democratic Party as a political project of ethnic enhancement. The Irish-Americans thrived in Tammany Hall: the Ward Bosses ran the urban political machines, and trading access and jobs for votes.

dairyman system

- From the 1690s onwards, in the mid-Munster countryside, the dairyman system dominated, especially in the Lee and Blackwater valleys. This system revolved around the great dairy masters. 0 A big one could own 1,000 cattle (Irish: fear mile bo). He leased 20-40 cows to a dairyman in return for a butter rent. The dairyman disposed of the calves, kept the buttermilk and was supplied with a cabin and potato ground. Dairy houses were also supplied, with a room for milk and the necessary utensils (pails, keelers, firkins, pecks, and later churns). The herd size did not exceed forty, which was the maximum that could be milked by hand by a single family. - The work in dairying was performed by women, in the field and in the dairy. Given the region's mild winters and soft summers, and consequent all-year-round grazing, there was no need for custom-built byres; cows were driven morning and evening to the bawn (Irish: bo-dhun), a sheltered milking place near the dwelling house. Its tolerance to outdoor wintering, disease resistance and high milk yield guaranteed the pre-eminenceof the 'black' or Kerry cow - the indigenous genetic variety - in dairying. - Pig-keeping was invariably integrated with dairying, because skimmed milk was an excellent foodstuff; one pig could be kept for each three cows.

the Keen political

- If the keen was anathema to a modernising, institutional church determined on obliterating its vernacular competitor, it also occupied a prominent position in British attacks on Gaelic culture, as a consistent signifier of Ireland's cultural and political incivility - 'the counterfeit and barbarous clamour of howling savages that would disgrace the funeral of a Hottentot or the obsequies of a native of Otaheite [Tahiti]' - The keen was assessed as a barbaric mark of primitivism, an animal howl inhabiting the ambiguous borderlands between nature and culture, a sinister sound which embodied the strange danger of Irish emotion in all its raw and violent excess. Its affront to the canon of polite taste was all the more unsettling in that it has a formulaic, ritualistic and even professional dimension (in the case of keening women). This affect was heightened by the keen's theatrical performance of emotion, which signified Gothic Catholic excess, as opposed to Protestant privacy and inwardness in response to grief. The shocking co-existence within the wake of laughter and lament, of a wildly oscillating emotional register, signaled Celtic inconsistency, the lack of the fully formed, regulated, rational personality of civil Anglo-Saxon society. - This ethical critique focused obsessively on the mouth, the vector of oral culture, insistently envisaged as lax and unstable - the site of drunkenness, sedition and the excessive emotion of the keen.29 Hence arose the concern to impose the Kantian hierarchy of the sense - to promote the objectifying eye and ear in place of the profligate immediacy, the inferior taste of the mouth. The Anglicisation of Ireland in the nineteenth century required a re-ordering of the Irish senses, the acquisition of the stiff upper lip in place of raucous, riotous loose talk. This newly disciplined Irish body could then produce a new ethical subject - rational, self-interested and above all consistent. - The overlap of the political and emotional economy is nowhere so transparent as in this discourse. In her convent boarding school at Bruff in county Limerick, Sissy O'Brien was struck by the nun's emphasis on strict silence, believing that she and her classmates would have been 'lively and joyous, but for incessant repression and the haunting fear of breaking rules, especially of breaking silence.

Introduction to Potato Famine

- In 1600, Ireland was a lightly settled, overwhelmingly pastoral, heavily wooded country. Its economy was characterised by the unprocessed nature of its exports - hides, fish, and timber in particular - and by its low population of one million. - By the end of the seventeenth century, the most rapid transformation in any European economy, society, and culture had been effected. Two processes were central to this process: the initial subjugation, subsequent colonisation and final integration of Ireland into the expanding English state, and the concurrent enhancement of Ireland's location, with the articulation of the North American commercial world. - After 1685, Ireland now became the last European stepping-stone to America, and a very close neighbour of the increasingly powerful and consumer-driven England. - The emerging world economic system impacted on what had been a remote, peripheral, and backward island economy; landscape itself, settlement patterns, farming systems, land use, demography and regional economies were all transformed. A striking feature is the suddenness of Ireland's transition from utter backwardness to comparative modernity, without experiencing the long conditioning of other medieval societies. - This great leap forward was predicated on its enhanced location and strategic importance in the seventeenth century. However, this economic acceleration was not achieved without inflicting severe social and cultural trauma. - Ireland was the only European country to suffer the precipitous decline of its national language; ethnic, sectarian, and social fissures were opened on the island; the country exhibited startling and frequently incompatible blends of archaism and precocious modernity.

STATISTICS

- In 1959, Ireland sent 90% of its exports to the UK (which operated a cheap food policy): in 1970, 66%: in 1995, 26%; in 1999, down to 25%. - In 1970, 12% of Irish exports went to Europe: in 1995, this had quadrupled to 47%; In 1996, Irish GDP per head = 103% vs. UK - 41% of Irish exports in 2001 were high tech exports (Finland second with 26%); - We are now increasingly a function of the NASDAQ: USA is the key player in the Irish economy: it generates 60% of all projects coming into Ireland. There are currently 585 USA companies in Ireland, employing 70,000 people, and representing thirty billion euro investment.11 - 25% of total US green field investment into Europe in the 1990s came to Ireland: Greenfield FDI is far more advantageous to the receiving economy than the Merger & Acquisition FDI that tends to occur in more advanced economies.1,110 MNCs with 120,000 jobs - still evolving (but Irish-owned companies employ almost 100,000 in USA, which is getting closer to the number employed by US companies in Ireland): Ireland is the ninth largest source of FDI in the USA [albeit only 2.1%): Ireland invested 18.5 billion dollars in 2001, which doubled from 1998, quadrupled from 1996 and increased by a factor of eight since 1991.12 In the most recent efforts to measure globalisation, the Republic comes out as the most globalised country of 62 states measured in the AT Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine index in 2001.13 [It had ranked sixth in 1998, and first in 2000]. This index measures integration into the global economic and political system. Ireland's position is driven by its export-led economy. Ireland has become a rich country by world standards over the last decade. OECD study puts Ireland in top four wealthiest countries in world [after Luxembourg, Norway, and the USA] as measured by GDP/purchasing power parities: we have moved up dramatically since the 1990s.14 - The state in the 1990s created over four times the amount of new jobs as the UK or the EU. Income per head has risen from 60% of the EU average to almost 100%. We outstripped the UK in both GDP and GNP per head in the 1990s, an enormously resonant symbolic achievement given our long history of colonial dependency on them. The UK is also no longer our biggest trading partner, having been overtaken by the USA. By the late 1990s, we were attracting building workers from Britain, having supplied them with our workers for decades.15 According to the Economist index, house prices have tripled 1995-2003 [versus a 54% rise in USA over the same period]: luxury cars sales soared by 158% between 1994 and 1999: there are 1.7 million Irish credit card holders - one of the highest rates of penetration at 46% of the population in the world.

Dance before famine

- In a culture of poverty, body language could offer joyous liberation, an exuberant display of flamboyant theatricality lifting out of the material world. Dancing became a cultural statement, whose somatic and kinetic intelligence blended into a richly expressive vernacular art. The accomplished traditional dancer rode the rhythm, consummately mastering the movement. But (s)he also oscillated along the porous boundary between respect for tradition and an assertive individuality. - For the spectators, the attraction was the expressive tension between tradition and the individual talent; the dancer, bound to the strictly prescribed music, could also innovate within and against it. Where male and female danced together, there was also sexual theatre - expressed through the heavier 'hit' of the male dancer (culminating in the 'batter', heavy rhythmic drumming with the full foot), counterpoised against the quicker, buoyant step of the female performer. In the crowded social settings of pre-Famine Ireland, the challenge and the spectacle was heightened by the rigid limitations of space - The rich pre-Famine repertoire of Irish dances involved the creative interplay between indigenous and exogenous forms, resulting in popular hybrids like the 'sets' and 'reels' (an Irish adaptation of the continental 'quadrille'). The itinerant dancing masters customised these new forms, translating them into a popular idiom and then propagated them in their newly standardised forms through their itinerant teaching circuit. Dance was a malleable, inherently portable art form that could easily transfer from one place to another. - The Catholic church turned against the robust tradition of dance, because it could be free, intoxicating, spontaneous, sexual. It involved close encounters between male and female; it could occur in unregulated spaces, like public houses and cross-roads; it belonged to the participants without mediators or masters. The church moved to domesticate its wilder energies and to control the time and places of performance. This occurred simultaneously with the increasing dominance of industrial time regulated by the clock, over agrarian time (regulated by the daily and seasonal cycle). In the post-Famine period, the dance tradition was leached of its vitality, exuberance and hybridity; like the hedge schoolmaster, the dancing master was inexorably squeezed out as the churches increasingly frowned on their activities

Dairying

- In south Munster, especially in the hinterland of Cork city, the eighteenth century was the decisive period in laying the framework of the modern landscape. The rapid rise in external demand led to the equally rapid rise of a market-oriented agriculture, with an especially buoyant period between 1740 and 1815. - There was an abrupt transition from unprocessed primary products (hides, fish, wool) to processed beef and butter. These changes were facilitated by the estate system, by a dietary revolution that saw the potato eclipse 'white' [dairy products] meats, and by the commercialisation of agricultural production. Butter, previously consumed as a food, was now released to the market, being substituted in the diet by the potato. - Cork city became the most significant centre for commercial butter production in the Atlantic world as its grass-rich hinterland with its old dairying tradition became an intensive butter-producing region. - City butter factors evolved a sophisticated market structure, with fixed prices, accurate weighing procedures and quality-control systems. By advancing cash and firkins[ barrels], they penetrated across all strata of rural society in Munster. This was reflected by a four-fold growth of butter exports in the eighteenth century, a six-fold growth in rents, and in the value of Cork's exports, and a trebling of the population of the city

Reagan Democrats' of the 1980s

- In the 1960s, white flight dissolved the traditional Irish American neighbourhood and weakened the inner city parishes: the Irish were replaced by black and Latino communities and the suburbanised Irish became more diluted as even as they also accelerated their rapid social rise. - That in turn paved the way for the 'Reagan Democrats' of the 1980s, when for the first time Irish-America turned decisively towards the Republican Party. Today the claim to being Irish-America is cost-free, unlike in earlier generations where it had downsides attached. For many it is - like so much else in a consumer society - a life-style option, whose attractiveness has increased both as multi-culturalism surged in America,

COMMEMORATING THE FAMINE

- In the commemoration of the Famine, the visible presence of women was striking. Irish women were actively involved in an act of cultural recuperation. This generation matured in a new paradigm of Irish history, which, for the first time, had seriously to acknowledge the presence of women. Boland attacked their marginalisation within the historiographical consensus, claiming that, with respect to representation, Irish women 'always have been outside history.'81 - As a result, 'Womanhood and Irishness are metaphors for one another. There are resonancesof humiliation, oppression, and silence in both of them and I think you can understand one by experiencing the other.' The silence and invisibility increased in the case of the Famine dead and Irish women emigrants - victims of a double erasure. - Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill's poem sequence 'Na Murúcha a Thriomaigh' ('The merpeople who dried on land') explores the devastating cultural change induced by the Famine, changes which cast Irish people as 'fish out of water': 'In our attempt never to know anything like the Great Famine again, we even changed language'. Ní Dhomhnaill describes the Famine as 'the last and lethal body blow to a distinct native way of life and world view, epitomised by, but not purely confined to the Irish language,' and she considers the language as offering 'another way of being in the world.' Beyond the language shift, Irish people entered 'a waking death where we had no emotional memory of who it was that we were or what it was that had happened to us.' Ni Dhomhnaill's strategic use of the Irish language is as a vocabulary of the vanquished, a repertoire of the repressed, a language of refuge and intimacy (like Yiddish). - The language functions as an alternative archive, a collective counter-memory. In this way she is able to reclaim the language from the state, and to use its marginal and minority status as an analogue for the position of Irish women. In particular, its inherited forms, like the oral tales, can be reworked into a 'magic realist' perspective on the Irish experience. - These projects treat history as rememorative, seeking to write back in that which had been erased or submerged. Rememoration is a term invented by the American novelist Toni Morrison, an awareness that 'the act of imagination is bound up with memory' and that individual memory and social memory are inextricably linked.

Gender

- In the post-Famine period, equal numbers of men and women emigrated - a phenomenon unique in European immigration patterns, and something that was not true of the pre-Famine period. - the Famine loosened the Irish from previous constraints on single girls travelling alone. The Irish were now willing to allow young girls to travel as singles, not in family groups, although the shock of travel was softened by the presence of chain migration: American exerted a huge demand for domestic servants - the Irish 'biddies'. Servant jobs acted as a prelude to marriage. Most young women were between the ages of 20-24 when emigrating, although many went as teenagers - As well as creating marriages of mere convenience, the dowry system froze out poorer girls and younger sisters. It was these who fuelled the astonishing female flow of migration in post-Famine Ireland. America was their preferred destination, because it offered them the opportunity of achieving the independent domestic sphere from which they were so rigorously excluded at home. In that sense, their American dream issued from an Irish nightmare; America freed them from oppressive social conventions, the dead weight of the dead generations, weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living - A five to ten year career in domestic services allowed Irish girls to acquire the domestic skills of a bourgeois household, while saving sufficient to make their own dowry

RADICAL MEMORY

- Ireland was culturally traumatised in the immediate post-Famine period. The cultural revival at the end of the nineteenth century was a delayed second- generation effect, inspired by people themselves born during the Famine. The best examples are Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Michael Cusack (1847-1906). - The reshaping was necessary to fill out the vacuum created by the 'hollowing out' effect of the Famine. An Irish radical memory deployed the past to challenge the present, to restore into possibility historical moments that had been blocked or unfulfilled earlier. - This radical memory was possessed of a prospective rather than an elegiac nostalgia, a nostalgia for the future not the past. It was a redemptive project, harnessing unreleased potential, preserving alternative futures that were not realised but still available. Radical memory makes us heirs of the past and its latent utopian possibilities. - The promise of a historical event is always more than what actually happened. There is more in the past than what happened; at any given point in time, multiple trajectories toward the future were open. Radical memory can restore this openness to the past. This dialogue of memory and expectation keeps alive the memory of suffering and defeat against the obliterative force of the victors' narrative. Radical memory opens a space for the parallel creation of a counterpoint history, of loss, of victimisation, of humiliation. - This redemptive models of memory must also acknowledge the irredeemable losses that lie at the core of historical injustice, loss so absolute as to be beyond redemption, as has been powerfully argued in the case of the slave trade, the Shoah or the Irish Famine. Literary and ethical discourse still leaves a historical hole a negative space of absolute loss, a limit that theory cannot transgress, that ethics cannot redeem, a disconsolate future that has lost its past. This is also the realm of contingency and necessity, of Marx's piercing aphorism that people make their own history but not in conditions of their own choosing. We must therefore be alert to different modes of memory: an individualist, self-obsessed one, which internalises blame as damage and melancholia, and a culturally induced one, which seeks explanations in wider spatial structures and deeper narratives. It therefore allows for translation from the personal to the public sphere. The second approach avoids the pitfalls of helplessness, of internalising damaging notions of fate, destiny and providence: by seizing responsibility for memory and therefore history, it restores agency and bears an enabling rather than a disabling memory. This prevents the slide of memory into nationalist nostalgia. In a sense, it radicalises historicism. - Accordingly it avoids the pitfalls of the therapeutic or re-enchantment model of memory as applied to collectivities. The dangers of using a Freudian vocabulary of memory must be negotiated if we want to emphasise that memory is itself a social construct; it is inappropriate to transpose psychoanalytic concepts directly from individuals to collectivities. - Radical memory seeks not for the past it had, but for the past it had not, the desired past; not an actual history but a possible history. It is anti-nostalgic, seeking to bring the past into the present not to leave it there.36 It deploys the past to challenge the present, to release cultural energies stored in thwarted moments from the past.

SCALE OF EMIGRATION

- Irish emigration is unique in its scale, duration, and geographical spread. One in two of every Irish person born since 1800 has emigrated. 9-10 million Irish people emigrated since 1700 (mostly to the USA, although since 1920 to Britain). It is also the earliest and, therefore, most consequential episode in the great period of mass trans-Atlantic migration. At least a quarter of a million Irish had entered America prior to 1776; another 100,00 entered between 1776 and 1815, and one million in the three decades before the Great Famine began in 1845. The Irish composed ten per cent (six million) of the sixty million Europeans who migrated in this period - over ten times what one might expect on the basis of existing population. Emigration became an enduring and disturbing reality - the black hole at the centre of Irish culture. The Famine inevitably raises the issue of emigration - Nearly one million emigrated between 1846 and 1850, with a peak outflow of a quarter of a million in 1851 - Another 1.3 million went in the 1850s and 1860s:1851-1871 - 2.5 million: 1871-1921 - 2.5 million:Five million people left Ireland between 1800-1870, the highest rate in Europe per capita: - By 1890, 40% of all people born in Ireland were living abroad. In 1841, the Irish composed one-third of UK population: In 1871, only one-fifth; in 1911, only one-tenth: emigration dramatically eroded the relative importance of Ireland in Britain.

FROM IRELAND TO AMERICA

- It is stressing, for example, the continuing communication across the ocean, the ability to reform families and build communities based around locality. The number of letters distributed by the Irish post-office increased from five million in 1851 to twenty million by 1914 - even within a shrinking population. - It is important, then, not to see the Irish as passive, inert and uncomprehending victims of America, crippled by their disabling Gaelic and Celtic past as though the lumper proletariat of pre-Famine Ireland became the lumpen-proletariat of America.32 Instead of the lonesome lemmings of an earlier tradition of Irish-American scholarship, we need to see the Irish as versatile, dynamic and adaptive. And part of that adaptability was the choice of urban America as their preferred destination. - By the 1850s, almost eighty per cent of the Irish were concentrated in the industrial core from Baltimore to Portland, making them among the most urbanised people in the world. But in doing so, the Irish anticipated the urban future of America, not its rural past. In this sense too, the cities of the Irish were in America, not in Ireland. New York's foreign-born population soared from 9% in 1830 to 36% in 1845 and to 51% by 1855, largely on the back of Irish immigration. By 1861, there were more Irish-born in New York City (260,000) than in either Dublin or Belfast - The Irish preference for urban settings was also a preference for the Irish neighbourhood: the Irish were not ghettoised by prejudice/fear, but by choice, through a strong emphasis on home, family, and neighbours - an emphasis transplanted from the embedded core values of pre-Famine Ireland. - Irish people should stay in urban areas where it was easier to organise religion - services, clergymen, charity, education - rather than settle in isolated rural areas; the Catholic colonisation schemes in Nebraska and Minnesota failed spectacularly. This sense of Irish 'ghettos' should be distinguished from its modern counterpart with its connotation of social disorganisation, broken families and chronic unemployment. Individualist-oriented Americans found it hard to understand the strength of Irish communality.34 Ultimately,the famous Irish 'ghettoes' - like the Back of the Yards in Chicago, the North End in Boston, or the Five Points in New York - were not ghettoes at all

1916 REBELLION

- Others: 'England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.' - e.g. Sir Roger Casement -WWI = Imperial War): IRB still involved. -Pearse peopled his past with his ideal type characters, from Cuchulainn to Colum Cille. So strident is his invocation of the sagas, of the virtues above all of Cuchulainn,31 that the unwary can be lead into thinking that Pearse dwelt in a perpetual Celtic mist. But the relationship between past and present in his mind was complicated. He regularly invoked the past to legitimise his image of the future. But he ensured that the past could be safely summoned to his side. For this past was an imaginary past reconstructed in the image of his ideal future. Pearse acknowledged in 1913 that 'Cuchulainn may never have lived and there may never have been a boy corps at Eamhain'.32 Whether Cuchulainn ever existed was beside the point. The point, an essential part of the reconstruction of self-respect for defeated peoples, was to endow Ireland with a noble past to enhance its self-respect in the present. Pearse ransacked the past for whatever he needed for his own polemical purposes - General Post Office (GPO) taken: British brought a gunship up the Liffey and shelled O'Connell Street: Pearse surrendered to prevent bloodshed. The centre of Dublin was reduced to rubble.38 A small group, met by Dublinhostility and incomprehension, especially in middle class areas (Ranelagh, Rathmines): 'After a talk with a few civilians and a study of the frightened, worried and dazed women huddled in doorways, I judge there is littlesympathy for the rebellion'... fires on Sackville Street 'served to drive out the Sinn Féiners like so many rats from an old mill':39 'a mad orgy' led by Connolly, 'the notorious syndicalist leader.'40 Virol [a product designed ' as 'food for war nerves'] was strongly advertised in the Irish Independent: described last week as 'a horrible nightmare': run on vegetables at Mr Beggs place 'with 'respectable citizens carrying cabbages, cauliflowers and rhubarb with the humblest'.41 The Irish Times fully supported execution of the leaders: 'the safety of the whole kingdom and the peace of Ireland is at stake': executions were 'the only possible course': Cork Constitution also advocated 'the penalty of the hangman's rope'.42 Irish Independent; 'We are no advocates of undue severity but undue leniency to some of the worst firebrands [Connolly] would be just as bad'.43 Limerick Leader: 'The time has come when all hesitation should finally cease and when Irish nationalists must make up their mind to be either on the side of futile revolution or on that of constitutionalism and success.'44 - After the Rising, sixteen leaders were executed: leaders court-martialled and shot at Kilmainham Gaol: Connolly strapped to a chair, because he could not stand due to a leg injury sustained in the fighting. Sir Roger Casement, a pioneer humanitarian, was subjected to disgusting treatment on account of his homosexuality and was ignominiously hanged as a traitor: strenuous efforts to smear him.45 Compare the execution of Ruiz by the Spanish in the Phillipines. - In 1916, there were 1,600 volunteers, plus 200 from Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. 450 killed, 2,500 injured, 3,000 arrested, 3,500 jailed. One thousand were quickly released but 1,867 were sent to Wales, especially to a special camp at Frongoch, their jail in Wales, which has been called 'the university of the revolution'. This group included Michael Collins. Séan Mac Diarmada observed before surrendering in 1916: 'The thing you must do, all of you, is survive, come back, carry on the work so nobly begun this week. Those of us who are shot can die happy if we know you'll be living to finish what we started'. - After the executions, public sympathy swung back massively to the rebels. Sinn Féin got excessive credit for Rising because the British insisted on calling it the Sinn Féin rising. John Dillon [leader of Irish Parliamentary Party: 'It is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided'. British ambassador to USA: 'Our cause for the present among the Irish here is a lost one. They have blood in their eyes when they look our way

Geography of Origin

- Pre-Famine: The geography of emigration was rooted in Ulster and Leinster. - Post-Famine: There was a switch to Connaught, and the west of Ireland. Ulster becomes much less important, although it still has an outflow. - The most important counties are Cork [half a million left it between 1846 and 1921], Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Donegal. - The destination of emigrants changed, with a shift of emigrant flows from Great Britain to the United States. - In the pre-Famine period, there were 100,000 emigrants, mostly to British destinations. These tended to be southern in origin, Catholic, paying passengers, and were not derived from the ranks of the very poorest. - After 1815, there was an accelerated flow of emigration: one million from 1815-1845 [with half a million of these going to Great Britain]. - After 1845, two million went in a decade, primarily to the United States. This shift from Britain to USA was driven by economic growth in USA, at the same time that there was a slump in British labour markets. This instigated the process of chain migration. Slumps and peaks in emigrant flows mirrored highs and lows of the American economy. In general Irish emigrants had an excellent knowledge of US, due to the steady flow of emigrant letters.

Scholars agree broadly on the 'bourgeois character of Dáil Éireann and Rumpf's conclusions about the 'essential conservatism of the revolutionary regime

- Scale of land agitation among rural small-holders, particularly in Connaught, and the rise of a formidable labour movement in the cities and towns, albeit a labour movement that tended to 'operate independently of the Republican campaign.'76 Jim Larkin's powerful campaign with the Dublin poor, and the Dublin Lockout of 1913 was forcefully opposed by the Catholic church.77Brian Farrell's call to distinguish between 'revolutions that involve some large cataclysmic social changes and other forms of 'internal war' that simply change the structure and personnel of government.'78 A 'major transition' rather than a transformation:79 the displacement of constitutional nationalists by the advocates of physical force and the reluctant willingness of British authorities to negotiate a comprehensive settlement with men that they had for years been denouncing as 'murderers.' - The contrasting roles of Collins and De Valera in the struggle for independence is a persistent theme in recent Irish historiography, reached a wide audience through the medium of Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins (1996). Celtic Tiger Ireland came down clearly on Collins' side: the Big Fellow's administrative skill and organisational ability: endorses his 'pragmatism' and 'practical nationalism': Collins was also one of the 'gunmen', of legendary ruthlessness: he gave relatively free rein to fellow gunmen such as Dan Breen who took unauthorised military initiatives on their own and despised the 'politicians' in the ranks of Sinn Féin. But when the truce took effect in July 1921, Collins was ready to make the transition from military to political struggle. He believed that by coming out in the open, he and other IRA operatives had forsaken their freedom to function in an underground campaign beyond the reach of British military forces. Difficult choices Collins faced as a member of the Irish delegation that negotiated the Treaty. - In the course of the negotiations, Collins 'irrevocably moved from the company of the self-sacrifice school of Irish nationalism' and came to stand for 'the new Ireland, the Ireland which aimed to succeed, not by eliciting sympathy, but by compelling respect.'80 Among all of the leaders of the Irish struggle for independence, Collins was best equipped to bring to fruition the vision of a transformed Ireland, expressed in the First Dáil's Democratic Programme of January 1919. He was killed by anti-Treaty Republicans at Beál Na mBláth in his native West Cork in August 1922. De Valera becomes the villain: the Machiavellian Dev sent a reluctant Collins to London in his place so that he could avoid responsibility for the compromise agreement that was the inevitable outcome of the negotiations. Collins, the military man, understood what the slippery De Valera, the politician, could - or would - not: that a return to warfare would be a major setback for the Irish cause, and that the Treaty, for all of its shortcomings, really did (in Collins' words) 'give us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire ... but the freedom to achieve it'.81 - The Collins/De Valera story becomes a morality tale of ideology versus pragmatism, of a misty-eyed attachment to the Republican ideal82 versus a practical nationalism, of a legendary gunman turned courageous politician versus a devious politician who, in the end, aided and abetted the most ruthless and uncompromising 'militarist-republicans'. Dev on Collins: 'It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Collins and it will be recorded at my expense'. 83 That version flattens out and oversimplifies a complex historical landscape. After Collins' death, his successors in the Free State government developed an economic program for Ireland that was anything but 'pragmatic' and 'flexible.' Indeed, in its cautious conservatism, it was far more reminiscent of Tory orthodoxy than of anything that could be called distinctively Irish. This was, in part, a response to the bloodletting of the Civil War. It also reflected the long- standing class outlook of Kevin O'Higgins, Patrick Hogan, and the 'Catholic establishment in waiting'.84 - Roy Foster's argument that the Anglo-Irish Treaty could have been negotiated without the 'bloody catalogue of assassination and war' is simply wrong.85 British politicians (Lloyd George, Winston Churchill) sought, in their public rhetoric, to present Ireland's war for independence as an ugly internal quarrel among the Irish people. While acknowledging the depth of the internal divisions, Costello argues that 'it was partition as an active policy of the British Government that ensured a divided Ireland'.86 The pervasive threat of renewed British military aggression in 1922 imposed enormous constraints upon any expression of the democratic will of the Irish people. To infer any such outcome from the various elections held during that year is to minimise the grim fact that most Irish men and women were gripped by fear at this pivotal moment. - Partition emerged onto the political agenda as a fatally attractive solution to the Irish problem. By institutionalising 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' states, it was hoped to make nation and state congruent within the sectarian equation. Sir James Craig could proclaim that Northern Ireland was 'a Protestant state for a Protestant people' and the Free State developed a mirror image Catholic state in the south. Bloody partitions: Ireland, Palestine, Pakistan, Cyprus. There would be a long-term historical price to be paid for colonialism, as Lloyd George had warned Craig in 1920:

police and magistrates hurling

- Similarly, the police and magistrates also intervened. The veteran Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa (1831-1915) claimed that magistrates forbade hurling and that he had personally witnessed police setting out to halt a match.40 To this trinity of landlord, parish priest and policeman could be added the figure of the strong farmer as the key agent who sounded the death knell of hurling. The game did not die; it was killed. - The Young Irelander Michael Doheny (1805-1863) noted how the game was 'fast dying away' and assigned as a first cause, clerical distrust. But he then identified a second, and more important factor: 'the disinclination of the farmers to allow the hurling on their grazing lands'.41 As the socially respectable withdrew from participation, the game was kept alive by boys and by the very poor. Because meadows were increasingly unavailable, the game was literally squeezed out into the roadside (where it assumed the dangerous form of road hurling) or into the coarse countryside (where it declined into scuaibín - a rough and tumble cross-country scramble, devoid of the grace, skill and discipline of its elegant predecessor. - Generalising in 1877, the writer A. M. O'Sullivan recalled the effect of the Famine on the ordinary people: 'Their ancient sports and pastimes, everywhere disappeared and in many parts have never returned. The outdoor games, the hurling match, are seen no more.' Another commentator claimed that 'the most of the hurlers are now beyond the Atlantic wave and the remainder go whistling vacantly around the roads at home.' In 1877, a Dublin official believed that 'the Irish are the most ignorant people in amusing themselves that exist in the civilised world

Class transformation

- Small farmers also came under pressure in the post-Famine period - after the Famine, strong farmers and graziers increased their holdings at the expense of their weaker neighbours. - Most poignantly of all, the cottier system disappeared in the post-Famine decades. The number of agricultural labourers dropped sharply from 1.2 million in 1845, to 0.9m in 1851, to 0.7m in 1861 - halving in less than a generation. From being 30% of all houses in 1841, the one roomed cabin share dropped to 10% by 1861, and had virtually disappeared (at 1%) in 1891). Hugh Dorian: 'The poor were treated and despised as if they were beings of quite a different creation. The satiated never understand the emaciated'.

THE REBELLION AFTERMATH AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

- Support ebbed away from John Redmond as Sinn Féin grew massively in authority and used 1916 as an effective propaganda and recruiting device: De Valera 49 (the senior survivor of 1916) was elected president of Sinn Féin: Death of John Redmond in 1918: - Conscription was imposed in Britain in January 1916 with Ireland exempted: in 1918 the decision was taken to extend it to Ireland: Sinn Féin could now effectively present itself as a peace party that could save Ireland from the horrors of war into which Redmond had recklessly plunged Ireland. The Catholic church issued the 'Mansion House document' that was to be read publicly at all masses on 21 April 1918, condemning conscription as an 'oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people, have a right to resist.'50 In 1920, De Valera described WW1 as a 'a cruel war and a cruel peace.' General election 1918: two million voted, delivering a Sinn Fein landslide: they won seventy three seats - abstentionist: democratic mandate: wider franchise: women over thirty got vote: Sinn Féin got 485,105 votes versus 237,393 for the Irish Parliamentary Party: Sinn Féin withdrew from Westminster and unilaterally set up their own parliament Dáil Eireann in the Mansion House in Dublin on 21 January 1919 with Dev as President, even though he was imprisoned at Lincoln in England. Dáil Eireann issued a declaration of Independence based on the Democratic programme of the first Dáil:51 - De Valera was sent to USA in 1919-20 to raise funds, where he proved very successful raising five million dollars: subsequently held up in treaty split and internecine feuding in Irish-America. A key figure here was the Philadelphia- based Joseph McGarrity.52 'To me Sinn Féin is the nation organised. I never regarded it as a mere political machine.' - Eamon De Valera, 1922.

Pre-Famine Politics - Act of Union

- The Act of Union was an imposed imperial solution to Irish problems. Its central failure was the inability to accompany it with 'Catholic Emancipation,' a failure determined by intense elite and popular British hostility to the idea of Catholics as fellow citizens. - The short term effect of the Union was effectively to endorse Orange policies in Ireland. It had been assumed by key British decision makers that Irish problems emanated from an Irish-(Protestant and Catholic) inability to rule themselves: the Westminster wand would magically metamorphoses the Irish (like the Scots after their 1707 Union) into pliant British citizens. But Irish society under the Union became spectacularly more violent and poorer - posing a difficult question. - This racialist discourse solved a major problem for the post-Union British perspective on Ireland. Prior to the Union, Irish difficulties could be decisively attributed to the incompetence and corruption of its national legislature. It was assumed that the self- evident virtues of an impartial imperial legislature would painlessly extend the manifold blessings of British civilisation to Ireland. But Irish poverty and violence spectacularly increased rather than decreased after the Union, posing a severe interpretative difficulty. Why was Ireland not improving under the aegis of this marvellous empire - a modern empire of trade, civilisation and moral progress, not of force and fear? . - the 1790s and subsequently, Ireland assumed the French stereotypes - Papist, republican, anti-monarchist - in both elite and popular British perceptions. Under the Union, it became the other within, whose poverty, violence, and surly separatism became a curiously comforting antithesis to British virtue, prosperity and stability. Proto-disciplines like ethnology, phrenology and sociology gave a respectable scientific veneer to these prejudices. As science evolved a stadial3 model of civilisation, race, religion and diet (paddy, popery and the potato) conspired to leave Ireland low on the ladder. By linking Celtic inferiority and the perverse popery of the Irish poor, Irish poverty could be interpreted as biological and moral in origin, comfortably outside the remit of remedial political measures.

EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS

- The Eucharistic Congess of June 1932 represented the triumphant public staging of the fusion of Catholicism and nationalism in Irish identity.6 It was presented as the culmination of Irish history, marking the fifteenth hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Catholicism to Ireland with St. Patrick in 432 (His bell was taken from the National Museum and used at the Mass to signal the continuity). Over one million people (out of a state population of three million) attended mass in the Phoenix Park, to hear the great Irish tenor John McCormack sing the Panis Angelicus.7 [See Appendix: Seamus Deane on McCormack] The event also drew a line under Civil War hostilities, helped by the peaceful democratic transition to a Fianna Fáil government composed of the group defeated in the Civil War. Its staging in Dublin signalled international recognition of the stability of the Free State, while the remarkably enthusiastic participation of the Dublin slum dwellers8, commented on by the English novelist, G. K. Chesterton, demonstrated that the state was strongly insulated from communism

Family dynamics

- The Famine hastened the dissolution of social and cultural protocols within kin groups. It also caused a sea change in marriage patterns, as patriarchy embedded itself. This was reflected in the rise of the matchmaker who oversaw mercenary and perhaps loveless marriages, the rising disparity between the ages of husbands and wives, and a surge in the number of bachelors and spinsters. That in turn prompted an unhealthy and repressive attitude to sexuality, and the creation of an authoritarian family structure. It also spawned emigration, which made it difficult to hold Irish families together. The Irish sense of 'family' emerged as an emotionally rooted island in a treacherous sea of breakdown and dispersal; the sense of place was shadowed by an all too prevalent displacement.

THE FENIANS

- The Fenians or Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB] were founded in 1858 by James Stephens and John O'Mahony as a secret oath-bound revolutionary organisation dedicated to the establishment of an Irish republic through force. America was their true home. - Physical force nationalists, they supported the use of force, pioneering the use of dynamite in acts of exemplary terror. The Fenians were the last group of Irish political prisoners to be banished to Van Diemen's land. Here they staged the dramatic Catalpa escape. - The Fenians were republican in outlook, anti-clerical, urban and artisanal in background. The Catholic church vehemently opposed them - At their height, 50,000 were sworn in IRB. They were international in scope and infiltrationist in strategy [egteh Land League and the GAA]. They were a driving force behind the 1916 Rising. They were Janus headed- in one sense, a throwback to the eighteenth-century illuminati, in another, a forerunner of modern terrorism, using dynamite as a propaganda of the deed. - Dynamite had been invented by Nobel in 1866, and it was manufactured in Brooklyn and then smuggled into Great Britain by the Fenians. They used it to devastating effect in explosions in London, Salford, Glasgow and Liverpool, especially in the bombing of symbolic London targets. The Fenians also benefited from the political funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in 1861. Their success prompted the British creation of the Special Branch, and the secret police in Canada:

irish unions

- The Irish also became, par excellence, the waged labour force of industry and the controlling presence in the unions which secured their pre-eminence. In a surprisingly thorough fashion, organised labour was relentlessly anti-black. The trade unions became the prime vector in the Irish trajectory into a secure standard in 'white' America. The Irish, ultimately, made their way in America as whites, not as Irish. This was to be made crystal clear in the 1863 draft riots in New York. - Beyond simple economic advancement, there was a further advantage to this strategy. It diminished the emphasis in the American public sphere on Protestantism, and on a Protestant Ascendancy political system. In the 1840s and 1850s, in a panic-stricken reaction to the flood of Irish immigrants, the Nativist and Know Nothing movement mounted a vigorous attack on 'Popery' and on the 'Irish', especially in volatile cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. An English visitor in 1881 summarised how America would be improved 'if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it.' It is impressive how easily Irish-Americans coped with the negative stereotypes that followed them across the ocean. The Irish were pre-adapted to meet this hostility, which was simply an American version of British stereotypes; their long political and cultural apprenticeship in Ireland made them adept at survival, at group solidarity and in political organisation, mobilising the political power of numbers to achieve goals. By embracing white supremacy, the Irish triumphed over nativism; the essence of that triumph was their support for the Democratic Party. The Irish vote was a solid, disciplined one, under tight political control

THE FREE STATE

- The anti-Treaty party has certainly made the Free State safe for the bourgeoise.' [Professor George O'Brien of University College Dublin, reflecting on the post Civil-War era]. - 'We are the most conservative revolutionaries in history.' [Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Justice]The support that many clerics gave to Cosgrave's1 party in the 1920s and early 1930s greatly annoyed Seán Lemass. During a by-election in 1925 Cumann na nGaedhal received the backing of many influential members of the clergy. This prompted Lemass to attack the clerical influence that he saw as pervasive in Irish politics: - Republicans caught between the Devil and the Holy See: Death of Douglas Hyde the first President: at his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, the leading Irish politicians all stayed outside the service because it was taking place in a Protestant place of worship

Elimination of rundale and clachan

- The assault on the potato as a food source was accompanied by an onslaught on the rundale and clachan system, in the belief that only individual farms would encourage initiative and self-reliance. The clachans needed to be dispersed to break the cultural moulds which sustained mutual aid (Irish: comhar na gcomharsain) and thereby fostering a debilitating dependency. What upset them about the clachans was that they were a horizontal not a hierarchical landscape, which flattened social distinction, dishevelled, slovenly settlements which marking the lack of a settled society, and the site of archaic, anarchic, communal, behaviour, due to the lack of a properly developed individuality. - They could be seen as a 'Celtic' rather than a 'Saxon' form of settlement

agricultural labourers/cottier system

- The commercialisation of the tillage economy was accompanied by a spectacular increase in agricultural labourers. These were accommodated as cottiers, labourers who were given a one-room cabin and a manured potato plot (up to one acre in size) in return for unpaid labour for as much as two-thirds of the year. - Tillage farmers favoured this arrangement as it guaranteed a cheap and disciplined labour force, while the intensively cultivated potato crop was an ideal precursor to the following cereal crop. Expansion in the tillage area was achieved by the simple expedient of increasing the number of cottiers. - On large commercial tillage farms, the dependent cottier population could run to double figures. Their housing was notoriously impoverished. Samuel Madden in the 1730s considered that the huts 'of our cottiers are built like birds' nests, of dirt wrought together'. - Cottiers were also accommodated in a necklace of cabins strung loosely around the fringe of the tillage farm, the social dichotomy mirrored in the micro-segregation. The prolific potato and the prevalence of turf permitted the Irishagricultural labourer to set up independent households. But their independence was purchased at the expense of depressed living standards as they were paid essentially a potato wage. - The cottier system became the principal demographic dynamo in the Irish countryside

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT: FAMILY AND ITS VICTIMS

- The culture of emigration became endemic and pervasive. Emigration was institutionalised as part of the life cycle, an Irish solution to an Irish problem - Educated youth who leave have had the maps of the world before their eyes for years and are not likely to sit down for life on a potato patch - By the twentieth century, emigration had eaten its way into the heart of the Irish experience - The Famine accelerated the emigrant stream from Ireland. In the 1840s, the Irish comprised the single biggest group entering America at 45% of total immigration. In the 1850s at 35%, the Irish were outstripped solely by the Germans. Emigration could be a harrowing experience. - While estimated mortality levels of 3% on these crossings were relatively low, that figure increases dramatically to over 10% if it includes those who died subsequently in the Atlantic ports - as at the notorious Grosse Île on the St. Lawrence. In 1847, one in six of those who sailed to Canada - 107,000 - died, 5,000 in Grosse Île 3,000 in Montreal

Regional settlement patterns

- The island possessed a variegated set of environments and an inherited web of culturally diverse regions. The landscape impact, therefore, of these changes evolved out of a complex interplay among environment, history, economy, society and settlement. Five major regions can be identified: dairying, cattle-fattening, commercial tillage, proto-industrial and small farming. Large farm 1. Dairying 2. Cattle fattening 3. Tillage Small farm 1. Linen 2. Rundale and clachan

Cattle fattening

- The pastoral tradition in Ireland was overwhelmingly oriented towards cattle. Favoured by a climate so mild that winter housing was unnecessary, blessed with rich pasture- lands on a healthy limestone base, and with low production and labour costs, Ireland could produce cattle more cheaply to a higher quality than any of its European competitors. - Ireland was also ideally placed between the English and American markets. - Good quality beef, allied to diligent quality control and supervision, gave Irish products a very good reputation. - 'The ox- slaying city of Cork' (1737) became one of the greatest killing fields of Europe, and also a base for the most sophisticated packaging and processing food industry of the eighteenth-century world. - Permanent pasture in Ireland remained tightly tethered to its limestone-based cores in north-east Leinster, north Munster (especially east Limerick and west Tipperary), and inner Connacht (east Mayo, east Galway and the celebrated plains of Boyle in mid- Roscommon). Cattle fattening was highly responsive to market fluctuations, especially within the hinterlands of the great cities.. - In cattle-fattening areas, grazier holdings became the cornerstone of leasing policy and therefore of the settlement pattern. Often holding multiple tenancies, graziers became the anchor tenants, farming grassland devoted solely to cattle fattening. Because such holdings were so large, and because they required such flimsy enclosures, the population, settlement structures, and enclosure systems in grazier structures were all skeletal. In counties Meath and Kildare, it was common in the late eighteenth century for 1,000 or 1,500 acres to be in the hands of a single grazier. Graziers were dog-and- stick farmers, often the resented target of land-hungry small farmers

Spread of the potato

- The rapidity of the potato's spread should also be linked to the sheer scale of social and cultural dislocation in Ireland in the seventeenth century. - It began its Irish career along the Cork and Waterford coastline in the late seventeenth century. This area had the benefits of a mild and frost-free climate, as well as a rapidly spreading dairy economy which, given the potato's lack of storeability, it made sense to substitute it for dairy products, and release the cash crops (initially butter, later oats) onto the market. - The potato quickly spread in Munster as the winter food of the rural poor in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Cork-Waterford coast became famous for its early potatoes grown on its sandy soil; this area pioneered the use of seaweed as a fertiliser and already by the 1720s it was shipping potatoes to the Dublin market. - the potato then began its long march out of south Munster towards Connacht and Leinster. As it did so, it squeezed out two earlier diet traditions - the white meats (butter, milk and cheese) of the Gaelic and Gaelicised south and west, and the pulses( peas and beans) and cereals (oats) of the Normanised east. And in these regions, it acquired new virtues as a cleansing rotation in tillage areas. - Its rapid expansion was also facilitated by the genetic evolution, and hence adaptability, of potato varieties. - Because surplus potatoes were an excellent animal food, the potato increased the production of pigs and bacon. - This economic development and the evolution of Ireland as the larder of the First Industrial Revolution brought with it a permanent, proliferating and potato-dependent underclass. Thus, heavy potato consumption among the impoverished Irish labouring class benefited the British urban consumer, recipient of the island's cereal and bacon exports. - With the potato and turf, there was ready access to cheap food and fuel; housing could also be provided cheaply using local materials - stone from walls, tempered clay from floors, 'wreck' timber for rafters, oats, bent grass or reed for thatch. With restrained material expectations prior to the Consumer Revolution, there were few formal barriers to early marriage and family formation. - striking long term settlement impact. They facilitated the shift in population density from east to west, from good land to poor land, from port hinterlands and valleys to bogs and mountains.

HURLING

- The writing of Irish cultural history has focussed excessively on high culture, usually from a political perspective. Historians mesmerised by high politics and literary scholars preoccupied by the high deeds of Yeats and Joyce have spared little time to researching the broader cultural dynamic of sport within Irish culture. In this section, I take the example of hurling in an effort to write sportback into cultural history. Most sports history is notoriously written by fans with word processors: here I try to broaden and deepen the appropriate contexts in which to consider the role of sport in post-Famine Ireland. - Hurling is the distinctive Irish game, widely reckoned to be the fastest and most skilful field game in the world.37 It would occupy a place in the Irish psyche similar to baseball in American culture. - By the eighteenth century, there were two principal and regionally distinct versions of hurling

PERVASIVE SPIRITUAL EMPHASIS

- There is a pervasive social consciousness of the Famine as a struggle between rich and poor, between farmer and labourer, between corrupt administrators and their victims. This classconsciousness is much more in evidence than anti-British or anti-landlord sentiment Before the Famine, it didn't matter who was related to you, your friend was whoever would give you a bite to put in your mouth. (But) sport and pastimes disappeared. Poetry, music and dancing stopped. They lost and forgot them all and when the times improved in other respects, these things never returned as they had been. The Famine killed everything

why did devotional revolution start?

- This Devotional Revolution was made possible by a formidable increase in plant and personnel and a tightening internal discipline, which in turn acted as the basis of a transformation in popular religious practice. - A surge in Mass attendance, the spread of new devotional practices, an increasingly exhibitionist architectural display, a stricter social discipline-all these were part of the revolution. Irish Catholicism became more public, more assertive, more Roman in character, as the institutional church eclipsed its vernacular predecessor. - represented the triumph of a canonical belief system over older informalities. Its success was seen in the spread of churches, convents, schools, orphanages, hospitals that looked after people 'from the cradle to the crutch.' Irish Catholicism became a crucial bearer of order and identity in a nineteenth-century world of unprecedented flux, accelerated by the devastating impact of the Famine and selective emigration. These simultaneously obliterated the demographic base of vernacular Catholicism in the Irish poor and fatally weakened the older particularistic cultural formations rooted in the Irish language. - The devastation wreaked by the Famine strengthened the Church's hand in imposing its modernising moral crusade. Catholicism invaded the vacated cultural space and solved an identity crisis by offering a powerful surrogate language of symbolic identity in which Irishness and Catholicism were seen as reciprocal and congruent. The symbiosis of 'Irish' and 'Catholic' was strengthened, and religion articulated an artificial, symbolic language of identity to replace the living one being swept away by famine, emigration and jolting socio-cultural transformations. The institutional Catholic church could also take advantage of the more homogenised post-Famine social structure, which was receptive to bourgeois Roman Catholicism, as the pre-Famine potato people, the bruscair an bhaile [trash of the town] with their vigorous popular culture, were decimated and demoralised. The culture of poverty was supplanted by the culture of piety, as the church injected a new social discipline of respectability. - A growing political rapprochement with nationalists from these same bourgeois classes cemented an unusually cohesive and ideologically impregnable marriage of church and nation. These developments were stiffened by the post-Famine institutionalisation of the church and by the surge of self-confidence it got from involvement in the creation of an Irish Catholic spiritual empire overseas. The new Irish identity was exported to the Irish diaspora, bestowing a worldwide projection and a dominating role to Irish Catholicism as an epiphyte on empire in the English-speaking world. At the First Vatican Council of 1867-70, 30 per cent of the 730 bishops were either Irish or of Irish descent. The novelist, Canon Sheehan (1852-1913), noted in 1881: 'Wherever the mightier race has gone, the weaker race has followed and established a spiritual empire coterminous with the political empire.'9 A heroic historiography also allowed Irish Catholicism toenvisage itself as the historical, psychic and functional core of the Irish experience, thus seamlessly conflating itself with the national identity. - The post-Famine Irish church became essentially middle-class church

SONG TRADITION

- Three-phase evolution. One: songs with tunes and lyrics in Irish language: Two: tunes devoid of lyrics once language had faded: Three: reattachment of new English lyrics to the old tunes. The first phase is evident in the Irish-language manuscripts that routinely specify which tune the poems went with. The second phase began at the end of the eighteenth century with the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, followed by the landmark publication by Edward Bunting in 1796 - The third phase begins with Thomas Moore [he of the celebrated Moore's Melodies67] who writes new lyrics and attached them to Edward Bunting's salvaged tunes. Young Ireland takes on the role with more stridently nationalist ballads; then there is the work of the Joyce brothers, P. J. McCall68 [both steeped in the tradition who wrote new songs in the old styles and attach them to old tunes] and Fr. Padraig Breatnach who re-attached older English-language songs to Irish tunes

Irish and organized labor

- Throughout the nineteenth century, organised labour was the principal protagonist of this strategy, and this was a sector dominated by the Irish. - By 1900, 50 of 110 US union presidents were Irish. The trade unions did not just function as an economic success story for the Irish (at the expense of the depression of the African-American); they also became the key institution in assimilating the Irish into an evolving 'white' America. - The problem for the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century was that they were only ambiguously white, often construed as 'white Negroes' whose debilitating Celtic ancestry made them racially inferior to Teutonic [Saxon] whites (and this gloss could also slur over into stereotyping on Catholic/Protestant lines). - Thus, American intellectuals - just as readily as populist opinion - denigrated the Irish poor as being genetically (and therefore socially) on the same degraded level as the Red Indian and the Negro. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'the sage of Concord', linked the immigrants with the native Indians and African-Americans as racial inferiors, 'a shovel-handed Irish race,' destined to be 'cow-catchers and road graders, fit only to be human fertiliser,' guano 'to make corn cheap and grass grow green on the prairie.' - We should situate the Irish-American case in the re-racialisation of American society after the abolition of slavery. Precariously perched on an uncomfortable racial niche, the Irish embraced explicit 'whiteness' as a means of clarifying their enigmatic position on the colour spectrum.46 To achieve this repositioning, the Irish - through the unions - redefined the occupations they followed-however lowly - as 'white man's work', through rigidly enforcing the colour bar. By rigorously (at times violently) excluding African- Americans, even menial jobs could become 'white' jobs. This redefinition of the Irish as categorically white was facilitated by the large scale industrialisation of America in the second half of the nineteenth century; it proved relatively easy to impose a colour bar in the new industrial economy of mills and factories. In this way, blacks were successively squeezed out of the labour-market-first from the artisan trades, then out of services and unskilled labour, and finally debarred from wage labour in the factory. This is the occluded mirror image of the Irish success story in America.

irish democrats

- To secure this block Irish vote, the Democratic Party rejected Nativism while embracing white supremacy. In a surprising way, the Irish were crucial to the novel-but enduring- conjuncture of the Democratic party - what Martin Van Buren called 'the alliance of southern planter and the plain republicans of the north - By choosing to support the Democrats, the Irish made an astute political choice: racism closed the chasm in white society which nativist/Irish tensions threatened to open, especially in the eastern cities. This solution allowed America to mutate from its nearly nineteenth-century public stance of Protestant Ascendancy to the White Republic of the late nineteenth century. - In all these ways, the Irish gained fast track access to free labour, to political power and to the benefits of the law-unlike post-emancipation African-Americans - through the malign alchemy of America, the Irish, oppressed in their own land, were taught to be oppressors abroad, bleaching from green to white. In this sense, the Irish example offers an instructive case study in the social construction of whiteness, a racial category deliberately chosen as an adaptive strategy to ensure success in a highly competitive immigrant environment

two styles of keen

- While Gaelic culture was still vibrant and intact, two styles of keen co-existed. One was formal and literary, composed retrospectively, utilising a long line containing a regular number of natural speech stresses. These intricate and sophisticated compositions (like the justly celebrated Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, widely regarded as the greatest love poems ever composed) were a valued component of the Gaelic repertoire, with a venerable literary genealogy. - The second style of keen was more informal, improvised , extempore, using a restricted metre with one stress per line. By the mid nineteenth century, the literary tradition had almost entirely collapsed, and the orally composed keen was all that survived.

THE IRISH AND RACISM

- Why did the immigrants so readily embrace American racism? - Antipathy to slaves came from within the Republican tradition, which constantly used the rhetoric of freeman (The Freeman's Journal, for example) and abused 'slavish' mentalities. This, for some Irish republicans, like John Binns43 and John Mitchel, the passivity of African-Americans demonstrated that they were unworthy of democratic freedom. - labour competition among the unskilled proletariat, where Afro-American and Irish competed (often physically) for the same jobs.44 The black artisan and mechanic had been squeezed out of the labour market in the early nineteenth century through adroit manipulation of prejudice. In the great flood of migration between 1840 and 1860, the black labourer and docker was unceremoniously ejected from the labour market, initially by undercutting and then through the aggressive deployment of race as a barrier to retaliatory undercutting - Irish racism, therefore, was especially virulent in the competitive labour markets of the big east coast cities

Linen

- With beef and butter, linen was one of the three great Irish export products of the eighteenth century. The growth of the linen industry in Ulster to one of the world's leading half dozen industries by the end of the eighteenth century is intimately related to the evolving world economic system. Linen production in Ireland in the late eighteenth century became possible for four reasons: 1 Ulster landlords were already aware by then that southern Irish agricultural production (sustained by better soil and climate) was superior. They encouraged their tenants to diversify into linen, especially in a period of population growth. 2 Ireland (unlike Scotland) could grow its own flax and integrate its linen production in a controlled fashion. 3 Landlords encouraged a marketing system, which allowed independent farmer- weavers to evolve, as opposed to a 'putting-out' system. 4 Irish linens were cheaper to produce due to low labour-costs. Linen production rose phenomenally: exports soared from 1.5 million yards in 1712, to 8 m. by 1740, to 17 m. in 1760, to 46m in 1796. - By 1820 when the proto-industrialisation phase was at its height, there were 70,000 weavers. The vast majority of these were never organised on a putting-out system, but were independent farmer/weavers who sold their webs of cloth in the many provincial towns with brown linen markets fostered by landlords eager to cash in on the trade. - Linen was suited to inferior land such as the difficult drumlin country of south Ulster; the proto-industrial economy failed to impact on the fertile fattening lands of north Leinster. Indeed, there was a sharp interface between the two economies, fundamentally dictated by the underlying environmental constraints. This in turn underpinned the association of good lands and low population densities that became an increasingly pronounced feature of the Irish scene as the eighteenth century progressed. - By the end of the century, linen-rich County Armagh had population densities in excess of 500 per square mile -perhaps the heaviest concentration of rural population anywhere in contemporary Europe. Intensification of agricultural production via small, family farms triggered massive demographic growth

FENIANS AND FAMINE

- became the principal beneficiaries of this politicisation of the Famine in the Irish popular consciousness - were as strongly rooted in America as in Ireland, enjoyed considerable funding from there, and American-based figures like John O'Mahony contributed robust leadership. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was to retain its powerful American influence on Irish politics until well into the twentieth century. - Those dispossessed during the Famine carried a long political memory of it - The emigrant diaspora saw itself, and was encouraged to see itself, as the innocent victim of the government's parsimonious policies. - In the long standing Physical force vs. Constitutionalism split in Irish nationalism, Irish-Americans tended to favour the physical force side. The Fenians were a strongly diasporic organisation, with 45,000 USA members. Many were demobbed after the Civil War: The 'Fighting '69th regiment of the Union Army were the original 'Fighting Irish'. The Fenians launched an invasion of Canada [a British possession] from Buffalo to Fort Erie in 1866, with 600 veterans of the Civil War that had ended in 1865

Women in post famine Ireland

- confined women to a separate domestic sphere, but simultaneously allowed them to acquire and exert an ever-greater control over their husbands and children than ever before.14 As the 'home' became even more separate and special, those Irish women who could do so chose the domestic sphere consciously, because of the stature and authority that it conferred. Irish society in the post-Famine period became richer, and linguistic, social and religious change propelled it closer to British bourgeois norms; the penetration of Victorian domesticity as a core cultural value was an ineluctable by-product or their assimilation, enabled by rising rural income - this rising income made possible the physical remodelling of homes - with a clear separation of 'working' and 'living' space, through the provision of outbuildings, the privatisation (along gender-specific lines) of space within the home, notably the provision of separate bedrooms, the overweening emphasis on the parlour as an icon of genteel, respectable domesticity, and the consignment of older parents to the 'west' room, thereby concentrating the emphasis on the private, nuclear family. These developments were heavily endorsed by a modernising Catholic church, which laid a special emphasis on girls' education, whose convent schools created role models, usually imported from France and England

lazy bed

- environmentally perfectly adapted to harsh Atlantic conditions. It was constructed by slicing through and then inverting sods, which made it easy to deal with tough 'scutch' grass while killing weeds efficiently. - An excellent drainage channel was also created in this way while raising the seedbed above any surface water contamination. - The geometry of the bed itself ensured maximum exposure to the sun for growing potatoes, while the continuous moulding (the shovelling of soil from the trenches into the beds) added minerals to the roots, breaking the iron pan in a soil structure prone to leaching. - The lazy bed also generated its own microclimate; air flowing from the top to the bottom of the ridges reduced frost susceptibility, especially on bogland. - allowed steep, irregular and inaccessible slopes to be cultivated, where a plough would have been useless. - They ensured that there was no waste of soil or space by minute adjustment to soil type, slope conditions and rockiness. - Lazy bed cultivation was efficient: its potato yield was three times higher than in horse-ploughed drills. It was a brilliantly ingenious method of absorbing both an unrestricted labour supply and non-infield resources (manure, sand, peat and seaweed). - At its pre-Famine zenith, much of the cultivated land of the west of Ireland was composed of man-made soils, laboriously created in this fashion. This mode of cultivation required extensive labour inputs, but this was not a problem in a society experiencing a demographic surge. By the constant addition of sand, seaweed and manure, repeated over decades, the infields were eventually composed of carefully maintained artificial soils.

Tillage

- essentially mixed farming but with a specialisation in intensive commercial tillage. Built out of the environmentally favoured Anglo-Norman coastlands, the tillage zone waxed strongly in the second half of the eighteenth century, boosted by bounties on the transport of flour to Dublin (from 1758) and then accelerating as European demand soared in the Napoleonic period. - By the late eighteenth century, the commercial tillage zone was concentrated Cork, Dundalk, Strangford and Wexford. - The environmental advantages of this area included lower rainfall, well-drained lighter soils and good access to rivers and harbours for cheap transportation.. - The widening of Dublin's hinterland also generated modernisation, mechanisation and rapid expansion in the Irish flour-milling industry from the mid 1760s, especially in mid Kilkenny and south Tipperary. - The spread of commercial tillage generated heavy investment in processing facilities - mills, malt houses, breweries and distilleries, especially in towns commanding navigable waters and good hinterlands.

Whiteness studies

- history of assimilation is also a history of exclusion, and that these two processes are heavily reciprocal. But it is also important to interrogate the whiteness model. We should stress, as it does not, that the Irish may not have been simply opting for this racial strategy: the existing racial and class hierarchy of the American society into which they were slotting may have forced them into this role. - Ignatiev - and to a much lesser extent Roediger - overemphasise Irish agency as opposed to structural constraints. We should note too that this analysis of whiteness completely ignores Irish women, although they comprised at least 50% of the immigrants. The analysis also assumes a relatively homogenous Irish migrant group - although as my earlier discussion demonstrates, it was heterogeneous in composition. - Finally the Ignatiev/Roediger line underplays the extent to which whiteness was a unified category: ethnic hierarchies existed within whiteness, and the Irish continued to remain highly visible as a lesser category. Yet we should always retain a clear distinction between degrees of discrimination: there is a radical difference between cultural and religious prejudice and systematic racial subordination reinforced by law. - The Irish played a major role in helping other immigrant nationalities 'learn the ropes' of American race relations. A useful conception is of European immigrants (especially from southern and eastern Europe) as an 'in-between people' who negotiated their way to 'whiteness' though time. This does not mean that the Irish, or other European immigrants, were somehow 'black' or 'colored' or 'dark-skinned'." There were extremenativists who saw a darker hue when they looked at various European immigrants (even at the Irish, on occasion). But for the most part, the racialization of immigrants was overwhelmingly about 'culture' [especially religion] and 'innate' characteristics, rather than skin colour.

Gaelic Athletic Association

- is against this vacuum that the world of Michael Cusack (1847-1906)42 and the Gaelic Athletic Association [GAA] must be set. It fits the scenario for the development of risorgimento nationalism. This involved a tripartite sequence: initially recuperation of national identity (history, language, folklore); then, the progressive reworking of this by ideologists of nationalism and finally, the transition from cultural revival to political demands. - A national community must be nurtured, its identity carefully recuperated out of the shards of history, language and folklore. This new cultural vocabulary had then to be inserted into a grammar of political action. In its redefined form, national culture would then constitute stepping stones to political power. - This sequence required a number of social processes to underpin it: an increase in the number of educated people (facilitated in Ireland by the National School system); a dislocation in the settled sedentary culture (in Ireland, the Famine and a traumatic language-shift): a rise in mass communications (the penetration of print culture is a logistical imperative) and cheap transport which made popular mobilisation possible (in Ireland, the railway system and the newspaper). If these social processes combined with a political tendency towards the eclipse of empire, then cultural nationalism is empowered. Janus-headed, it simultaneously homogenized (stressing the unity of the Irish people) and differentiated (stressing their distinctiveness from the British people). Nationalism became a classifying protocol, which reordered relationships between peoples. - While cultural nationalism underpinned the GAA at a macro-level, a more pragmatic concern with codification did so at a micro-level. The Victorian period was the great era of sports codification, both in the regulation of existing sports and in the creation of new ones - Initially, an English phenomenon based around the public schools, codification was rapidly exported to the empire and the anglophone world. Codification eased the transition in sporting forms from rural to urban, participating to spectating, and recreational to competitive. The rise of mass spectator sports for urban consumption was facilitated by enhanced spending power, the associated commercialisation of leisure improved communication networks and the invention of the weekend. Codification also linked to a new rhetoric of high moral purpose of character building, the cult of masculinity and of racial stereotyping. This led to a sustained effort to organise and then control working-class sport and to develop 'national' games. Baseball in the U.S.A., rugby in New Zealand, soccer in England and Australian Rules football in Australia emerged almost simultaneously as national games. - Cusack explicitly visualised Gaelic games as a disciplined performance of Irish masculinity, a calculated corrective to Victorian caricature of the Irishman as a slouched simian brute, comic caperer or childlike innocent. The robust physicality of the games symbolised and performed a fully developed masculine character, a recovery of the male body from its emasculated and emaciated Famine forms. In 1870, the veteran politician Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903) claimed that the Famine had wrought 'the most dismal change in people themselves,' leaving 'a new race of beggars, bearing only a distant and hideous resemblance to humanity,' who were 'mutilated and debased scions of' the old stock. Cusack believed that the post-Famine Irish male had internalised 'degeneracy.' The body itself was now reinscribed politically and made explicit as a site of renewal and rectification. The Gaelic male specifically rejected corporeal colonialism, reshaping an Irish body politic as an antidote to dehumanisation, degeneracy and depoliticisation. The concepts of discipline, organisation, tactics and self-control associated with the games strengthened military potential as powerful enactments of tactical solidarities, patriotism and political muscle. Cusack's organisation of Gaelic games, then, should not be slotted into a narrow context. It fits neatly into the wider evolution of European cultural nationalism and of the sports codification movement. The genius of Cusack was the welding of these two strands together in an Irish context. He realised that the initial momentum behind sports codification in Ireland was emanating from Trinity College and the Dublin public schools, and infiltrating the boat clubs, rugby, hurling, athletics and cricket. In an era of the six day working week, the refusal to sanction games on Sunday was inevitably construed as an anti-Catholic and anti-working class manoeuvre, as was the insistence on the 'gentleman amateur' ethos (patently modelled on English precedents) which refused participation to 'mechanics' and 'labourers.' Cusack realised the need for a game for the Irish

two problems with the potato

- it could not be stored for more than three quarters of a year: this made the summer months between the end of the old season's crop and the beginning of the new crop very difficult with dependence on the green crops, the 'July na gCabaiste' [July of the cabbage] of the folk tradition. - The problem of storage was partially solved by the pig - an effective ecological hoover, who consumed surplus, waste, small and damaged potatoes and their skins, and who in one light could be seen as a mobile potato store. - The second problem was that the potato was difficult and expensive to transport. This militated against regional specialisation of potato production, and explains why the potato became so widely diffused in Ireland. - Together, the potato (tolerant, prolific and nutritious) and the lazy bed (adaptable, effective and productive) maximised the resource potential of marginal land. They were also a triumph of the potato, whose tolerance of wet acidic conditions alone made possible the fruitful tilling of these areas.

THE REMAKING OF IRISH AMERICA

- remaking of Irish America as urban, industrial and Catholic. None of these attributes was true prior to 1820, and were only partially true up to 1845. The pre-Famine Irish were much more diverse and scattered; they were as much Protestant as Catholic, and settled in rural areas as much as in cities. The Famine emigration created four new features of Irish- America.

Small farming

- small-scale family farms dominated, especially on the western coast. The small farm western fringe was essentially a new phenomenon, in part responsive to, in part creating, the surging demographic profile of Ireland, which boosted its population from 3 to 8.5 million between 1700 and 1845. - This explosion was accommodated by reclamation, subdivision and expansion into previously unsettled areas, aided by the potato. Ireland's Atlantic region was only heavily settled as anoutreach product of massive population growth. A pivotal change in the nature of Irish eighteenth-century life was the transformation of the west of Ireland in a thickly-settled small farm area. - A principal determinant of the west of Ireland settlement pattern was the rundale and clachan system.

THE DEVOTIONAL REVOLUTION

- the startling transformation within Irish Catholicism that occurred within generation of the Famine. - An entirely revamped religious practice hardened into a powerful and rigid cultural formation, that essentially remained intact for over a century, only slowly dissolving from the 1960s onwards. While most commentators describe this cultural formation as 'traditional' Irish Catholicism, it was in fact a new form, which belongs to modernising rather than archaic forces within Irish society, and which was dependent on the cultural carnage of the Famine for its emergence. Commentaries which neglect this deeper history in favour of a fore- shortened version run serious risks of distortion and shallowness. - The Famine accelerated the transformation of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In pre-Famine period, a vernacular style Catholicism had inserted deep roots precisely among those social formations that the Famine would decimate. This vernacular inheritance evolved organically out of the life of an intensely agrarian society, its ritual rhythm dominated by calendar custom and embedded in a complex web of naturalistic beliefs, inhabiting a numinous landscape of holy wells and pilgrimage sites like Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg, its sensibilities attuned to an alternative spiritual world peopled by deities of a pre-Christian provenance. - In this cultural matrix, behaviour was regulated by custom and tradition: the central religious events were rites of passage and communal occasion like the pattern, wake and station. - The trauma of the Famine, the associated decline of vernacular religion and popular culture, and the erosion of the Irish language created a cultural vacuum, which was filled by the 'Devotional revolution' - the institutionalisation of mass going, new devotional practices such as novenas, forty hour devotions, exposition of the host, more ritualistic practices.

Importance of the potato

- well adapted to a wet, dull climate and to sour acidic soils - the potato's principal enemy was frost rather than rain. - Unlike grain, the potato required no processing to make it edible; its producers retained direct control over their means of subsistence. - The potato was nutritious: with milk added, it formed a balanced diet, containing adequate amounts of protein, carbohydrates and minerals. - Its high energy value and low fat content made it a healthy food source. - relatively disease- resistant in the Irish context. It also did everything the vaunted turnip did; it was a root crop, which replaced fallow, a winter crop for livestock, and a valuable agent of reclamation in previously untilled ground. - In this sense, the prosaic potato did everything and more in Irish agriculture than the much-hyped turnip did.

THE KEEN

-A more specific account of the cultural changes induced by the Famine can be provided by looking at the fortunes of the caoineadh (keen), whose demise demonstrates the drastically altered status of Irish women and of oral culture in post-Famine Ireland. The Famine altered the Gaelic tradition of grieving the dead. The sheer frequency of deaths made people callous towards it. In these appalling circumstances, death itself died - or at least the social significance of death - The keen furnished formal and public acknowledgements of women's responsibility for death as well as for birth. It functioned as a transition ceremony, a cathartic, therapeutic theatre of death, which explored both the emotional experience of loss and the necessary continuity of the surviving community. The carnival quality of the wake was a response to this ambiguity. Far from being the 'wild and inarticulate uproar' heard by outsiders, the keen was structured, rhythmic and orchestrated, utilising iterative procedures drawn from a rich formulaic repertoire, composed in performance and adhering to its strict metre. While the pre-existing compositional vocabulary structured it, there was flexibility of improvisation within it. - Because the keen was pre-eminently a woman's genre, it could code a gendered rhetoric of resistance within the mourning formalities. It could also give a very direct voice to conflicts between marriage and between kin groups, precisely because the wake brought the two families together physically, and because the shock of death exposed or released raw emotional states. - Exchanges between priests and women-keeners are frequented recorded. While robust exchanges between poets and priests were frequent in the eighteenth century, there was a deal of intimacy and respect between the two in the Gaelic tradition. However, once the church began to distance itself from the tradition and once the Devotional Revolution took hold, a new sense of distance between priests and people emerged. Because it was women's work and rooted in a vernacular culture of expression and structure of feeling, the keen was opposed by the institutional church.

Biddy Earley

-Biddy (1798-1874)11 was a red haired 'wise woman,' a herbal healer, clairvoyant and medium with the fairies. - An only child, she was born in Lower Faha, between Feakle and Gort, and she came from the poorest sub-stratum of pre-Famine society - the beo-bocht Irish-speaking agricultural labourers. She spoke both Irish and English. - In 1814, her father died. While still a vulnerable teenager, she was evicted in 1816 and took to the roads begging. She eventually admitted herself to Ennis Poorhouse, to avoid the rigours of a life on the roadside, where her pride and glory - her red hair - was shorn off. - She married an old man - Pat Malley of Gurteenreagh. - After his death, she married her step-son [who also died soon after from the drink in 1840]. She then married a much younger husband, a labourer who had conacre land at Kilbarron near Feakle, overlooking the lake, where he was able to erect a bothan scóir [a two-roomed thatched mud-walled conacre cabin]. A ballad claims that her son Pat, a noted hurler, was given the bottle as a gift for his mother after taking part in a fairy hurling game near Feakle. - Her magic bottle - always believed to be from the fairies - was filled with a dark healing liquid and she used it for divination and mixing herbs. - As Biddy's fame grew, she was assailed by various irate priests and by the state: she was accused of complicity in agrarian outrages [the Moonlighters] and charged with witchcraft. - Her third husband died in 1868 and she married a forty-year old man in 1869 when she was over seventy years old. He died the following year, leaving her a widow for the fourth time. After her death, she was buried in an unmarked grave. - Like many intelligent people born into poverty, she hated authority figures: priests, landlords, doctors, police, judges ... - Locals were forbidden to give directions to her house or to provide lodgings for those who came to consult with her. But people in dire straits still came to her in droves: - Biddy was an astute reader of character, compassionate and a close observer of human nature - She had a magic mirror that she got visitors to look in - a powerful aid to auto-suggestion. Re disputes in families or between neighbours, she counselled - She was an inspiration for Yeats in his treatment of marginal female figures

Famine Clearances:

-Eliminating the potato would liquidate the western micro-farmer, a source of endemic poverty and overpopulation. The result would be a modern, efficient Irish agricultural sector, with large-scale farmers and a wage-earning sector. These changes would generate a healthier social structure, more closely approximating the English and Scottish model. The Famine's long-term effect, then, would be as an accelerator of agrarian anglicisation in Ireland, thereby copper-fastening the Union. The promotion of social engineering of this type, rather than relief or saving lives per se, dominated the British administrative and political response to the Famine. -At its extreme edges, this view point could worry that the Famine would not clear enough people out of the way to do permanent good.

The Famine and the government response

-In these circumstances, a failure of the potato crop would cause disaster; repeated failures would simply decimate the population. The unprecedented attack of Phytopthora infestans [the slime which caused potato blight] destroyed one-third of the crop in 1845, three-quarters in 1846 and 1847, and one-third in 1848. Massive mortality and emigration ensued: one million died and two million more emigrated in the next two decades, cruelly paralleling the three million 'potato people' who were totally dependent on the now fickle tuber in the pre-Famine period. These deaths were disproportionately concentrated in the areas of new settlement dominated by rundale and clachan, and by the lumper potato. In the dense huddles of poor quality housing, disease had a field day. From a sample of 7,000 people who died in West Cork in 1847, 44% died of fever, 34% of starvation and 22% of dysentery. The clachan settlements were simply decimated - The culture of the mid-nineteenth century (pre-Darwinian) was still predominantly religious. The early nineteenth century witnessed sustained efforts to reconcile new sciences such as geology, botany, and economics to Christian doctrine, and it was in this hybrid form that they gained greater popular currency. The dynamics of religious enthusiasm and scientific advance combined to produce an interpretative framework for natural and social phenomena. The British response to the Famine was profoundly informed by the prevalent Protestant religious sensibility. The phenomenon of famine - saturated in biblical resonances - was understood in essentially religious terms as a form of providentialism - God's direct personal intervention in the natural world. From within thisprovidentialist world view, the evangelical wing of British opinion stressed the consequent necessity to allow the unrestricted operation of the natural moral law, thereby encouraging a minimalist response to the Famine. This evangelical economics permitted the marriage of Malthusian pessimism and a strident eschatological emphasis, both stressing the inevitability of the famine and its function as a retributive sign -At its most extreme, it could interpret the Famine as a direct divine punishment of Irish Catholics for their addiction to popery, for remaining stubbornly steeped in its superstitious stupor -It could readily couple the Maynooth grant of 1845 with the advent of the blight, much as it interpreted the cholera epidemic of 1831-1832 as divine retribution for the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 -The blight would allow the pernicious potato to be replaced as a food source by a higher form like grain, and this change in itself would force the feckless Irish up the ladder of civilisation. The Famine would then be a harbinger of the future, a short term loss for a long term gain. It would teach the Irish poor the immutable laws of potato economy, encouraging them to exercise moral and religious restraint; by eliminating the potato, that underpinned their monstrous overpopulation, it would give them 'room to become civilised,' mercifully obliterating the archaic, anarchic culture, and slovenly society which the promiscuous potato had permitted. In Trevelyan's words, the Famine would thereby produce 'permanent good out of transient evil.' -The failure of the British state to shoulder the fiscal burden of the Famine becomes clearer. In 1845-1850 the British Treasury spent £7 million on relief, representing less than 0.5% of British GNP over two years. Contemporaries such as O'Connell and the radical M. P. Scrope drew attention to the sharp contrast with the £20 million raised in the 1830s to compensate the West Indian slave owners for emancipation. There was an even more marked discrepancy with the £70 million subsequently spent on the utterly futile Crimean war of 1854-18566. In the event more money was raised in Ireland than in the incomparably wealthy Britain to meet the weight of Famine. Poor rates and landlords borrowing raised over £8.5 million in Ireland and also generous response from America. Even the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma gave money.12

diaspora 5 types

1 Labour [notably from the Indian sub-continent) 2 Trade [notably Chinese and Lebanese] 3 Imperial [notably the British] 4 Cultural [notably the Afro-Caribbeans in the UK] 5 Victim [Jews, African-Americans, Armenian, Irish, Palestinian]

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] in South Africa established four different kinds of truth:

1 Objective empirical truth. This what people understand as the facts: Freud's material truth: 2 Dialogue truth - This is a social construct established by dialogue, debate and discussion. 3 Narrative truth: the victim's story- testimony: subjective, partial, mythical; the collective impact of these individual narratives creates collective memory; 4 Healing truth: facts positioned within a social constellation of human relations: ritualised and therapeutic. These different kinds of truth are in perpetual conflict with each other. Their conflict means that all historical narrative is inevitably relativised.

1899

11 October 1899: Boer War broke out: It was viewed in Ireland as an anti-imperial struggle: great sympathy in Ireland: the revelation in 1901 ofconcentration camps9 of Boer women, and children [including photographs], where 16-20,000 children died in one year exposed the barren brutality of the British imperial mission: gave renewed impetus to Irish anti-imperialism.10 - A Pro-Boer Transvaal Committee was established in 1899, which was to provide the nucleus of Sinn Fein: The Irish Literary Theatre founded in 1899: evolved into Abbey Theatre in 1904: considerable overlap in membership. The Transvaal Committee developed for the first time an independent foreign policy for Ireland. Key activists included James Connolly, Maud Gonne, Arthur Griffiths and John O'Leary: Yeats and Davitt were also active: street protest, civil disobedience, a riot: 20, 000 at pro-Boer rallies: opposition to British army recruiting in Ireland led by Maud Gonne; also precipitated withdrawal of Michael Davitt from Westminster parliament. - Abstentionism was later to become a key plank of Sinn Féin policy. By contrast, the Irish parliamentary party, under the new leadership of John Redmond in 1900, espoused Home Rule within the empire, including support for recruiting, the Boer War and imperialist jingoism. Attitudes to the Boer War exposed the growing divide between radical separatists and conservative parliamentarians. - The split showed publicly in terms of reaction to Queen Victoria's Irish visit in 1903, itself designed to bolster recruiting. Redmond sycophantically welcomed it: separatists were outraged. Maud Gonne wrote her savage attack 'The Famine Queen.' A pro-monarchical picnic for 15,000 school children was organised in the Phoenix Park.11 Gonne responded by organising a 'Patriotic Childrens Treat' in Croke Park, attended by 25,000. The battle for Irish minds and hearts was on in earnest. Gonne pioneered grass-roots urban protest. She drew on the same energies that fed into the trade union activism of Jim Larkin and James Connolly, and the Lock-Out of 1913. - All these activities crossed class, party, and sectarian cleavages: they did not involve a clear-cut severance of [high-minded] culture from [grubby] politics. There was no conflict of civilisations - of a Protestant Anglo-Ireland representing high culture against a Catholic Gaelic middle class or peasant culture.12 Neither was the Revival a backward-looking, nostalgic, anti-modern and anti-materialist movement. Cultural self-belief was the bedrock issue: it underpinned the struggle for national independence, for economic advances, for cultural autonomy. The spirit of self-reliance was the spirit of Sinn Féin [Ourselves], and all these ostensibly different activities were part of a common programme to create a new public sphere in Ireland, which would form the basis of a revitalised citizenship, and a new civic nationalism based on republicanism. They were all seeking a new politics, an alternative route to modernity, based on the self-help principle. The Irish Revival was not just some dreamy Celtic literary movement of writers and mystics looking backwards to a Celtic past. It was a progressive movement, featuring a series of self-help groups focussed on local modes of production - economic and cultural - the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League, the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society: it was not knee-jerk traditionalist or anti-modern. There were many overlaps between these groups at executive and grass roots level. These activists backboned the emerging political movement.13

Hunger Strikes

1981 saw the advent of the macabre Hunger Strikes52 as an expression of opposition to British criminalisation of the IRA as Mafia-style Godfathers, thugs, and racketeers, and the so-called normalisation' strategy through the removal of Special Category status. All this stemmed from the intransigence of British PM Maggie Thatcher,53 blankly backed by Ronald Reagan, a plastic 'Irishman'. The Hunger Strike was a demonstration of Creon versus Antigone, the principal characters in a Greek trilogy by Sophocles. Creon represented the rule of law and an intransigent state response, the Hegelian day versus the night. Antigone represents the 'instinctive powers of feeling, love and kinship' versus 'the daylight Gods' of free and self-conscious, social and political life. Thatcher, a modern Creon, deployed the same brutal policies in Northern Ireland as she had in prosecuting the Falklands war and the brutal crushing of the miner's strike in the UK. - The ghoulish Hunger Strike shone a piercing global spotlight on the 'Dirty War' in Ireland. It transformed the image of the Provos from active 'terrorists' to passive victims, while the Hunger Strike itself derived a deep Irish cultural resonance as a form of redress in cases of injustice. The Provos were well aware of Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike after 74 days in 1920, and his dictum that 'It is not those who can inflict the most but those that can suffer the most that will conquer'.54 The strategy also reasserted the link between the modern IRA and the 'Good Old IRA' of the early independence movement. Ten prisoners died during the 217 day campaign, which saw a slow grim ratcheting-up of tension by the staggered deaths. There was an immense theatricality, in the whole episode, which soon had the dramatic power of an ancient ritual. The strikers' bodies became a somatic text, a performative ritual. Images of the Christ-like bearded blanket men quickly iconised them. Others think that the Hunger Strike was cynically manipulated for political gain by Sinn Féin - The election of the leader of the Hunger Strike and defiant Provo Bobby Sands to the Westminster parliament indicated wider sympathy within the nationalist community for the strikers - and a democratic demonstration that the Provos were not seen within the Catholic community as mere self- serving criminals [ODCs = Ordinary Decent Criminals]: Maggie Thatcher ploughed on relentlessly, describing Sands as a 'convicted criminal' who 'chose to take his own life'. 100,000 attended his macabre funeral, and this was a huge propaganda boost to the Provos, as it suggested that a surprisingly large segment of northern nationalists supported them. - Raymond McCarthy

TOURISM

1987: 2.2 m 1996: 4.7 m with £2 billion spent. 1999: 6 m spending £2.5 billion. 42 new hotels opened in Dublin city between 1998-2001: - Advent of excellent restaurants, e.g. Guilbauds, Thorntons: one of positive spin offs of tourism: before that Irish cuisine was an oxymoron: new food culture - eg excellent Irish cheeses, many from west Cork: for first time fish features regularly in the diet.24 - Also benefits well spread due to B & B phenomenon: massive impetus to improve Irish plumbing, central heating and cuisine:Reinvention of St. Patrick's Day, with parade in Dublin: Rise of Temple Bar and Dublin as a weekend destination: massive impetus from advent of cheap Ryan Air flights, especially from UK: UK the largest market, but USA the best spenders: - Note the decline in American numbers, post 9/11; Britain has shown a slight increase: steady in Europe but the advent of euro has increased the perception of Ireland as an expensive destination. As of 2003, we became the second most expensive country in Europe [beaten only by Finland]: minimal penetration of Asian market: visitors beginning to register feeling that the Irish are not as 'friendly' as the advertising suggests: and the big investment in Heritage Centres from the 1980s has not been successful - created a bland, shallow, manufactured experience: switch from west of Ireland to Dublin as destination: confusion as to whether we are a cheap mass-market destination, or high-end niche market: certainly the Ryan Air phenomenon of cheap access increased the numbers dramatically. Tourism now faces a crossroads. Surprisingly, Ireland now spends more on tourism than it receives: tourism now comprises 6.4 % of GDP and employs 137,000 (not 'good' jobs though): employment in tourism has doubled since the mid 1980s. - An unusual positive feature of Irish tourism is that it is largely owned by Irish people: unlike Wales - 80% English-owned: we also avoided the white settler phenomenon that overwhelmed Scotland [Isle of Skye; 40% settler population now] and Provence 25 at the height of the English economic boom of the 1980s. Germans and Dutch settled in west Cork and Kerry: these were health and environment-conscious people, avoiding cancer- inducing sun exposure, and also believing that the Atlantic coast of Ireland was the safest place in Europe in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.26 The upside has been the spread of cheese making and high quality food ingredient manufacture in the region: Cork is the HQ of the Irish 'Slow Food' movement. The downside has been the privatisation of beaches and the closing of rights of way which have been communal for centuries - Uk then US ten germany then france most visitors

TANGIBLE SIGNS OF OVERHEATING ECONOMY

1995-2005; 584,073 new houses were built: 1995-2005; 1.26m to 2.14m cars: 1995-2005: average price of new home soared from 77,974 to 275,851 euro. - By the early 2000s, it was becoming clearer that Ireland had crossed some significant thresholds, which meant that its economy was becoming overly dependent on the property sector, driven by cheap money, tax breaks, easy lending by banks and government policies that poured petrol on a blaze already flaming out of control. This created an unholy trinity among property developers, the banks (especially Anglo-Irish Bank) and Fianna Fáil as the main party of government, leaving Ireland open to the accusation of being a an example of crony capitalism. One-third of all houses in the country have been built since 1997. The cost of an average house tripled in Ireland after 1995, the most rapid rise anywhere in the world. Ireland led the world at 17% annual average total return on houses between 1992 and 2002.33 This boom was fuelled by negative real interest rates (due to inflation), the economic upsurge, massive demographic demand, and the weak euro, which made money cheaper than it had ever been historically. Housing markets typically comprise 15% of the GDP of advanced economies, and 40% of average household wealth but they are notoriously vulnerable to a bubble. 81% of Irish homes are owned by the occupier - the highest rate in the world, closely followed by Spain [compare 63% in USA]: since the mid 1990s, 50% rise in real prices in Ireland [30% in USA]: Dublin easily beat Brussels, Toronto, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Madrid (and closed on Sydney, Milan and Paris) in terms of house prices at the height of the property bubble. It is. Only world cities like London, Tokyo and New York were seriously more expensive. - The construction sector eventually accounted for an unsustainable 20% of the total workforce - 203,800 in 2004, versus 142,000 in 1999. In turn, the public finances depended massively on property sales taxes- called stamp duty. - All the while, we took our eye off the issue of competitiveness, which has initially made the Tiger tick. After 2002, our prosperity was propped up by property rather than exports, and we became an expensive place to do business, as labour costs and prices soared. The loss of competitiveness dampened exports and made it more difficult to attract jobs. It also left us increasingly naked against the chill winds of a harsher economic climate, should the winds in our sails change direction. Between 2001 and 2003 alone, the Republic slipped from fifth35to eleventh place [of 59 economies included] in the most competitive small economies globally.36 This created a real possibility that it could lose out in a global economy. - At the same time, the gloom can be overdone; we are still attracting major companies and investments. Google decided in 2003 to locate its European operations in Dublin; the decision was linked to impressive Irish broadband provision, as Google required 10,000 servers. Microsoft opened a new megadata centre in Dublin in 2009: 300,000 square feet and $500M investment: the first MS data centre outside the USA: security a key issue so no precise location is specified: designed to support MS's new cloud computing system, Azure, that needs extra capacity: Microsoft chose Ireland due to climatic factors: able to use ambient 'free air' to cool the facility, cutting energy, water and chemical costs by 40%; no need for a cooling tower or a mechanical or chemical cooling system. The weather suffices for 95% of the year.37 - MNCs are still attracted to Ireland by tax rate, talented and flexible workforce, track record and ease of doing business. We can no longer pretend to be a low cost manufacturing base and we have lost that type of operation to China and Eastern Europe. We have to strive now to be the 'innovation island' - the IDA's new slogan is 'Ireland where innovation comes naturally'. The constant effort is to move up the value chain - we are no longer trying to attract manufacturing. Our competitors now are Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg, the Netherlands... Our efforts are currently geared to ground our 'smart economy' in scientific and technical excellence.

Provisionals (Provos) and the officials (Stickies

A bitter split now erupted in the IRA20 between the Provisionals (Provos) and the officials (Stickies).21 At the first Easter after the split, the Provos sold Easter lilies commemorating the 1916 Rising with a pin: the Officials sold lilies from which one peeled off the backing and stuck on one's lapel - and instantly attracted the nickname Stickies. This split was also essentially a Belfast/Dublin one, and a Nationalist/Marxist one. On 28 December 1969, the Provisional Army Council of what became the Provos issued its first public statement: the split was 'the logical outcome of an obsession in recent years with parliamentary politics, with the consequent undermining of the basic military role of the Irish Republican Army. The failure to provide the maximum defence possible of our people in Belfast and in other parts of the Six Counties against the forces of British Imperialism last August is ample evidence of this neglect'.22

Bloody Sunday: Derry 30 January 1972

A second internment camp hade been opened at Magilligan strand near Derry on 6 January 1972. A protest organised there by NICRA on 22 January 1972 was banned and frontline British troops known as paratroopers (equivalent to navy seals in the US army) were despatched there from Belfast, who treated the crowd with great harshness. Another march was planned for Derry on Sunday 30 January 1972. Paisley sought to have it banned. A 10,000 crowd showed up, and the British military, who saw the whole episode as orchestrated by the Provos, were determined to show who really bossed the streets. Fourteen innocent civilians were murdered by British paratroopers as part of a politically orchestrated crack down on the Civil Rights movement.26 The massacre of innocent civilians generated a huge backlash.27 On 2 February, an angry Dublin protest burned the British Embassy on Merrion Square, as reported in the Irish Times.

Medical care services

A secondary component of this sector is Medical care services: 70 companies, 11,500 employed, £1 billion exports pa: Baxter-Travenol (Chicago): Abbott Laboratories (Chicago) came to Ireland in 1974 and now employs 1,700.6 Boston Scientific [Natick, Mass] employs 3,200 mostly in Galway: Medtronic [Minneapolis] which employs 1,700 in Galway: Guidant [Indianapolis] employs 840 at Clonmel. - The cluster effect of competencies is important - allowing for synergies, innovation to develop new products into new drugs: for example, the growth of high quality component and service providers. The jobs in the pharma sector are also good jobs - 40% occupied by graduates. This industry invests $50 billion annually in R & D. Cluster of international leaders in health care; 57% of these companies now have R & D capacity: in 2001, invested 50 million euro in R & D, up by 33% on the previous year; helped by 646 million euro Science Foundation Ireland [SFI] input into university research: - A key question for Ireland is whether the pharmas are here to stay. If that sector ever decided to leave, we will need all the Prozac that used to be manufactured here. The industry itself states that it currently faces two major challenges: impending expiry of patents and diminishing levels of research. Some products currently manufactured in Ireland have come off patent and more are due to expire soon. Once cheaper generic alternatives enter the market, strong downward pressure is exerted on the price, driving revenues down. Current research struggle to generate innovative products to meet therapeutic needs, given that regulators and payers are increasingly unwilling to support incremental improvements to existing therapies. These challenges require an active Irish response, giving global companies fresh reasons to locate major here - setting the country apart from competitor economies that are chasing the same investments. Ireland can no longer compete directly with low-cost economies on cost grounds alone. Companies have to secure competitive advantage through smarter ways of doing business, superior technology, constant innovation, and aggressive cost- control. - Ireland's challenge is to become a hub for the development and scaling-up of existing products. The country should strive to gain a reputation for swift technology transfer and development - shortening the time for a drug to move from clinical trial to the market. Seamless transition from R & D to manufacturing is a key step in ensuring the sector's future. As healthcare requirements change, technologies will increasingly converge. Pharmaceuticals and medical technologies are already coalescing, as shown by the evolution of drug eluting stents. Information technology and telematics will converge via medical diagnostics and pharmaceuticals. Due to the strong presence of all these sectors in Ireland, the industry is well placed to drive this process forward. Employees need to be flexible and to work with their sites to ensure that necessary change is embraced.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE GFA.

A tension lies at the heart of GFA: it tries to balance an overt concern with communal identities - a 'two identities' and almost a 'two nations' vocabulary is deployed - with a concern for citizenship - which is an individual rather than a group right, and is more concerned with safeguarding transparency before the law and the 'equality' agenda. There is a palpable tension between the communitarian/nationalist and the individual/liberal emphasis, which also tends to break along Catholic communitarian and Protestant individualism lines. - Belfast has currently fifteen peace walls, compared to twelve in 1998. The historic pattern has been of speedy segregation in troubled periods, followed by a slow seepage back when times improve politically: one in ten marriages are mixed. Currently the Ardoyne area is 1% Protestant while the Shankill is 3% RC. - The Provos has offered a surprising comfort to Unionists, in terms of presenting a clear-cut enemy whom all despised: the ceasefire perplexed and wrong-footed them, and opened up fractures within the unionists that had been masked by their unified opposition to the IRA.

Fibre Optic Cable

A wake up call here was the 1997 decision by Microsoft not to locate its major new internet venture in Ireland due to the lack of competitively priced broadband access. The first fibre-optic cable [costing 60m $] was laid by Global Crossing [with strong Irish government support] terminated in 2000 at City West16 -This supplied high speed band width linking Dublin directly to the US and 35 other European cities. By 2003, we had six cables - Tyco, Flag, Tat 14, Cable & Wireless [Apollo], Hibernia Atlantic [12, 200km: links NY-Boston-Dublin], and Global Crossing [which links 200 cities worldwide]. Ireland currently has the cheapest prices in Europe, but a global glut due to the dot bombs took the heat out of the provision problem, as demand slackened: important for data-storage: US firms can create back-up mirror-site in Dublin, which protects them against a US disaster like 9/11: there is now one million square feet of data-hosting space in Ireland. 150 million euro was on spent developing Westpark, an e-business park at Shannon (Clare), with one million square feet of office space. There is a strong effort to bring broadband to the regions, not just Dublin. 40% of houses now have computers: 31% have internet access; 100,000 have broadband connectivity: we are still doing poorly on international comparisons with these figures.

Fiscal Crunch

All these chickens came home to roost in Irish henhouses after the downturn in 2008. With unbelievable speed, large parts of the Tiger unravelled, and we felt the full force of the crash. As one of the most globalised countries in the world, we were peculiarly impacted by the worldwide retrenchment. The impact was exacerbated by the sharp drop in the pound and the dollar, a fall that suddenly made our exports more expensive. We were lucky to be in the euro: Benefits of the euro: ten years old in 2008. ECB established to control monetary policy: has proved reasonably robust. It kept inflation at 2% pa, pushed down interest rates, helped job creation and promoted finacial integration. The downside was the loss of fiscal independence - one speed Europe in relation to monetary and exchange rate policies. Ireland can no longer recover competitiveness through an interest rate cut - huge rise of labour costs - 33 % increase 1999-2007: wage growth has raced ahead of competitivity. This fuelled and protracted the Irish housing boom, which in turn caused the Tiger boom to extend beyond sustainability. The euro shielded Ireland from a fiscal meltdown in 2008: Otherise we would have been Iceland.38 The attraction of the euro is that it was durable because of the size of its zone, political stability, and sound fiscal policy. It has shown its ability to weather a big fiscal crisis. Excellent record on inflation. Income per head still at 70% of US level. Lucky as it coincided with the global 'great moderation' - the era of economic stability and low inflation now rudely terminated. The euro still has not ousted the dollar as a global reserve currency (Dollar still has two-thirds of that, euro has a quarter) - although it did function as a safe haven as investors deserted small risky currencies (Iceland, Hungary); Only four surviving strong currencies - dollar, pound, yen, yuan. Even the Swiss franc and the British pound have come under pressure - both had big banking sectors with lots of foreign currency debts. Hungarians, Poles, Danes now keen to enter the euro zone.

THE 1960s

All this happened on the eve of the 'Swinging Sixties': Californication of Ireland: T.V., 1961: Oliver J. Flanagan: 'There was no sex in Ireland before the television.' Importance of Edna O'Brien's Country girls trilogy: The country girls (1960): The lonely girl (1962): Girls in their married bliss (1964). This trilogy was the first explicit voicing of a woman's perspective, and of sexuality: The local response in her native Tuamgraney in County Clare was outrage - the parish priest insisted on a public book-burning. 'I sometimes admit that when I think of television and radio and their immense power, I feel somewhat afraid': Eamon De Valera at the inauguration of Telefis Eireann [the state television service] in 1961:Almost palpable sense of new generation: the Irish 'midnight's children' (Salman Rushdie) bored stiff with the old orthodoxy38: Stirrings of pop culture - George Best39 [the first Irish sex symbol, and a sublimely gifted soccer player], the Dubliners, all beards, pints and Aran sweaters; The Age of Affluence (J. K. Galbraith): the birth of a consumer society: - Also first challenge to authoritarian church: Vatican II, 1962-196540Enormous change in access to education following Free Education (1967)New buildings in Dublin city: Espousal of modernism in its most brutal, nihilistic form; 1960s was a bad decade globally for architecture; Destruction of Georgian city - a beautiful face with missing teeth:The 1960s in Ireland - a direct response to the dreadful 1950s and the resulting decision to open up the Irish economy to multi-national industry from 1958 onwards. In the face of consistently humiliating demographics41 and economic stagnation, and a deepening sense of the failure of the entire independence project, autarkic economic policies were abandoned, as a modernising Taoiseach (Prime Minister) replaced De Valera. A new policy, the First Programme of Economic Recovery, was instituted in 1958. Among its key components were joining the fiscal institutions of international capitalism, the World Bank and the IMF, applying to join the European Common Market and inviting in multi- national industry through a liberal taxation regime and access to cheap labour. These innovations seemed to bring instantaneous success - again predicated on wider changes, as the 1960s spawned the consumer society, and Ireland benefited from its renewed exposure to confident and expansive British and American economies. The economic uptick was also paralleled by striking social change in the 1960s, which posed a vigorous challenge to existing models of identity politics. The state nationalist paradigm seemed to be dissolving rapidly through the internationalisation of capital, the impact of global communications, rapid transformations in attitudes to sexuality, and shifting gender roles. - Key events here included the establishment of a state television service (RTE), in 1962,42 the building of the first high-rise building Liberty Hall between 1962 and 1965, the visit of the glamorous Irish-American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy43 in 1963, the first high-rise public housing at Ballymun (completed in 1969)44, the First Vatican Council 1962-65, the opening of the first shopping centre at Cornelscourt in 1964, the transfer of University College Dublin to the architecturally brutalist Belfield Campus in the 1960s, and the advent of 'Free Education' in 1967.45 All these changes seemed to indicate an Ireland that was finally enjoying the fruits of 'modernisation.' The ardent provincial pursuit of the cosmopolitan can be seen most readily in both urban and rural Irish architecture of this period. - The ache to embrace the cosmopolitan style of glass and concrete defiant of context was evident in Dublin, just as the bungalow blitz swept the countryside. 46 Dobbins bistro in a Nissan hut: 47 no effort to marry old and new: There had been no new buildings for a century after the Famine except pubs and churches: one can almost feel the enormous lust for something new - glass and concrete - in the 1960s: especially visible around Stephens Green; classic example is Sam Stephenson's 1960s mews off Leeson Street; the architect closest to Haughey and the modernisers: leather-lined conversation pit, mirror glass, mosaic bar, glass table, V'Soske Joyce long-haired rug, sunken bath, sauna, heated towel rails: famous for late night parties, once people exited one of the few Dublin night clubs on Leeson Street:

religious prejudice of America

America featured a long parade of witch burners, anti- Papist Know Nothings [aka The American Party, founded in 1854], Ku Klux Klan, prohibitionists, to Kenneth Starr and Russ Limbaugh. The anti-Catholic The awful disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery was the biggest best seller in America22 until Uncle Tom's Cabin. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously described anti-Catholicism as the pornography of the Puritan. In the White Slave panic of 1910, one newspaper asked: 'Shall we defend our American civilisation or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners - French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians?' The Irish in America oftenfound themselves at the uncomfortable vortex of the confluence of anti-Catholicism, evangelicalism and scientific racism

FIRST WORLD WAR

And then the First World War broke out in 1914 in Sarajevo21: Suspension of Home Rule bill (with Redmond's assent) until end of war: A fatal gamble? Redmond offered unconditional support for the British war effort - Carson absorbed into War Cabinet: Sinn Féin broke with Redmond over Irish involvement in the war - anti-recruitment and threat of conscription.22 This aligned Sinn Féin for the first time with the hitherto Redmondite Catholic Church which also opposed conscription. Sinn Féin proved adept at propaganda23 during this period, which also saw increased international journalistic scrutiny of Ireland from abroad.24 - The First World War witnessed the deployment of mass armies with machine guns firing six hundred rounds a minute. War was welcomed by literary people as a hygienic exercise and a restoration of seriousness of purpose after decadent frivolity of the Belle Epoque and the Gilded Age [Think of The Great Gatsby or those mansions lining the waterfront at Newport, Rhode Island]: also a riposte to bourgeois individualisation and atomisation: Western front quickly became bogged down and lethal: 475 mile long killing zone, a no man's land of five to ten yards, hunkered down in thirty foot deep trenches: could only be taken by infantry assault: Battle of the Somme: fifty thousand British killed in one day without gaining an inch: Three million lives were casually sacrificed while the front wavered back and forth across five miles in three years. In spring 1916 at Verdun, two million men were engaged in a massive mutual holocaust, involving 676,000 losses. - Eight million died in WW 1, about 27,000 of them Irish.25 140,000 Irish fought: Many Irish thought that they were fighting for the rights of small nations (poor little Catholic Belgium, where the Huns were raping the nuns): Irish troops were four times more likely to be sentenced to death by British Army court martial than troops from Britain or the Dominions.26 Ulster regiments were decimated at Battle of Somme: WW One: poor decision making on all sides: lions led by donkeys: ended the British empire: USA eventually engaged in 1917 and broke the stalemate:

Anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism was also a vibrant force within Irish-American nationalism, as a reflexive hostility to colonialism was transposed into the American realm. Ford welcomed the American invasion of Spanish Cuba in 1898, but only if the intention was to free rather than annex Cuba. He mobilised against the American invasion of Philippines ['a Catholic country'] and was fearful of a nascent American imperialism. He saw America's imperial role as profoundly anti- American, anti-democratic and a betrayal of the Revolution and of republicanism. It brought despotism home to their own doors and introduced an autocratic militarisation to American society. Irish-Americans displayed unanimity on imperialism as a negation of American founding principles, while supporting internal American expansion as 'an empire of liberty'. Thus when the United States launched its conquest of the Philippines in 1898, Ford sided squarely with the Filipinos and compared American perfidy to that of England. 'Today the Filipinos are treated in their own country by their would-be foreign masters the same way the Irish were treated in 1798,' he declared. 'If we [Americans] choose to follow in England's footsteps, it may be expected that we shall duplicate her crimes against God and humanity'.

Housing

As the housing boom exploded, traffic snarled up and insufficient infrastructural investments were made. Luas (a Light Rail System) was successfully installed but there still is no underground, and road infrastructure is painfully inadequate. Dublin airport became heavily stressed: the Dublin - London route is the busiest route in the world. As the boom continued, prices escalated. In 2003, only Finland beat us as an expensive location. We became the most expensive country in the euro-zone, and Dublin became full of bad pubs and overpriced pretentious restaurants. It is not too harsh to say that a rip-off culture emerged and that Irish people as whole became addicted to consumerism, as shiny new shopping centres mushroomed. The Dundrum Shopping Centre, modelled on American Malls, and opened in 2003, is a monument to the hubris of the Tiger years, a cathedral of consumerism. The Celtic Tiger became a Laputa34 floating on a tide of cheap money.

Change of IDA strategy

As well as seeking new companies, we now seek to sustain and nourish our existing base. There is no use in losing jobs as fast as we created them [now running at over 10,000 annually]: the new mantra is moving up the value chain; we need to help companies that are already here to reposition themselves within their parent companies. Ireland can no longer do manufacturing- our cost base is too high to compete with Asia and eastern Europe: Three options: one: develop new functional responsibilities, especially R & D; two: upgrade facilities to state of art: three: seek to be the base for EMEA region [Europe, Middle East and Africa]. Ireland has to pay attention as to where its operations rank in the parent MNC, as these are slimming back on multiple locations. This is a different challenge from the 1990s when we faced a ramping-up exercise - rapid start up of production, through producing techies and engineer for ITC. Now we need M. Scs, post docs, of ever higher quality to attract the vital R & D and management activities. Even in manufacturing, nearly 70% of new employees are graduates as opposed to 10% in early 1990s: Wyeth has significant R & D capacity from inception: A good example of successfully managed change is the Apple plant in Cork which morphed from manufacturing to software design and customer support. Now that we have so many world leaders here, our principal challenge is to retain them. The proven flexibility of the Irish work force is a big plus. The challenge is to integrate MNCs into Ireland in such a way that they are not just a low-cost tax-driven export enclave disconnected from the national economy. Can we generate sufficient agglomeration benefits to keep industries rooted in Ireland? [Seattle and Silicon Valley are both high-cost locations which have remained competitive] These benefits include, according to Michael Porter, a deep and mobile labour market with industry-specific skills: specialist suppliers of niche materials and services: knowledge spill-overs and innovation arising from personal contacts. For example we now have 65,000 employed in IT. A lively indigenous software industry has grown rapidly. Closer links have emerged between specific industries and third-level educational institutions.

CHALLENGES

Between 1993 and 2006, for fifteen straight years the Republic has had the fastest growing economy in the EU. Even after the global downturn from the second half of 2002, Ireland enjoyed a remarkably soft landing. But the Global Fiscal Crisis hit us hard in 2007, and the Tiger economy came apart at the seams, especially that inflated and unsustainable part of it driven by the construction industry. Big questions now beset us. Are we as well prepared for the next big thing as we were for information technologies in the 1990s? Were we lucky? No one predicted the Celtic Tiger or fully understood it. The Tiger turned out to be a Cheshire cat which just slowly faded away with a cynical grin. Our key issue remains always the sustainability of our economy.

effect of Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday terminated NICRA and the reformist tradition and it rocket-fuelled the rise of the Provos. It also marked the point at which northern nationalists definitively refused to acknowledge any more the legitimacy of the British state. 1972 became the single most violent year of the Troubles with almost 500 killings,37 5,000 injuries and 10,000 shootings. The north descended into absolute mayhem. The political system responded by trying to create a power-shocking executive (SDLP/Unionists), agreed at Sunningdale. This collapsed due to resistance organised by the Ulster Workers Council strike (1974), and inspired by Ian Paisley. The resulting vacuum led to a long, depressing 'Dirty War', as law and justice were systematically subordinated to security policy by 'securocrats' - those who prioritised security over political issues. Some of the most influential and philosophically challenging books of our time are Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer series.38 He argues that the rule of law is routinely displaced by the declaration of a state of exception or emergency. This raises the problem that sovereignty cannot then be said to reside in the law if the state can make exceptions to it, or dispense with the rule of law at its own discretion. In these circumstances, the exception therefore exposes the hidden norm: it allows the state to persist even as the law recedes - a point first developed by the political philosopher Carl Schmitt (a dominant intellectual influence on the neo-con movement in America, with its advocacy of the strong state). 'The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing, the exception proves everything'. [Carl Schmitt, Political theology, 1922]. The state of exception lies in a no-man's land between the civil law and political facts, between juridicial order and life. Northern Ireland offers an interesting expression of Agamben's ideas. The so-called Diplock (non-jury) courts were introduced in 1973, followed by Criminalisation of IRA prisoners between 1975 and 1979, the use of Supergrasses between 1979 and 1985, and a Shoot-to-Kill policy by security forces in the 1980s. The initial British army thinking was developed by Sir Frank Kitson, in his book Low Intensity Operations (1971). He deployed models derived from his experience fighting the Mau-Mau in Kenya,39 and from what had happened in Aden, Malaysia, and to the French in Algeria. The elite British Army unit, the SAS [Special Armed Service], recruited local, agents, sponsoring the co-option of existing factions through infiltration of Protestant paramilitary groups. The British also developed Psych-ops ('black propaganda', 'Lisburn lie machine'), even to the extent of facilitating loyalist bombs in the south. The Dublin bombing in 197440 occurred when special anti-IRA legislation was about to be passed and successfully manipulated Southern opinion, notably in the state broadcaster RTE and the main paper the Irish Times.41 Kitson established the Military Reaction Force in 1972, to recruit local agents (loyalist paramilitaries, whom the British armed by importing firearms for them from South Africa) and run counter-insurgency operations. These were called IIF [Irregular Indigenous Forces]. The Military Reaction Force was nearly wiped out in the Four Square laundry affair in 1972.42 It was then given a new name - 14th Intelligence and Security Company, with a key leader being Gordon Kerr, who had been trained by Kitson. Kerr was later promoted to Lieutenant Colonel when Maggie Thatcher took a hands-on approach to defeating the Provos after her election as British Prime Minister in 1979 and particularly after the brutal and high-profile assassinations of her close friend Airey Neave, and of Lord Mountbatten and the carnage inflicted on the Parachute regiment at Narrowwater. After that gory 'spectacular' (the Provos's word for a high profile killing), the gloves came off for Thatcher. This special-ops force within the British army (not the police) was now given the name Forces Research Unit [FRU]. Thatcher secretly visited and fraternised at its Lisburn (County Armagh) HQ and Kerr operated outside the normal army chain of command, reporting directly to Military Intelligence. The FRU released files on suspect Provos to the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence Association's [UDA] intelligence officer, Brian Nelson, who then organised hits on them. Nelson was operating with army agents to identify names on the UDA hit list, in an effort to direct the UDA to 'proper' targets. The most notorious examples were the murders of the lawyers Pat Finucane43 and Rosemary Nelson. In effect, an arm of the British state, under high-level political and military direction, was carrying out a campaign of sectarian assassination of political opponents 44The concept was to use the loyalists to inflict sufficient pain on the Catholic community to make them 'vomit out the Provos', to 'grind down' (David Trimble's phrase) the Provos by attrition, and to sap their will to fight. Instead random loyalist killings drove the Catholics back into the bloody arms of the Provos as a necessary protection, thereby prolonging the Troubles. This was the conclusion of the Stevens inquiry on collusion.

Can we add on a Research and Development [R & D] tier?

Build it on existing university research: Ireland competitive in education system until it gets to Research and Development: Nobel prizes in literature but none in economics or science: shift in leadership of Irish universities: 2002 election of laser physicist John Hegarty to head up TCD: and medical researcher Hugh Brady to head up UCD from 2004; both American trained- Madison-Wisconsin and Harvard - and with understanding of the business- oriented model of American university governance; also marks switch away from Cambridge, and humanities21 dominance: another tilt towards Boston rather than Berlin? It marks a weakening of Anglo influence in Ireland. In 2009, announcement of merger of UCD/TCD research functions in an effort to generate critical mass

PEACE PROCESS

By 1989, a weary 'stalemate' was reluctantly being agreed on both sides. Peter Brooke, the Northern Secretary of State, issued an important statement that 'The British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland'. Meanwhile, the secret Hume/Adams talks were taking place in Clonard Monastery, facilitated by Fr Reid, in which Adams asked Hume to persuade him that progress on a United Ireland could be achieved by non-violent means. In the South, movement was also taking pace: the South agreed to abolish Section 2-3 of its Constitution, establishing a 'consensual' rather than a 'territorial' claim to Northern Ireland. All this paved the way for the important Downing Street Declaration of December 1993: It is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently give, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish. The Peace Process involved some new principles. It involved working from the political extremes in, not from the centre out. The old failed policy had been to exclude the extremes and to try to build the middle ground out. The British and Irish government agreed that they were players rather than impartial adjudicators. The British should exert influence on Unionists, while the Irish exerted influence on Nationalists. Crucially, the Americans would apply pressure on both governments and act as an honest broker or referee between them. The emerging Peace Process was also the subject of skillful micro- management by southern mandarins, notably Sean Ó hUiginn, Martin Mansergh, Tim O'Connor and Sean Donlon.66 The British were also ready to consider different options. The first set of British responses in the early days of the Troubles were panicked, ad hoc and inconsistent - as in the disastrous introduction of internment in 1971. They started with an 'extrication with dignity' {decolonisation} model, which only slowly changed to an acceptance of the permanency of Direct Rule. From the 1980s, a more realist approach emerged, and with it a narrowly focused British policy, with an emphasis on damage limitation, especially in the international arena, and with a close eye on the USA. They also sought a thaw in relations with the south, and the rebuilding of Belfast on security lines. But one policy remained obsessively dominant: beating the Provos. A key weapon organised by M15 was the insertion of slow acting agents who had to be given time to filter up through the Provos ranks - like Scappaticci, and Donaldson. The Provos were thoroughly compromised, as was demonstrated by the Loughgall ambush in 1978 when the SAS wiped out eight senior Provos. Infiltration led to better targeting, and sowed fear at the heart of the Provos. This left little scope for Adams to manouevre: after fifteen years of haggling, their only remaining viable weapons were delivering the ceasefire and decommissioning. Meanwhile, war weariness had permeated the North, as the children of the first generation of the troubles began to mature. Activists who were willing to endure the pressure and the pain themselves did not wish to inflict it on their children. Remarkable leadership qualities had also developed within the Provos, especially Gerry Adams and Martin MacGuinness.67 They recognised that their existing political options were too narrow. MacGuinness said in 1986: 'By ignoring reality we remain alone and isolated on the high altar of abstentionism, divorced from many people in the twenty-six counties and easily dealt with by those who wish to defeat us'. The IRA ceasefire of August 199468 promised 'a complete cessation of military operations' and made possible further political movement.

1898

Centenary of 1798: stitching function for torn politics - Local government reform - new platform for aspiring nationalist politicians: women got the vote in local elections and become a growing presence in politics:

POLITICAL TURBULENCE - THE HAUGHEY YEARS

Charles J. Haughey was a remarkable caricature of the post-colonial leader. His nouveau-riche lifestyle included the trappings of the Anglo-Irish gentry - horses, hunting, yachting, vintage wines, a gossip-column mistress, the Big House at Abbeyville, a west coast island retreat (one of the Blasket Islands) - and ostentatious, conspicuous consumption (hand-tailored Charvet shirts from Paris) allied to personal boorishness. This was accompanied by a charade of attachment to the old pieties - language, anti-partition, the small farmers... All this edifice of hypocrisy was built on personal corruption on a heroic scale. Haughey in government specialised in Grand Projets in the French presidential style - Ballymun towers, Government Buildings, International Financial Services Centre and Temple Bar. While revisionists try to assign him to traditional Ireland, Haughey in fact embodies the modernisation project in twentieth-century Ireland. - Many plays loosely modelled on him have already been presented by the Abbey Theatre: Sebastian Barry's Hinterland (2001), Marina Carr's Ariel (2002), John Breen's Charlie at the Pavilion (2003).Difficult relationship with Great Britain especially with the 'Iron Lady' Maggie Thatcher. - Poisonous legacy of the Hunger Strikes (1981): National soul searching in 1980s: - We had blown it: sense of doom and gloom, that we were a third world country on the edge of Europe: We were the basket case of European economics: many were advising us to call in the World Bank: a) Whole Irish stock market in 1987 capitalised at 4 billion pounds b) Economist headline 16/1/1988: 'Poorest of the rich' (GDP: 64% of EU average) c) Joseph Lee's Modern Ireland book (1988) could be called a 'case study in economic failure.' - At same time equally negative assessments from Roy Foster's Modern Ireland (1988) and the Field Day critique.In retrospect, we can see that three good things came out of the horrible 1980s: a) Convinced the Irish public of the need for fiscal rectitude and prudent public finances b) Need for continuity of economic policy from administration to administration c) Galvanised clear sense of national purpose (especially in Civil Service) - These changes in public policy created the appropriate habitat for the sleek species about to stride on set - the green striped Celtic Tiger.48

IRELAND AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

During World War II, 50 million people were killed as advanced nations created carnage on an industrial and global scale. It destroyed entire cities in Europe, but also touched every corner of the globe, from Montevideo to Burma, and Madagascar to Alaska. Yet, southern Ireland resolutely managed to avoid participation in this widespread conflict, despite its formerly close ties with the United Kingdom and its geo-political importance in the Atlantic sphere. By contrast, the Unionist population in the Six Counties enthusiastically backed the war and supplied two of the three professional heads of the British Army. In an address at the end of the war, Winston Churchill eluded to this strategic situation, 'Had it not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland, we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr De Valera or perish forever from the earth.' Ironically, partition decreased the British incentive to invade. Churchill was convinced that airfields in Ireland were a strategic necessity. However, the existence of alternatives in Northern Ireland chilled his enthusiasm for forcibly occupying southern bases. - Irish neutrality caused much bitterness in the United Kingdom who viewed Irish neutrality as a betrayal, and an abnegation of moral responsibility. They felt that there was no middle ground in a war against evil [although it should be remembered that the full extent of Nazi atrocities, notably the concentration camps, only became apparent after the war was over]. Ireland was strategically important to the allies for its Atlantic-facing ports [the so-called 'Treaty Ports'] of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly, only recently ceded by the United Kingdom in 1938. British military commanders also cast covetous eyes on Irish air bases that would have facilitated British and American aircraft in searching for German U-Boats further out into the Atlantic, depriving the Germans of thousands of square miles where their submarines could surface without fear of air attack. The only palatable aspect for the British was that they still had Northern Ireland, especially Derry, as a base for submarines in the Atlantic. Why did Southern Ireland choose to stay neutral? It remained neutral because Irish people were vehemently united in their rejection of joining the fray. They believed that the risks of entering the conflict far outweighed any possible gains. The Irish government remained intent on ensuring that their painfully obtained sovereignty was respected. For De Valera World War 2 was a litmus test of whether Irish independence was genuine. The Irish policy of neutrality was backed by an overwhelming majority of the Irish citizenry. A contemporary observer noted: 'The population of Éire is unanimously behind the Government in its decision for neutrality. There are differences of opinion on many political questions, but on this subject all are agreed.' This unanimity was all the more remarkable considering the tortured years that the Irish Free State had endured prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The Irish people came to an extraordinary consensus on their involvement in the war. Eunan O'Halpin notes: 'From the outset there was virtual unanimity on government policy.' Public opinion ensured Irish neutrality. The most important, reason for that stance was their concern about losing their hard-won and recently gained sovereignty, which many had fought and died for only a generation before. One contemporary writer noted: 'For the present-day politician in Éire, the independence of the country is nothing short of sacred, and the slightest shadow of anything that might mar it is looked upon almost as a sacrilege.' This Irish stress on the inviolability of their neutrality was unique in Europe. The overwhelming sentiment in Ireland was that surrendering the use of ports to the United Kingdom for the duration of the war would fatally compromise their independence. Robert Fisk notes: 'The proof of that sovereignty was Britain's acceptance of Irish neutrality, a policy which was thus unalterable inside Éire'. There was also the pragmatic point that there was no real possibility of either a German or a British invasion; Ireland was too distant for the Luftwaffe while theBritish, however much they were annoyed, were afraid of provoking an American backlash if they invaded

Dynamics of transformation

EU transfer payments: EU net transfers to Ireland were 35 billion euro 1973-2005: it had a huge impact on workplace and environmental laws: In 1973, 55% of Irish exports went to Great Britain [18% of it cheap agricultural products]: this is now down to 18% and dropping. In 1973, our average income was 60% of EEC average, at the height of the Tiger in 2008, it was well over 100%. Important for infrastructure, especially roads: Switch from agriculture to information technologies (in which skipped an entire generation).3 The EU allowed us to emerge out from under a British economic shadow and created an important psychic thaw. Mary Robinson observed that 'Europe has enhanced the national identity of Irish people'.4 EU participation allowed us to transfer from sterling dependency to Euro-zone [Euro started on 1 January 2002]. We are now the only English-speaking country in Euroland, which is a major attraction for American-based companies. This became especially important after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 which created compelling fiscal incentives for American companies to be based in Europe. We entered the Exchange Rate Mechanism (E.R.M.) in 1992, adopted the Euro in 1998 and abolished our own currency in 2002. Participation in the eurozone shielded us from fiscal shocks in the aftermath of the global crisis of 2007, when otherwise we would likely have been bankrupt, like Iceland. - Second generation of multi-national companies (MNCs): Less scattergun, more targeted -high output, high tech, clusters/linkages: Low corporate tax rate - 12.5%. Strategy: One: Identify sectors. Two: Identify leading companies in those sectors. Three: Attract them to Ireland: Four leading sectors: Electronics: Computer Software: Pharmaceuticals: Biotech Healthcare:

FIANNA FÁIL

Eamon De Valera set up the Fianna Fáil [FF] political party in 1925: Took the oath [which had given so much trouble earlier] as an 'empty formality' and went into the Dail: Emergence of a vigorous two-party system: FF = 'a slightly constitutional party': they entered the Dáil with their revolvers in their pockets. 1932 - FF won election (to stay in power for 16 years): Just as effects of Wall Street crash struck here: A protectionist policy: tariff walls = 'Economic War': De Valera tough on IRA (executions): 1937 Constitution (Catholic, Gaelic ethos): Effort to impose culture by state ('command culture') Jeffersonian Republicanism? A powerful rural-fundamentalist strain emerged, stressing that the quintessential Irish civilisation was deeply rooted in the soil; the true genius of the Irish character could be developed only in a life lived close to nature. This life offered a fuller, deeper existence, which was more harmonious and fulfilling then life in the city. The Catholic church also stressed the sanctity and value of rural life. Fianna Fáil gave these rural-fundamentalist principles political expression, more particularly in the 1930s. Two of the central tenets of the Fianna Fáil programme of 1932 were the development of a social system in which 'as far as possible equal opportunity would be afforded to every Irish citizen to live a whole and a useful Christian life' and 'the distribution of the land of Ireland in order to get the greatest possible number of Irish families rooted in the soil of Ireland.' 13 Rural fundamentalism was thereby assigned a primary importance in the formulation of cultural identity in the post-colonial Irish state. Eamon De Valera was a classic example with his 'coronary introspection' technique

Culturally introverted-censorship

Every major Irish writer banned: Brendan Behan's suggestion to revive the Irish language was to ban all the books published in it: Patrick Kavanagh's long poem The Great Hunger: Flann O'Brien's satire, notably At Swim Two Birds31 (1939), and An Beal Bocht32 [The Poor Mouth] 1941: - Deep sense of failure of the independence project: Capture of the state had not led to the transformation of a country: a failed state - business as usual33: It is important to acknowledge the few initiatives which did take place, including Gael Linn, the Dolmen Press, Comhaltas Ceoilteoiri Eireann, the Ardmore film Studios [1958] and Claddagh Records.34 An excellent evocation of this disillusioned period is John MacGahern's novel Amongst women (1991). Moran, an old republican, is disappointed by the state that he has helped to found. He tries to recreate a micro-republic in his own family, but ends up driving his family apart, and creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, which forces his male children out and oppresses his daughters.

The Good Friday DisAgreement

Excruciatingly slow resolution - the Long Good Friday - The Good Friday DisAgreement, not so much 'hope and history' [Seamus Heaney] as hope and hype. A Joint Declaration of the British and Irish Governments in 2003 sought to stabilise the institutions, predicated on a complete IRA stand down, as specified in paragraph 13. The demand was for clarity and closure from IRA in 'Acts of Completion'. This was also an effort to shore up Trimble for fear of the rejectionist DUP on his flank. Ironically voters after the Agreement rewarded the more hard-line Pasley's DUP rather than Trimble's OUP, and Adams's Sinn Féin rather than Hume's moderate SDLP. Both sides have polarised since the Agreement rather than drawing closer together. This led to a sullen peace and a jittery Unionist community where Trimble was outmanoeuvred by Paisley. - By early 2005, the process seemed to have ground to a shuddering halt. The fall-out from the Provos massive 50m$ robbery of the Belfast Northern Bank on 20 December 2004, and a gruesome killing on 31 January 2005 of Robert McCartney76 generated a blistering media and political fire storm of negativity about Sinn Féin's bona fides, their alleged criminal links and the extent to which the Provos had become a liability in their own heartlands. Ironically this criticism was angrier in the south than the north, where all the old antagonists of the Provos, silenced by the Peace Process, sought the limelight again. The truculent and bullying Michael MacDowell proved especially adept at needling and undermining Sinn Féin in the South, and the southern media and political class remains deeply hostile to them, the more so as they seemed set to advance rapidly in the south as well after the ceasefire.

The 1950s

Factors: emigration resumed, mostly to Great Britain: Humiliating demographics and economic stagnation:

2007

Finally in 2007, after much hand-wringing and procrastination, Sinn Féin and the DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] finally agreed a political power-sharing deal. This worked out much more amiably than anyone had predicted [Ian Paisley and Martin MacGuinness struck up an unlikely friendship, earning the moniker 'the chuckle brothers'] and the bedding down of the political institutions has proceeded slowly but surprisingly calmly. When Paisley retired as First Minister, his position was taken by Peter Robinson, widely regarded as a moderniser, a capable, calculating if rather cold politician. Robinson has visibly sought to distance the DUP from Sinn Féin although the slow but steady normalisation of politics in NI continues. One last hurdle was surmounted in 2010: the return of responsibility for policing and security to Stormont from Westminster. The political class in Northern Ireland are gradually learning that they have to take responsibility for their own situation, rather than constantly running to London, Dublin or Washington when things get tough at home. - Despite the continuing sectarianism which still infects every aspect of Northern Ireland life, despite the bad blood and bitter memories caused by a generation of civil strife, despite efforts by micro-republican groups to foment violence, there are still reasonable grounds for cautious optimism: TINA - There Is No Alternative.

1907

Founding of the political party Sinn Féin (translates as OURSELVES): 'The language itself is not an end but a means to an end'. Arthur Griffiths: his transformative book The resurrection of Hungary [1904]: anti-imperial: Abstentionist: Constitutional /militant split: Distrust of English liberalism: but also a growing sense that a Home Rule parliament on College Green meant little if there was not a distinctive Irish nationality to be guarded and developed.All this cultural activity switched the way that Irish people, especially young Irish people, thought about themselves, as Seán Ó Faoláin analysed it: I read world history as the English saw it. I read English literature as the English wrote it

Ireland and Britishness

Four components of Britishness4 (Linda Colley) Protestantism Empire War Industrialised (in nineteenth century)

Advent of Sean Lemass as Taoiseach in 1958

Four quotations from Lemass: 1.The historic task of this generation is to ensure the economic foundation of independence. (1959) 2. It is not an exaggeration to say that the next five years will prove whether this state can survive as an independent economic unit. This is the critical phase of our national development. All the years of sacrifice and struggle of the past will be in these years, either justified or proved fruitless. The question is whether our people - on the farms, in the factories, and in all other spheres of activity - will put into the campaign to expand the national resources, the very great and sustained effort which will save the country. 3. So long as there is freedom for families to move to Britain, our standards must approximate to British standards or our population will go. It is the survival of the nation which is involved, and not merely our living standards, unless we can achieve, by our own efforts, a rapid and substantial increase in our resources. 4.There has been some evidence in recent years that people were beginning to question whether really substantial economic progress was possible at all or even whether a viable economy could be sustained here. These questions needed to be answered, our people's confidence in the country's future needed to be supported, and the interest and enthusiasm of young people in national development needed to be stimulated. - Lemass positioned as a new, modernising Taoiseach versus the old, blind, out-of- touch De Valera.36 He endorsed the plan by T. K. Whittaker, who was responding to the deep sense of national crisis. As he noted: 'The mood of despondency was palpable.'37 Whitaker authored The First Programme of Economic Recovery (1958) which argued for the opening up of the Irish economy to multi-national industry using three strategies: 1: Invite in multi- national corporations (MNCs) 2: Join Common Market (application 1961, joined EU in 1973) 3: Join World Bank and IMF (1957):

THE HARVARD MISSION

Harvard Irish Survey initiated by E. A. Hooton & Lloyd Warner in 1930s: three components: Physical anthropology10, social anthropology, archaeology; chose typical Irish county - Clare [on advice of Seamas De Largy, head of Irish Folklore Commission - it helped that De Valera was strongly associated with that county]; Archaeology under direction of Hallam Movius, noted Palaeolithic expert and Hugh O'Neill Hencken: 1932-6: excavated seventeen sites in five years [Cahercomaun, Ballinderry...] and published them in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy [PRIA] & the Journal of the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries [JRSAI]; systematic, cutting edge archaeology: suited De Valera as an effort to demonstrate the antiquity and dignity of indigenous Irish civilisation [no investigation of medieval or post-medieval] delight at discovery at Ballinderry of wooden gaming board and hanging bowl: Movius enthused: 'Outside a classical country, say Italy or Greece, it is seldom you find such an enormous quantity of material and of such a very high calibre as was found at Ballinderry'11 Ironically the bowl is now regarded as Hiberno -Norse in style:12

International Financial Services Centre (Dublin

IFSC set up in 1987 with the inspiration of entrepreneur Dermot Desmond and (later disgraced) politician C. J. Haughey: Modelled on Canary Wharf in London: The IFSC operates out of the Dublin Docklands development area, on a 5296 hectare site stretching north and south on the Liffey quays. It has other jobs in high tech, in retail etc. Only one of twelve jobs goes to locals. The crucial feature in ensuring its initial success was the availability of 10% [versus EU average of 28% corporation tax] tax until 2005. It also helped that Ireland has a sophisticated series of forty double taxation treaties with other countries, notably the USA. This means that income taxed in one jurisdiction will not be retaxed when it is repatriated. By 1999, there were £500 billion in funds: 1.2 million square feet of offices: 7,500 employed in it. By 2003, employed 10,700; In 2009, it had 25,000 employees and 20 billion euro of export services: half of top fifty banks in the world located there; advantage of location: European (E U) - especially post 1992, when single market was created: English-speaking: Educated work force: Good technology: Eurozone -the IFSC might be vulnerable if the British ever get around to relinquishing sterling and joining the Euro-zone.10 However there are also increasingly strong clustering benefits, critical mass in terms of companies (over 400 international firms and almost 1,000 managed entities, including Merrill Lynch, Sumitomo Bank, ABN Amro, Citibank, AIG, JP Morgan (Chase), Commerzbank and BNP), and physical space to grow - a problem in other centre city sites. The weakness of the IFSC is the failure to build a vibrant social life there: it has few shops, pubs, restaurants, and is viewed as a sterile environment, off-limits to the cities inhabitants. The recent LUAS extension will help, as does the rebuilding of The Point as the major league O2 arena.

the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP)

In 1882, he changed his party's name to the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). A central aspect of Parnell's reforms was a new selection procedure to ensure the professional selection of party candidates committed to taking their seats. In 1884, he imposed a firm 'party pledge' which obliged 61 party MPs to vote as a bloc in parliament on all occasions. The creation of a strict whip, a disciplined party machine and a formal party structure was unique in party politics at the time. The Irish Parliamentary Party was the first modern British political party, contrasting with the loose rules, flexibility and informality of the main British parties, which soon were forced to follow the Parnellite model A: Link land and nationalism (e.g. boycott) - land agitation identified as the engine that would pull the Home Rule train: B: Link constitutional and physical force nationalism (IRB): Parnell believed to have sworn Fenian oath in the old Library at Trinity College: A true revolutionary movement in Ireland should, in my opinion, partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character. It should be both open and a secret organisation, using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of its secret combination. C: Link Roman Catholic Church and nationalist politics

DOWNWARD SPIRAL: 1972 AND BEYOND

In 1972, the fall of Stormont led to the imposition of Direct Rule from Westminster. This emanated from the disastrous unionist decision to introduce internment without trial in 1971, which in turn led to Bloody Sunday in 1972

Future of the Tiger

In 2000, we achieved an incredible growth rate of 10.7%; After a blip in 2002, we resumed growth in the 4-6% range and we were still doing better than the EU and the USA until 2007. We then hit a wall and took a huge hit at minus 11% in 2009. The key question is whether this is a temporary blip due to global volatility or a permanent hit. The answer depends on whether you prioritise internal or external factors as initially permitting the Tiger economy to flourish. - Internal factors include a plentiful supply of labour, a good education system, social partnership and prudent fiscal policies. - External factors focus on exchange rate changes due to the euro, which massively increased our competitiveness in the late 1990s. The ERM [Exchange Rate Mechanism] delivered low and stable interest rates as opposed to the previous high and volatile ones. The buoyancy of the US economy in the Clinton/dot com/high-tech boom fed FDI [Foreign-Direct Investment] flows to Ireland and boosted our exports on the back of the US consumer feeding frenzy. - If we believe that internal factors are the key, then we can afford to be optimistic. Our work force is still skilled, flexible and if anything more experienced and confident. If there is a drop in labour supply, we can import it.If we believe that external factors powered the Tiger, then pessimism is more appropriate. The interest rate shift was a once-off adjustment, not to be replicated; exchange rates can go in the wrong direction, and a weak dollar seriously compromises our competitivity. The Euro low was reached in July 2001 and since then, there has been a 44% rise in euro or a 31% drop in dollar, putting unbearable pressure on our exports. We remain utterly exposed to the American market, and our recovery depends on an American one, which is not necessarily imminent. - Another way of looking at the Tiger is not to focus on what went right in the 1990s but what went wrong since the Second World War. Why did we so spectacularly under- perform in the period 1945-1990? The Tiger would then be seen as a catch-up phase when we converged on other countries performance and finally became a 'normal' European economy. The Tiger years would then be a once-off catch-up phase which we should not expect to emulate again.29 - We also have to remain competitive as a location for global industry. Yahoo located its European HQ in Dublin - joining Amazon, Google, eBay, and LinkedIn. The Yahoo CEO cited access to skilled labour, telecoms infrastructure [low cost international band width and web hosting], government flexibility, low corporation tax and Ireland's successful track record in hosting US companies as factors influencing the decision.30 Our economic future is also more intimately connected than ever before with the future of the EU. In 2004 the EU expanded to 25 countries and 455m citizens (which 75 m in the accession ten, 380 m in existing fifteen); in 2001, euro area = 60% of US GDP; more than 100% if you include Britain, Sweden & Denmark; EU is currently bigger than the US economy. Ireland is very open to Europe, and it was the only EU country to immediately and completely open its labour market to the Accession Ten.31 The EU embraces a massive territorial extent stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals; in a sense, it is a fourth-generation European empire, following the Roman, Carolingian and Napoleonic examples. It will eventually have not just a common currency and economy, but a common legal code, common constitution, and common defence force, as well as an integrated road and rail network. Ireland's economic future is hitched not just to the stars and stripes but to the Euro-star. EU is not a classsic nation state on the Westphalian state [after 1648] - with a defined territory, hard borders, centralised power, common culture and institutions, uniform identity: - It is more neo-medieval - with overlapping allegiances, and multiple authorities, within states hollowed out from above and below: decentralised power, shared sovereignty, opaque borders, diversity, and mobility.32

Irish 'Green Box

In 2004, the first Irish 'Green Box' opened in an attempt to develop eco-tourism. This embraced a large part of Leitrim/Fermanagh and adjacent counties. Eco-tourism is based on the concept that tourism should have the lightest possible environmental impact, and that its economic impacts should benefit local people. It has the additional benefit that eco-tourists will generally spend more than conventional ones. As hardy outdoor types, they are also less likely to be deterred by the rain.27 7.8m visitors in 2008: up 5%: 15% increase from Europe: spent 6.5 billion euro: US visitors shorter stays - 12 to 10 days: 57,000 hotel beds, up from 30,400 in 1997: drop in B & B: 1998, 4,300 registered: in 2008, this had dropped to 2,649: shift to city breaks.28. There are now 14,000 hotel beds in Dublin - probably an oversupply and Ireland has way too many hotels - built on tax breaks: there are over sixty hotels in Killarney alone. Many are insolvent after the financial crisis and they are essentially kept on life-support by the banks who don't want them entering their bloated bad debts column. Thus Ireland in 2010 is full of zombie hotels

Fianna Fáil

In the South, a bitter debate also emerged within Fianna Fáil. Its pragmatic wing sought to contain theTroubles in Northern Ireland. The Irish Taoiseach [PM] Jack Lynch promised that 'We will not stand idly by'- and then he did just that. A more militant wing, led by Neil Blaney and Charles Haughey, wanted to support and arm the IRA - a possibly Faustian pact in which they agreed to arm the Provos and turn a blind eye to their operating from the south, in return for agreement that the Provos would not seek to undermine the southern state. This eventually led to the notorious Arms Trial in 1970 in which Blaney and Haughey were charged with covertly importing arms for the Provos. - The Provos soon reached the facile and fatally attractive conclusion that all-out 'war' [or 'terror'] woulddeliver a United Ireland - that the British would not have the stomach for a 'war', especially one that targeted their economic interests. The Provos soon resorted to lethal car bombs, which blasted city centres to smithereens, and shrugged their shoulders if this also involved 'collateral damage' in the mealy-mouthed phrase, as body parts of innocent civilians had to be collected in black plastic bags off the streets. This fatally misread unionist opinion, which always united and stiffened under attack, in a demonstration of their celebrated siege mentality. And while The Provos claimed to be anti-British, they soon treated Ulster Unionists as 'legitimate targets' once the British put them in the frontline of response in a policy called 'Ulsterisation'. This knee-jerk Provo response to the British policy of Ulsterisation was to cement partitionism within unionism. The Provos were also supremely confident young men in a hurry, contemptuous of those who had ethical issues with violence, including John Hume and the Catholic Church. Their appetite for violence soon disgusted moderate opinion in the south, which had initially been very sympathetic to the plight of northern nationalists, and the Provos violence quickly turned republicanism into a die-hard phenomenon rather than a mass movement. However effective they were as hard-core insurgents, they totally misread the political situation.25

Electronics & Computer software

Ireland has an enviable history of success in the field, attracting some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Although it is less hyped than IT, it is the steady base of export performance. Eight of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world have Irish facilities, and the country is one of the premier global locations for pharmaceutical and chemical product manufacture. As the western world ages, this is a huge area of growth; biotech will replace the dot coms in the 21st century as the hot area of scientific advance, innovation, public demand, and profit; 120 MNC companies [plus 30 smaller Irish ones]. The pharmaceutical sector is still thriving, despite the global recession. The sector exported products worth €44 billion in 2008, representing just over half of the Irish national total. It contributed €1 billion in corporation tax in 2008 and it employs 24,000 people, with twice that number working in businesses that supply goods and services to the industry. A recent survey of 20 pharma-chemical companies in Ireland indicated expenditure of €350 million during 2009 on capital projects, consistent with continuous investment and facilities upgrades in the sector over the past decade. Recent capital investments range from plant upgrades to the development of greenfield facilities. There has been a huge recent investment by Wyeth at Grange in South Dublin: they spent 1.2 billion euro on 1.2m sq feet biotech manufacturing plant - a showcase high-tech 'clean' industry. Merck, Sharp & Dohme, Gilead Sciences, Genzyme, Pfizer and Eli-Lilly are all nearing completion on major projects in 2010. Ireland's pharmaceutical industry currently generates over 50% of the country's exports, and Ireland is the largest net exporter of medicines in the world. - Leo Laboratories (still here) were the first to come in the 1950s: Pfizer came in 1969; it located in the Cork harbour area thanks to its Irish-American CEO Jack Mulcahy and pulled in a cluster of other companies to that region; Allergan (Westport, County Mayo), 1976: employs 1,000: Schering-Plough: 1980s: Sandoz: 1989. A big plus feature is that the USA federal regulator FDA approves 24 of the biggest plants in Ireland. There has never been a plant closure despite environmental issues. This is a highly stable industry, almost recession-proof, which has not the churn over of the IT sector. Viagra, Prozac and Botox manufactured in Ireland: A significant amount of Allergan's global supply of Botox is made in Westport, County Mayo - worth 600m$ in global revenue. There were 1.7m Botox injections in USA in 2003. Pfizer's Lipitor, the world's top-selling anti-cholesterol medicine, is made exclusively in Cork, with revenues of $12 billion. Pfizer also makes Viagra (which in one year contributed 2% to Irish GDP) is also made in Cork and is worth 1.7$ billion annually in US sales. These examples of industry success are repeated across the country, particularly in hubs around Cork and Dublin.5

sustainability in tourism

Issue of sustainability in tourism; overpriced? Shoddy bland modern developments especially bungalow bliss: Lack of Irishness - too many imported workers; confusion over whether we are a cheap, mass market destination or whether we are a high-end elite market: nobody ever came to Ireland for the weather (except Ludwig Wittgenstein) so service has to be our trump card; decline in that area; problem of which model of tourism to pursue: low end or high end: The high-end sector erupted in an explosion of spas and country clubs in the Tiger exuberance - places like Monart, and Bellinter, Adare Manor, Mount Juliet ... Ireland is now an expensive destination: It is a problem that Ireland now uses foreign workers at low end: many of them immigrant (e.g. Spanish): people come to Ireland for the welcome and expect to meet friendly Irish people: they don't want to meet Spanish here: One-third of staff in the tourist sector is non-Irish: the Irish are so busy trying to be cool that they don't have time to be friendly and welcoming: some success with, for example, golf:

Patrick Pearse's educational experiment at St Enda's

It is in this context too that we should evaluate Patrick Pearse's educational experiment at St Enda's, founded in 1908: an Irish-language school for boys, trying to fashion a modern male Irish citizen using the ancient model of masculinity embodied in the warrior culture of the Fianna and in the Early Christian period in Ireland: mix of Gaelic and Christian mythology and iconography; Cuchulain14 and Christ: emphasis on patriotism, culture, child- centred education. Pearse described it as 'an educational adventure' for nationalist boys, preparing them for a life of public service and republican citizenship. He was consciously preparing a cadre of leaders - 'a brotherhood of young Irishmen' - to take over the newly independent Ireland and 'ready to spend themselves in the service of their country': liberal and enlightened curriculum:15 Pearse also investigated the state of bi-lingual education in Flanders.

James Connolly

James Connolly represented the labour tradition in Dublin.27 This had briefly reached an apotheosis with the Great Lockout of 1913-1914, largely orchestrated by Jim Larkin. He pursued a Syndicalist strategy - a variant of socialism that strove to overturn capitalism through the power of workers organised in One Big Union [OBU]. In the Irish case the OBU was the ITGWU; by 1913 it had 30,000 members: 'Big Jim', a gifted agitator and orator, was not strong on theory or politics, and he bought into the Soviet illusion and he was hopeless in working with others. He attempted to use trade unions as instrument in a class war rather than as an element of compromise and negotiation. Twenty thousand workers were locked out, and the church, the state, the press, and the police were all arrayed against labour. - The Lock-Out only succeeded in crushing trade union militancy and represented a major defeat for Larkin and Connolly.28 Connolly now turned increasingly to republicanism as a defence against the capitalism and the imperialism that he held responsible for the carnage of WW One. Socialism had shown itself at a European level to be entirely impotent to prevent the working classes from slaughtering each other enthusiastically under aristocratic leadership. Class solidarity had melted like butter in the frying pan of nationalism.

Language

Linguistically, emigration to two Anglophone superpowers created a desire to speak English. An intriguing counterfactual is whether the condition of the Irish language would have been stronger had the USA been Spanish speaking. Between 1850 and 1880, half a million Irish-speaking emigrants left, fatally weakening the condition of the language. An 1850 estimate claimed that five-eights of the New York Irish were Irish- speakers - The first ever Irish-language newspaper An Gaodhal appeared in New York in 1880. There were 350,000 Irish speakers in USA in 1901

Fionán MacColuim

MacColuim, a clerk in the India Office in London, fitted the classic profile of a nationalist intellectual. Active in the Gaelic League in London, he was struck by the lack of a social dimension to the language movement, especially as compared with the vigorous Scots 'céilithe' nights there. Imitating the Scots model, he organised the first Irish céilí at Bloomsbury Hall in London in 1897. MacColuim became perturbed, however, by the lack of variety in the Irish dances, and by the absence of large-scale, rapidly moving dances, covering the entire floor space of a hall, and which could involve everybody as participants rather than as spectators. He then met an old Sliabh Luachra [a tradition-drenched area on the borders of Cork, Kerrry and Limerick] dancing master, Patrick Reidy, who introduced him to a more extensive repertoire of Irish dances. Thus encouraged, MacColuim accompanied Reidy on a collecting trip to Ireland - drawn inevitably to Reidy's native ground in Kerry, but also attracted to the county as a bastion of 'pure' or literary Irish (as opposed to the patois of Connemara, or the deplorably Scots- tainted Donegal dialect).

Peadar O'Donnell - De Valera exchange

O'Donnell, a socialist, had badgered Dev re the half million that had left Ireland under his leadership: Dev replied that half a million would also have left if O'Donnell had been in charge: O'Donnell shot back -'Yes - but they would have been a different half million.'

People's Democracy (PD

On 1 January 1969, fifty members of the largely student-based People's Democracy (PD) began a four- day march from Belfast across Northern Ireland to Derry, modelled on Martin Luther King's 1965 'freedom march' from Selma to Montgomery. Over the four days, the numbers grew to a few hundred. The march was attacked by loyalist mobs, most savagely on 4 January 1969, known as the Burntollet Ambush, seven miles from Derry. 200 Loyalists, including off-duty members of the heavy-handed paramilitary 'B-Specials', used sticks, iron bars, bottles and stones to ambush the marchers, thirteen of whom were hospitalised. Eighty RUC officers, who accompanied the march, declined to protect them, and some even joined in the beatings. As the battered march entered Derry, it was again attacked at Irish Street, a mainly Protestant area of the city. Finally the RUC broke up a support rally in the centre of the city as the march arrived. This action, and the subsequent provocative entry of the RUC into the Catholic slum, the Bogside, incited serious rioting. Seamus Deane's lines are evocative: The unemployment in our bones erupted on our hands in stones. - Two thousand Queen's University students, including Seamus Heaney, held a sit down protest in Belfast to protest against the treatment of the Civil Rights marchers by the Paisleyites, abetted by the RUC and the B-Specials.16 For them, a tainted parliament and the police had shown themselves to be in thrall to a bigoted mob. The difference now was that the TV coverage shocked the world, shamed the British, galvanised Southern opinion, and outraged Irish-America. The 1950s had witnessed the rise of TV, a perfect medium for performative politics, especially a visual morality play of good and evil, with easily identifiable heroes and villains. A staged confrontation made for dramatic TV, involving stark protagonists, drama, a moral narrative, and a whiff of violence. TV coverage took what had been hidden and projected the local onto a global stage.17 Martin Luther King had demanded only admission and integration into an allegedly open democratic society - the resistance that he met revealed the occult limits of American democracy. The same process was now playing out in Northern Ireland.

THE FUTURE

One thing is very clear: there is no possibility of the IRA reverting to a terror campaign in the aftermath of 9/11. The Bush administration switched focus to a 'war on terror' and Bush was more sympathetic to unionists - inarticulate, Bible Belt, born again tee-totaller with rigid moralism and little sense of humour.85Impact of changes in: EU - Europe of the Regions: Britain-Scotland:Impact of Celtic Tiger economy - one island economy? Role of Intertrade Ireland [the All- Ireland trade and business development body] initially chaired by ND Trustee Martin Naughton.86 Taken together, the island economy averaged 5.4 % growth in the 1990s [Republic average = 7.2% 1990-2000: North = 3.2 % UK = 2.1%]. The volume of manufacturing accelerated in the Republic 1991-2000 [Republic = 13.8%: North = 1.9%: UK = 0.7%]. The mature industries [textiles, forestry, paper, plastics, heavy engineering] are broadly similar in performance. High tech industry: massive differential in favour of South: it now has a much larger MNC sector: collapse of heavy industry in North: narrow base of internationally competitive companies in North inhibits potential: The most dramatic difference North/South is in the size of the public sector: in North it accounts for 12.5% of GDP; in Republic, 3.4%; heavy spending on public administration and defence: vestiges of a command economy, full of quangos. 30% employed by the state in NI [20% in England]- the southern economy has outstripped the northern one. Erasure of border not constitutionally but economically and socially, not rapidly but slowly: gradually cause it to fade as a fact on the ground and then it is irrelevant.Gradual switch of responsibility to South from UK with a challenge to South to exhibit generosity, flexibility, sensitivity. That has got more difficult with the demise of the Celtic Tiger. David Trimble described a contrast between what he regarded as a multi-cultural United Kingdom versus a mono-cultural south.87 For the vast bulk of people, an imperfect peace is infinitely better than a dirty war. The fat lady may not be singing yet in Northern Ireland but she continues to clear her throat backstage. Looking back, we should remember what the English poet Wilfred Owens, writing about the casualties of the first World War, called 'the eternal reciprocity of tears'. The need still exists for some modicum of a shared past as well as a shared future - is it possible to have a shared rather than a partisan sense of truth and justice? Truth is the first casualty of war and the problem of dealing sensitively with victims, with memory and with trauma still remains acute.88 A report on dealing with the legacy of violence generated predictable responses in 2009.89 Three distinct routes are possible in dealing with the past in post-conflict transformation today, all concerned with key concepts of truth, justice, memory and healing: The therapeutic, archival and judicial imperatives define post-conflict memory work today. 'They also establish the contradictory, ends of truth recovery processes: to find 'healing' for victims by giving them a public voice; to re- write the record of the conflict and establish a new, potentially shared narrative of the past; and to revisit past injustice in order to establish an accountable, rights-based regime in the future'.90Marina Warner has written on the idea of historical apology.91 She notes that the word apology twines two languages - the theological/sacramental language of repentance/atonement and the psycho-analytic one of the talking cure. This in turn creates a curious religious/secular crossover. The apology can become a secularised ritual demanded by identity politics. - Between 1966-2006, 3,712 deaths occurred as a direct result of the Troubles:93 pro rata, this would be equivalent to five million dead in the USA. One in five people in Northern Ireland had someone in their family dead or injured during the Troubles: once blood is spilled, it takes a long time to wash out of the system - the north will remain a haunted and diseased society, infected by low level rancid sectarianism, for generations to come.

DIASPORA

Painting the post boxes green nationalism: The old red British post boxes with their monarchial insignia [VR= Victoria Regina] were simply painted green. Independent Ireland retained the institutions of the old state: This stasis would not have happened if the 1916 leaders had survived - lost the best of them - 1916 was as much a coffin as a cradle of the Revolution:national identity (Irish) gives way to an ethnic identity (Irish - American) that finally gives way to American. Migration is conceived of as voluntary and assimilation is viewed as normative. In recent decades, some scholars have contested this modelling through the deployment of the concept of diaspora, with an emphasis on uprooting, coerced migration, and the retention of an interest in the homeland. The use of the term diaspora has intensified in recent decades. The term normally involves the idea of catastrophic dispersal, estrangement - A critique of the Irish applicability of victim diaspora is that it applies well to the Famine era migration but has little purchase on the earlier and later periods

Catching Up: Productivity Comparison

Productivity involving growth in manufacturing, 1966-2000 (9.2%, highest) Massive turnaround in 1990s :a) Government debt as a % of GDP; in 1987: 116%: in 2001: 43 %: in 1986: £1.4 billion: in 2001: £2 billion surplus. b) Tax rate: top rate 58% now down to 40%: Standard rate: 35%, now 20% c) Unemployment 1. 1987:17% 2. 2002: 4.3%[ low at 3,6 % in 2001] d) Industrial disputes 1. 1979: 1 million days lost 2. 1998: 37,000 days lost e) Net immigration after 1996

Whiteboys of the 1760s to the Land War of the 1880s

Remarkably in a still profoundly agrarian society, the Land War of the 1880s set in motion the legislative euthanasia of an entire landed class, predating the massive upheavals in Russia a few decades later. This achievement arose from the fusion of the agrarian with the political issue, bringing together for the first time physical-force (the Fenians) and constitutional nationalists in a unified campaign. This abandonment of rural Ireland by the left - leaving it to the tender ideological mercies of Fianna Fail populism - remains a crucial factor in explaining the political marginalisation of the Left in Ireland.

Sands's election victory

Sands's election victory and Owen Carron's bye-election victory after he died alerted the Provos of a possible election strategy which they called TUAS59 = Tactical Use of Unarmed Struggle. On 31 October 1981, Danny Morrison, a leading member of Sinn Féin,60 made his famous rallying cry to the faithful gathered at the Party's Ard Fheis [annual meeting]: 'Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite [a light, accurate and reliable Russian machine gun, ideal for urban terrorism] in the other, we take power in Ireland?' In June 1983, Sinn Féin for the first time took a serious part in a British General election. They received a creditable 102,000 votes (13%) while the much more experienced SDLP got 137,000. This caused alarm bells to ring in Dublin and London. That the 'decent majority' of northern Catholics abhorred the Provos was one of the fictions of The Troubles: the ballot box- usually brandished in front of the Provos as an alternative to violence - was now showing something different. There was now real fear in Dublin and London of the SDLP being swamped by Sinn Féin, and with it the fig-leaf of legitimacy. The Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Garrett Fitzgerald convinced a reluctant Thatcher61 in 1985 to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement in an attempt to shore up the SDLP, John Hume and 'constitutional nationalism'. Thatcher was reluctantly persuaded that this was the only way to marginalise and exclude Sinn Féin/IRA.

Comparison of Ireland and Scotland

Scottish Union of 1707 Highland clearances of 1745 (genocide?) Successful modernisation of agriculture, involvement in empire, importing of Industrial Revolution (esp. in Glasgow) Closer linkage of Ulster to British economy with rise of Belfast as a giant industrial city: decline of Dublin post-Union.5

IRISH LANGUAGE

That change also entailed a massive dislocation of the culture itself, symbolised by the rapid erosion of the Irish language in the reorganised areas. This change is captured in a vignette by William Wilde. On a visit to Lough Inagh in Connemara, he saw the tally-stick in operation [a stick around the child's neck which was notched if they were caught speaking Irish] - feel like they need to speak english for the future

1960 - THAW AND MOUNTING TENSIONS

The 1960s saw a liberal Unionist minister Terence O'Neill11 take over in NI, who was willing to meet his southern counterpart, the modernising Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Seán Lemass, as a prelude to normalisation. O'Neill was well meaning if patronising as revealed in his comments on Catholics: - The 1960s also saw the first University-educated northern Catholics, who benefited from the 1947 Butler Act in the UK, which rewarded British working-class people for their war effort by making university education more affordable through a scholarship system. Leading activists and writers emerged, including Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell, Eamonn McCann, John Hume, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane - The 1960s was also a decade of anti-establishment feeling over most of the world. Between 1967 and 1972, nationalism surged among African-Americans, Basques, Croats, Igbo, Irish, Jews, Quebecois, Scots, and scores of others in all parts of the globe, while also retaining strong anti-imperial dimension. The north became increasingly confrontational. The 1965 decision to locate the New University of Ulster in [Protestant] Coleraine rather than [Catholic] Derry was received by Catholics as a deliberate slap in their face, accentuated by the provocative choice of 'Craigavon' as the new town's name. In Derry, the Catholic unemployment rate was 20% and the city seethed with resentment. The fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the 1916 Rising in 1966 also fed renewed nationalist feeling, and confidence was helped by the victory of Glasgow Celtic [a 'Catholic' team] in the European Cup in 1967. The Northern Irish Civil Rights Association [NICRA] was founded in 1967, although it had precursors from 1963 in the Campaign for Social Justice, established by Con and Patricia McCloskey in Dungannon, County Tyrone, a pressure group seeking to publicise blatant cases of mistreatment of Catholics by the Unionist regime, especially in the allocation of housing. NICRA was a broad coalition of the republican Wolfe Tone Clubs, the Connolly Association (a Marxist group), and student activists and reformers of various hues. It employed the trans-national vocabulary and mobilisation techniques of radical protest, which had suddenly become accessible via TV. It sought to internationalise the Northern problem, and tried to recruit Irish-American support.13 The American Civil Rights Movement was a potent influence.14 Bob Dylan's anthemic 'Blowing in the wind' and Joan Baez's 'We shall not be moved' became hugely popular in the North. The novel demand of NICRA was for 'British rights for British Citizens' and 'One man, one vote' as opposed to the gerrymandering blatantly evident in Derry, where property-based voting allowed a rigging of the system in favour of the unionist minority. Unionists regarded NICRA as a republican/communist front, operated by the unseen hand of the IRA, and resisted its reasonable demands. The Civil Rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968 is considered by many as the start of the 'Troubles'.15 Organised by the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) and supported by NICRA, this march was brutally stopped by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) before it had properly formed. Three British Labour Party Members of Parliament (MP), were present, as well as Gerry Fitt, then Republican Labour MP, several Stormont MPs, and the media including a television crew from RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. 400 people lined up on the street with a further 200 watching from the pavements. The RUC baton-charged, injuring many people, including some MPs. Because of the striking TV footage, the incidents generated global coverage - and condemnation. The Catholic population of Northern Ireland were inflamed, igniting two days of hectic confrontation in Derry between the Catholics and the hated RUC.

1980s conclusion

The 1980s was a grim, futile decade in Northern Ireland, which dragged to a terrible conclusion. The Provos continued their increasingly senseless killings, and the loyalists responded with tit-for-tat killings of random Catholics. There was a blind, bloody, bitter, descent into the heart of northern darkness, which began with the brutal killing of two British army corporals in Casement Park in Belfast in 1988. This followed IRA Volunteers on a bombing mission in Gibraltar being killed in cold blood by the SAS. The loyalist Michael Stone attacked their funerals, and three more died. The north was facing into a terrifying abyss - and yet at this bleak moment, new thinking was emerging which would lead to the Peace Process. - It took republicans an inordinately long time to recognise that their opponents were not the British but the unbreakable desire of the Unionist population to stay within the UK frame that they saw as guaranteeing their interests.

The Apple variety

The Apple variety, especially, which was edible all year round, allowed the potato to evolve from being a winter food of the poor to being an annual staple (with winter cabbage and summer herring) in the second half of the eighteenth century

Louis MacNeice

The Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice wrote this bitter poem about the South in September 1942, after the death of a close friend, drowned in the Atlantic as a result of German action. MacNeice is regarded as having been straightforwardly hostile to Irish neutrality: the poem is far more complicated. In 1941 he wrote: - I have no wish now to bring up the undying (though Chameleonic) Irish Question but I would ask you to remember that the feeling in Eire is now predominantly pro-British (though still opposed to participation in the War), that the pro-German minority is extremely small and De Valera's position is agonisingly difficult. Those who propose the application of the strong hand to Eire are forgetting their history. - The question posed by the poem is how do we distinguish impartiality - the 'neutral island in the heart of man' - from indifference? The ambivalence of neutrality, the tension between the broader moral questions thrown up by the Second World War and a sense of the uniqueness of Ireland's situation, the tug between awareness of a particular location and general European and global issues, is central to Irish writing of the period. As Hannah Kernahan puts it in Kate O'Brien's novel The Last of Summer, 'Danzig's a long way from Drumaninch'. Otherwise, how can we explain De Valera's official visit to the German Embassy in Dublin to offer formal condolences on the death of Hitler?29 - One long term impact of WW 2 was to deepen the North/South divide: the post- war Labour Government introduced the Welfare State as a reward to the British working class for their whole hearted participation in the war effort. It was also - reluctantly - introduced in NI and widened the gap between North and South in terms of the level of welfare provision, including the National Health System, and then the provision of increased access to university education (the Butler Acts).

Home Rule

The British Liberals under Gladstone had initially aligned with Irish parliamentary party to secure advantage over Tories: After the failure of 1893 Home Rule bill, the Liberals were disenchanted and disengaged. Freed from Irish incubus by their landslide win in 1906 election: won again in 1910 but by a lesser margin: again had to turn to Irish Parliamentary Party and John Redmond to shore them up in Westminster: the price extracted by Redmond was yet another push for Home Rule. - Rising tension: 1910: Nationalists held balance of power at Westminster with 84 seats: 1913: Home Rule passed - vetoed by hostile House of Lords: 1914: Royal assent. Huge Ulster opposition to Home Rule had been building since the 1880s: In 1886, most Presbyterians believed that Home Rule would put them 'under the heel of a majority that hates them and would do everything in its power to humiliate and dispossess them'.16 'I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I should not be prepared to support them.' [Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Tories]: Tory/Orange Alliance: 'The Orange card is the card to play.' [Randolph Churchill, father of Winston]:

THE NORTH SINCE PARTITION: THE TROUBLES

The British army arrived in Northern Ireland with, as James Hughes refers to it, a "colonial mindset". Between 1945 and 1969, it had deployed 53 times to irregular conflicts. Hughes 107. [Palestine, Aden, Kenya, Malaysia] Though many of the corporals and lieutenants had no combat experience when they arrived in Northern Ireland, their training had been undertaken with colonial war veterans as instructors. Thus, this colonial mindset existed throughout the entire army and affected how the individual soldier conducted himself. And, as it is at a "tactical level that military brutality and community alienation occurs", this colonial mindset was deadly. hughes114. Kitson wrote, "Conditions can be made reasonably uncomfortable for the population as a whole . . . to act as a deterrent towards a resumption of the campaign".37 If netting the fish did not work, he wrote, then it would be best to pollute the water.38 Hughes, James. "State Violence in the Origins of Nationalism: British Counterinsurgency and the Rebirth of Irish Nationalism, 1969-1972" in eds. John. Hall & Siniša Malešević, Nationalism and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013

THE CELTIC TIGER

The Celtic Tiger1 was born in the Olympic Stadium in Rome on a balmy summer's evening in 1990 when Ireland played Italy in the quarter final of the World Cup of to Italia '90: cheerful stadium; 10,000 proud, loud lunatics in green: a picture-perfect moon rising in a picture-perfect Mediterranean sky: we had made it on the world stage and everyone loved us in Italy (unlike the nasty violent English hooligans); it helped that we spent a fortune: First time in many years we Irish felt good about ourselves-national euphoria: chants of 'Ooh-aah Paul McGrath': 'We're all part of Jackie's army' echoing from thousand of pubs; All caused by a quintessential Englishman Jack Charlton [We lost one-nil to a Toto Schillachi goal, but everyone was still delighted] - GNP Growth In Ireland 1991-2009

The Gael

The Gael is 'the idealist amongst the nations: he loves ... painting, sculpting, music, oratory, drama, learning, all those things which delight and ravish the human soul. What the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern; and in no point will the parallel prove more true than in the fervent and noble love of learning' ...'if you wish to accomplish anything great, place an ideal before you, and endeavour to live up to that ideal

GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT [GFA] 1998

The Good Friday [or Belfast] Agreement represented a historic compromise between Unionism and nationalism based on the principle of consent. It had three strands of relationships: Ireland-Britain: Ireland North and South: Nationalist and Unionists in Northern Ireland. It introduced a trans-national answer to Ireland's national question and it also gave the southern state - and northern nationalists - additional leverage in the north. The GFA was based on the principle of Power Sharing (what political scientists call'Consociationalism'). In a famous phrase, it guaranteed 'Parity of esteem' for both traditions. A legitimate Irish role in the affairs of NI was formally acknowledged - a crucial factor for Sinn Féin who argued for self-determination - the right of Irish people north and south to collective self-direction and political autonomy, free of the obtrusive and partisan British influence that they believed copper-fastened the Unionist veto on political progress. - A major sticking point for unionists was reform of the police and the abolition of RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary], a monolithically Protestant police force, unrepresentative of the wider community. The 'Patten Commission' advocated fifty/fifty recruitment to redress the historical imbalance, the creation of a police 'service' rather than a police force, and the disbanding of the RUC, to be replaced by the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland], with a focus on community policing rather than security issues. The percentage of Catholics has now [2009] risen to 30% and in a crucial move in 2010 control of policing and justice was restored to the control of the Northern Ireland government, rather than Westminister.. - For republicans, the big issue was the insistence on the 'Decommissioning' of paramilitary weapons. This was slowly and painfully proceeding until 9/11: after that seismic shift, the use or the threat of political violence was no longer a valid option for Sinn Féin, as it would no longer be tolerated for a moment by the USA. Once the deadly smoke of the Twin Towers cleared on a newly disillusioned global landscape,, there was no possible viable place on the global landscape for a terrorist group like the Provos. - When the GFA was voted on in a referendum held on the same day in NI and the Republic, 71% voted for it in NI and 94% in Republic. Thus, an overwhelming majority in Ireland was in favour of it overall, in the first nationwide vote since the 1918 General Election.

ADVANTAGES WHICH PERMITTED BIRTH OF THE CELTIC TIGER

The Irish fiscal regime was the most attractive in Europe: 10% corporation tax rate until 2002 [when it was forced up by EU to 12.5%, which is guaranteed until 2025]: Issue of transfer pricing (black hole in Irish public finances): note the massive discrepancies between Gross Domestic Product - GDP [which measures the total output of the economy, including repatriation] and Gross National Product - GNP [which measures total income, and excludes repatriation], especially in late 1990s; the Pfizer effect; dual economy;7 strong growth in MNC sector with a weak domestic economy: massive repatriation of funds: GNP growth in 2002 was O.6% versus GDP of 6.3%: GDP of 130b Euro: GNP of 105b: outflow of 25b Euro: largely generated from thriving pharmaceutical sector, with 75% growth in profits in 2002.8 There was a cumulative total of 176 billion euro FDI in Ireland in 2002. That investment generated 32 billion profits, of which 15 billion was repatriated. Much of the repatriation concerns outflows from the International Financial Services Centre - IFSC. - A second positive factor was a permissive political and civil service regime in Ireland - with everyone on message and singing from the same national hymn sheet - politicians, IDA, civil servants, educational leaders - a national effort: 'Human Capital': 'Young Europeans' theme: 50% of population under the age of 25: Quality of workforce: IDA ads in America: 'Hire them before they hire you': 'People are to Ireland as oil is to Texas.' Self-conscious effort to eliminate Quiet Man (Bord Fáilte image of Ireland): thatched houses in empty pastoral landscape. - Impact of free education in 1967: Whelan family example: In 1967, 18,000 sat for the Leaving Certificate examination at the end of High School: In 1997, 370,000 earned their certificates: we have also now extremely good rates of female involvement in education, amongst the highest in the world. Tremendous quality of Irish teachers: Addition of new tier of technologically oriented Regional Technical Colleges (RTCs): Job-oriented: Dublin City University [DCU] and University of Limerick especially successful. - New economy favoured small and quick, not heavy and slow: freed us from locational and energy constraints. We skipped a generation from agriculture to information technologies without the intervening Industrial Revolution. No rust belts in Ireland9 except Belfast [final closure of Harland & Woolf ship building yard in 2003]. - Advent of Social Partnership in 1987 (anti-Thatcherite, anti-Reaganite naked capitalist model). Led to fiscal stability and industrial harmony. 'European' model of high wages with Irish taxes, generous welfare system, flexibility (MNCs were allowed to operate without trade unions). - Viable place to live in: English-speaking: Good educational system for children: Attractive culture for wives and children: No threat of kidnapping: importance of life- style issues to the creative class: Politically stable (especially since cessation of Northern Troubles) and no natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes) to damage valuable investments. - Diaspora effect (especially Irish-American): Rise of Irish Americans in 'corporate' America: 50% of CEOs in Fortune 500 = Irish American: Examples: Pfizer to Ringaskiddy (Cork) in 1969 due to Jack Mulcahy: Coca-Cola to Drogheda due to Don Keough: International Funds for Ireland (Tony O'Reilly, Michael Smurfit, etc.)

Taxation difficulties

The Irish housing bust crushed domestic demand: tax revenues shrank: unemployment rising; public debt rising. The national tax rate - all taxes as a percentage of national income - had been rising steadily since 2003. In 2007, tax revenues reached 37% of gross national product (GNP), up from 34% in 2002. The Government's total tax take increased by 24 billion euro between 2002 and 2007, an advance of two-thirds. Over the same period, GNP at current prices expanded by just over one half. In consequence, the overall proportion of national income taken in taxation has risen. Its composition shifted substantially between 2002 and 2007. Taxes on expenditure became the principal source of Government revenue - value added tax (VAT), excise duties and especially stamp duties on the sale of properties. Increased consumer demand and rising prices effortlessly sent revenues spilling into the Government's coffers. - Revenues gathered from taxes on income - including corporate income - rose much more slowly. The share of income taxes in total taxation retreated by 5%. In 2002, income taxes contributed 39.5% of all tax revenues. By 2007, this had declined to 35%. Booming property and stock markets have triggered increasingly large flows of Capital Gains tax. - As the pace of economic activity accelerated from 2003 onwards, the flow of tax revenues also accelerated. The Government stimulated activity by reducing taxes on income and work, thus increasing household disposable incomes. However, as households spent or invested their additional disposable incomes, the Government took 21% in VAT, or 20% in capital gains tax. National tax rates still remain well below the EU average. In 2005, the Republic's ratio of taxes to GDP, at 32%, was 9% below the the euro zone average of 41%. - Profligate politicians promised major improvements in public services, but within a context where public spending in the future is predicted to rise at much slower rates. This is a circle that cannot be squared and reality dictates that it is not possible for Ireland to enjoy Nordic levels of public service provision at Estonian tax rates. The Scandinavian countries are widely touted as proving excellent state provision of all kinds of benefits to their citizens - including education to health care. But the total tax- to-GDP ratios are highest in the Nordic countries, topping 50% in both Sweden and Denmark

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP)

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was founded in 1970 by John Hume. It had an Apres moi la deluge appeal - either deal with us or we will step aside and let you deal directly with the Provos. Hume espoused constitutional nationalism in the Grattanite, O'Connellite and Parnellite tradition. Hume, a history student at Maynooth where he did an MA, understood this tradition very well and he was also profoundly influenced by Martin Luther King's exemplary pacifism. Hume was fearful (presciently, as it turned out) that if the genie of violence were once released from the sectarian bottle in Northern Ireland, it would take a generation to put it back in again. Hume, the nearest thing to a secular saint that the Troubles produced, was a major influence in the USA - where he tried hard to wean Irish- America from financial support for the IRA, notably in the organisation NORAID. He also invented 'Humespeak' - the single transferable answer to any question, the constant repetition of key political principles, heard so often that people absorbed them as clichés or mantras eg 'We need to unite people not territory'.

Fenian swagger

The alleged 'Fenian swagger' was a reclamation of masculinity, a deliberate upright bearing and a willingness to look a landlord, a policeman or a priest in the eye. Archbishop T. W. Croke described himself as 'a hillside man' and James Joyce admired the hillside men, the hard core as opposed to sentimental nationalists.The Fenians launched an attack on aristocracy, and were radicals not romantics. They were pluralist in outlook and non-sectarian:

Conclusion

The boom in our housing market just as dramatically and overnight turned to a bust. That in turn put huge pressures on the banks, as they were overexposed to the property sector, and the main Irish banks suffered a catastrophic fall in their value, losing 99% in a few short months. The bloated construction sector shed jobs like leaves in an Autumn gale, and the resulting shock waves also depressed consumer confidence. Even worse, gaping holes now appeared in the Irish public finances, as property revenues evaporated. The State finances became a horrible mess, with a yawning chasm suddenly opening between revenue (collapsing) and expenditure (increasing). The Government dithered initially, unsure what to do, and the public were unprepared psychologically for any belt-tightening exercises. International financiers ratcheted up the pressure by increasing interest rates on Irish government borrowings. By 2009, the country has been plunged into the worst fiscal crisis in its history. - Overnight the party stopped and Tiger Ireland awoke with a terrible hangover. There was a manic-depressive feel to the national mood - as if we had been too high in the boom years, and then descended into a terrible depression. The media and the public were angry, bitter, lashing out, looking for scapegoats. The 'crony capitalism' of politicians, property developers and bankers became a main target of criticism. - In retrospect, as we pore over the entrails, it is clearer that there were in fact two Celtic Tigers: the first was the real one and it ended in 2003. The second was a bubble economy, maintained by an inflated and grossly distorted housing market. The country lost competitiveness, created an inefficient tax system as a sop to bloated Tiger cubs, and recklessly derailed the public finances. Senior Fianna Fail politicians like Charlie McGreevey and Bertie Ahern must take the lion's share of the blame. The present painful period is one of pressing adjustment. Wages and prices are falling rapidly, and unemployment has soared, as the bottom has fallen spectacularly out of the property market. The government created a high-risk strategy based on NAMA [National Assets Management Agency] to take toxic loans from the Irish banks, seeking to create viable banks again, and to get credit flowing into the real economy. It has also introduced a hair shirt budget in 2009: raising taxes, cutting welfare, downsizing public spending. Many are enraged that the poor - who didn't cause the problems - were being targeted to get the rich out of the hole they dug- socialism for the rich. An angry and repetitive 'debate' furiously assigns blame, but everyone knows the scale of the problem. Post- Tiger Ireland faces a dramatic challenge. - A wider perspective might suggest that most of the problem is not home-grown. We became the most globalised economy in the world, so when the global economy boomed, so did we. When it tanked, so did we. If it improves, so will we. It is also possible that however painful, the current crisis will force us to realistically address underlying systemic problems in our political and social system which we could ignore through the bloated Tiger years. A chill dose of reality is encouraging us to reassess where we are and who we are, and the froth of the Tiger years blowing off is not necessarily a bad thing. Clear thinking and clear heads are now needed more than ever

The events in Belfast

The events in Belfast led to the largest forced movement of population in Europe since the end of the Second World War, as an uncomprehending Stormont regime reacted with excessive force to the nationalist challenge. The Unionist monolith remained perversely uncomprehending. It had been given a free hand by the British up to then (no debates on Northern Ireland were even permitted in Westminster). Their Prime minister Brian Faulkner expostulated 'Ulster will not be treated as a coconut colony'.23 In a famous vignette, the teenaged feisty mini-skirted MP Bernadette Devlin slapped the English minister Reginald Maudling in the face. As he left on his helicopter, he famously exclaimed: 'For God's sake, bring me a large scotch. What a bloody awful country'. 24 The failure of the British to prorogue Stormont in 1969 was a major mistake that undermined the Civil Rights movement. When they finally did so in 1972, it looked like caving in to the Provos, and showed that violence, not civil rights activism, was the effective way to achieve change.

Fenian Rising in 1867

The farcical Fenian Rising in 1867 did have one impact - the addition of 1867 to the 'apostolic succession' of Irish Nationalism: 1798->1803->1848->1867. It also created a new crew of political martyrs, the executed Allen, Larkin and O'Brien. The British eventually resorted to judicial executions as a warning and as an appeasement to British public opinion. These three ordinary young men were the subject of a major clemency campaign. They were hanged anyway, the first political execution since Robert Emmet in 1803. It was a public event of grisly proportions, as O'Brien took a gruelling 45 minutes to die. This generated a groundswell of Irish anger, expressed in elaborate mock funerals for these Fenian 'martyrs'

SECOND-PHASE OF RECAPTURING THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The first phase had involved the re-Catholicising of the public sphere [see lecture Two on O'Connell]; completed by 1867 when O'Connell's statue was erected on O'Connell Street.55 The second phase involved its re-Gaelicisation in the late nineteenth early twentieth century: the battle to get Irish onto school and university curricula: the resumption of Irish surnames and Christian names [Diarmuid, Conor, Deirdre, Sinead etc], including the Os and the Macs, their use on shop fronts, street names, bilingual signage on statues - The crucial conduit was Standish Hayes O'Grady62: he saw the value of the pre-Christian Celtic period as allowing a shared cultural space, beyond the debilitating sectarian division of RC and Protestant; Cuchulain as a new hero: prior to scientific archaeology or history so all kinds of creative uses of the past possible before the imagination had been corralled by scholars

The great mill at Slane (1762-1766)

The great mill at Slane (1762-1766) was both the single biggest building in the Ireland of that time, and the biggest mill in either Britain or Ireland.

LIETERATURE OF THE FREE STATE

The literature becomes a literature of boredom, as in Flann O'Brien's brilliant satires of the Free State - At Swim Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive, Patrick Kavanagh's determinedly downbeat naturalist poetry, notably The Great Hunger, or John MacGahern's Free State novels, culminating in Amongst Women [1991). The same ennui infects Samuel Beckett's trilogy of the 1930s novels Murphy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. Beckett's style was transformed by his experiences in the Second World War, when he moved to Saint Lo in Normandy, joined the French Resistance and helped build a Red Cross hospital. Here he was close for the first time to the pain of ordinary lives, and began to question the ability of writing to express human suffering. He broke with the stylistic excess of his great inspiration, the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, and generated a new aesthetic of reduction: as he told his biographer James Knowlson, 'his own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and taking away, in subtraction rather than adding.' He began writing in French, whose formal purity helped him to prune his prose style back, increasingly exploring the unsayable, silence, the space beyond life, and anti-literature. Waiting for Godot is the outcome.27 'If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable' [Beckett

British establishment response

The main British establishment response was that there should not be 'body bags' and they created a policy of Ulsterisation. They had learned this from the American failure in Vietnam, where the repatriation of dead American soldiers turned American opinion against the war: newspaper editorial decisions were made using the mantra 'If it bleeds it leads'. That in turn generated the policy of 'low level warfare' and an 'acceptable' level of violence. The British now sought to 'criminalise' IRA and to turn popular support from them as a sectarian mafia run by 'Godfathers' of crime: 'If the guerrilla is the fish, the community is the water'. - Nationalists were ghettoised, and abused, especially in West Belfast. In the USA, John Hume and the SDLP led an onslaught on Irish-America opinion, helped by major leaders of Irish-American society, notably the 'four horsemen' - four prominent and powerful politicians, speaker Tip O'Neill, Senators Ted Kennedy50 and Pat Moynihan, and governor Hugh Carey of New York. The Provos felt that they didn't need a 'political' strategy at this time. The IRA strategy was that it was not those who could inflict the most, but those who could suffer the most who would win, and this backboned their 'long war' strategy. Long Kesh gaol became a 'university' for them and one cannot underplay the importance of prison as a political education for republicans.51 There was a big contrast between the republicans - with their library of 700 books, Irish-language classes and Open University degrees - and the loyalists - who were really interested only in body-building.

Ethnocide not genocide

The modern historian James Donnelly concludes: 'While genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish contemporaries'. Such beliefs intensified in the aftermath of the Famine, especially in the emigrant diaspora, who saw themselves, and were encouraged to see themselves, as innocent victims of the government's parsimonious policies. The Fenians14 became the principal beneficiaries of this politicisation of the Famine in the Irish popular consciousness.

MANGAN'S POEM 'SIBERIA

The most searing poem of the Famine is 'Siberia '(1846) by James Clarence Mangan. - The often discussed aesthetic question in relation to massive human tragedy is how you represent it without trivialising it: dealing with the Holocaust, for example, opens profound moral questions; how can you produce a reversion of something so extreme, so outside the norms of human existence? - Mangan, who himself died a victim of the Famine in the MeathHospital on Heytesbury Street in 1849, was acutely aware of this problem and 'Siberia' is his attempt to address it.Mangan's oblique meditation on Famine revolves around the image of 'the killing snows.' It is drawn from a German poem about Polish leaders exiled to Siberia after the failure of their 1830 rising.6 Mangan can often sound like 'a voice from a shroud' [John Montague], whose poetic performance is finest when his internal desolation meets an external correlative, as in the Famine years. But always too the glittering, opulent language and a tremendous command of rhythm [especially notable in his great translations from the Irish 'Dark Rosaleen', 'O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire']. - The poem 'Siberia' mimics the trajectory by which the intimate human circadian rhythm gradually slows to an abstract geological time. In an inhuman violation of the body's basic integrity, its barriers are breached by a grotesque invasion of materiality, an infestation that slows the blood to a sandy sludge. - . An entire culture is annulled, sinking into a glacial coma, a cultural deep freeze of silence, isolation and death. Human time cedes to a chiliastic time, beyond redemption. All of this is observed in the poem with the detached fascination of experiencing one's own dissolution; its voice emanates not from a warm, living body but from its spectral mutant. Mangan tracks the Famine's ontological violence - history's appalled reversion to geological time, into a space and a time which precede and follow human geography and human history and which are supremely indifferent to them

Class

The post-Famine period saw a shift to a predominantly unskilled background for emigrants, with a sharp drop in social class: emigrants now described themselves as mostly 'labourers' and 'servants', and this became overwhelmingly true after the Famine. The lack of skills was not a major impediment to social advance in America, where energy, youth and versatility were more important than inherited skills

Nationalists

The progress of the Famine on the doorsteps of 'the workshop of the world' was interpreted quite differently, as marking the failure of the union of 1800. John Mitchel, in his bitter and influential book The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) claimed that 'Ireland died of political economy' and that the inadequate British state response represented the terminal bankruptcy of the union. When the going got tough, Ireland was left to fend for itself, and treated as a separate state or colony, rather than as an integral part of the United Kingdom which would share the fiscal burden

shifting American stance

The shifting American stance was also important.69 The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has signalled the end of the Cold War. The Clinton presidency welcomed a strong Irish American input.70 Clinton, who took a personal interest in NI, moved decisively from the 'special relationship' of Thatcher and Reagan, where essentially America took the British line on NI 100% of the time. Clinton, prompted by Ted Kennedy, took a leap of faith by ignoring British protests to grant a visa to the 'terrorist' Gerry Adams in 1994. The Provos saw this as an earnest of good faith, persuading them that they would have their democratic mandate respected if they chose a peaceful path. In December 1994, Senator George Mitchell was appointed as a special American envoy to NI and his patient diplomacy had an enormously positive effect.71 Around the same time, Tony Blair was elected with large majority in UK as a reforming post-Thatcherite Prime Minister and he began the internal reshaping of British politics, including the establishment of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. The smooth and popularity-seeking Blair was willing to embrace serious new thinking on resolving the NI problem, and he was also keen to please his buddy Bill Clinton. He also had a big incentive - to silence the bombs, especially after the massive Canary Wharf bomb in London in 1996. - Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, had his first meeting at Downing Street with SF in 1997.72 McGuinness said 'so this was where the damage was done'. The Brits described the Provo mortar which had landed near there but McGuiness meant that it was the room where Michael Collins had signed the Treaty. The Peace Process benefited from Blair's huge self-confidence in his powers of persuasion and his massive election landslide in 1997. He initiated secret meetings with Adams and McGuinness and the IRA restored its ceasefire in July 1997, which had been broken with the massive Canary Wharf bomb in London in 1996. The British feared Brian Keenan, head of that bombing campaign, and the Provos intermediary with John De Chastelain on decommissioning. Adams and McGuinness were anxious to avoid splits and Powell described them as 'much more articulate and interesting than most of the other NI politicians': Adams was 'determined, subtle and impressive'. The Brits drafted SF statements and both sides slowly edged towards an agreement.

THE WILSONIAN MOMENT

The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers - Britain, Germany and France - and further discredited their regimes, endowed America with both power and moral prestige. Wilson, who barelyhad a foreign policy before war broke out in Europe in 1914, wasn't slow to realise the implications of European turmoil for the United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. 'We are provincials no longer,' he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. - During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies waited to see how their fates would be decided. Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for 'a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims', giving equal weight to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations paying close attention were the nationalist leaders of four non-Western societies - Egypt, India, China, and Korea. - That spring, Wilson's words ignited political upheavals in all four of these countries: the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea. A broader 'Wilsonian moment' challenged the existing international order. Two terms characterized Wilsonian liberalism: 'self-determination' and 'consent of the governed'(p. 22). Emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics. - The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment; future leaders of Third World liberation movements - Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru - were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time. - The Paris Peace Conference and Wilson's influence on international affairs cannot be underestimated. The events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonating globally. Wilson's origins in the Jim Crow south and his inability to seriously consider the aspirations of African Americans was a defect that extended to his considerations of the indigenous citizens of Europe's colonies. Wilson believed that equality between peoples could only be based on the gradual tutelage of non- Europeans within a human hierarchy. Piously Presbyterian, and a helpless anglophile (he had courted his wife with quotations from Burke), he had hoped that in the Philippines and Puerto Rico the United States would follow the British tradition of instructing 'less civilised' peoples in law and order- the white man's burden. After all, 'they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice'. - After the war, and during the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson grew alarmed at the expectations that his earlier proclamations had provoked. Wilson's advisors believed that such expectations would make 'dissatisfaction permanent' and challenge the legitimacy of the British Empire in India and Africa (p. 61). Wilson drafted the covenant of the League of Nations with no mention of self- determination. Wilson's failure was seen in the fatal defects in the resulting settlement: the inability to tame the appetite for imperial conquest among Europe's great powers, the inability to satisfy the newly inspired dreams of the colonized, and the failure to engage American politicians and citizens in the wider world. Uprisings against colonial rule erupted all over the globe in the years after Versailles, in Egypt, India, China, and Korea. In 1919 at Solohead Beg in Tipperary, the hot-headed Dan Breen shot two RIC men: this incident ignited the 'War of Independence' or 'The Troubles':A dirty war?- burning of big houses:53

liberal Unionist tradition post-Partition

There had been a lack of a liberal Unionist tradition post-Partition.77 Unionists responded to the new situation by escalating their Orange parading tradition, creating a new flashpoint at Drumcree and the Garvaghey Road in Portadown.78 This harder line and less respectable stance has led to it being deserted in droves by the middle class: Orange membership in Belfast dropped from 14,000 to 4,000: in Derry, from 2,000 to 800. At the height of Troubles, one in ten of Protestants worked for the security forces, so peace was also regarded as a job threat. Catholics, who currently outnumber Protestants 4/3 in universities, are seen as relentlessly upwardly mobile and as infiltrating into old middle class Protestant areas, like the affluent leafy suburbs off the Malone Road. The superior education on offer to the Catholic working class has helped them vault into the middle class, a process aided by the legal dismantling of the sectarian discrimination that had previously obtained in NI society. After the GFA, Protestants remain suspicious, watchful, discontented, sensing that they had been wrong-footed politically, and finding it difficult to adjust to the shock of normality.79 Unionist vote-shredding has accelerated, designated by an alphabet soup of bickering factions. Protestants have turned increasingly to evangelicalism at the expense of larger religious groups: evangelical certainty offers a sure anchor in the shifting political and cultural seas around them. A favourite text for preaching is: 'Meddle not with those that are given to change' [Proverbs 24: 21]. - Unionists initially impaled themselves on a Decommissioning hook ,which acted as a road-block to further progress until November 2001. Poor leadership of Unionists by David Trimble ['Mr Angry'] who tended to turn puce at regular intervals. The first years were wasted when everyone was still ready to give it a go: this allowed the momentum to dissipate, and unionists withdrew into their usual 'no surrender' mode, and playing the blame game. The process was not helped by the meddling of the duplicitous English Labour politician Peter Mandleson on implementing the Patten police reforms nor by Unionist hankering after the status quo, whereas nationalist trumpeted the GFA as a foundational document for the radical restructuring of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin have an irritating tendency to adopt whatever the current fashionable political dogma is: in the 1960s, it was Marxism: in the 1970s, anti-imperialism; in the 1980s, feminism: in the 1990s, conflict resolution. They deploy a chameleon vocabulary that morphs every decade: to the Unionists and the British, this smacks of duplicity and a lack of plain dealing. It is hard for them to understand the perplexing oscillation in Irish nationalism between constitutional and violent wings, and to judge whether Irish nationalism has entered a merely temporary and opportunistic non-violent phase. In the meantime, rejectionist Unionists, spearheaded by Paisley's DUP, launched a relentless campaign to undermine Trimble and to paint the GFA as a sell-out of Protestant interests. This played well with a beleaguered, suspicious and wrong-footed Protestant community who felt themselves to be ending up on the wrong side of history. Sectarian headcounts showed the shifting demographics: In 201i census, Catholics came in at 45%, [in 1921, the split had been 66:33 in favour of Protestants] while the Protestants were now notably an ageing population. NI could conceivably have a Catholic majority within this generation, and their strength of numbers was especially evident west of the Bann river [The Bann separates 'Protestant' east Ulster from 'Catholic' west Ulster]. Belfast81 is also now an increasingly 'Catholic' city, shown in the election of a Sinn Féin mayor Alex Maskey in 2002. - Northern Ireland has become not so much a 'cold house' as an 'empty house' for Protestants: they are losing their best young people to the British University system and once they go there they tend not to return. One of their biggest mistakes that you can make in politics is to turn your own young people against the society in which you expect them to live. Northern Ireland Protestants are in an equivalent position to the Anglophone flight from Quebec. - A huge problem is the working class Protestant areas, where hard-core Loyalism is embedded. Sectarian murderers like Billy Wright ['King Rat'] (who ran the LVF [Loyalist Volunteer Force] in Portadown to target Catholics indiscriminately) and Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair in the Lower Shankill.82 These showed the sordid levels to which loyalist paramilitaries had descended: they were dominated by drug dealers and viciously sectarian psychopaths, who betrayed their own communities83 for self-aggrandisement: Loyalist paramilitaries are not now so susceptible to Paisley as they were in 1974 UWC strike. This evolution was marked by the emergence of articulate politicians like David Irvine, who died tragically young. However, unlike the politically adroit Provos, they have proved incapable so far of making any sustained transition to politics and descended into racketeering and drug dealing. The MacAleese presidency workied hard behind the scenes to help them out of this political cul-de-sac. In 2009, Dawn Purvis, Irvine's successor as the political voice of Loyalist working class Belfast, courageously commented:

Dance Hall Act of 1935

This effectively outlawed house dances (allegedly on hygiene grounds, more accurately on moral hygiene grounds). Hall settings could be much more tightly supervised, as opposed to house dances - especially once the car introduced a new form of mobility for what Cardinal MacRory in 1931 saw as urban sexual predators - 'unsuitables from a distance'

Irish in Politics

This enhanced the importance of the saloon as a feature of Irish-America, as well as explaining how institutions like the police force became rapidly Hibernicised. An 1855 editorial in the New York Times claimed that of 1,100 cops in the NYPD, 300 were Irish- born, and a further 700 were Irish-American.19 As a by-product, this assertive Irish-Catholic stance accelerated the detachment from Irish identification of the descendants of Protestant settlers, who invented the novel term 'Scotch-Irish' to distinguish themselves, and an elaborate racial pedigree and polemic to castigate their allegedly 'Celtic' compatriots

A NOTE ON THE POEM

This is a poem written about the day when the two British soldiers were killed outside Casement Park in North Belfast. Three IRA activists (one of them, Mairead Farrell, a very well-known figure) had been assassinated by the SAS in Gibraltar, as they prepared a bombing mission against a British army base there. Their funeral in Belfast's Milltown cemetery had been attacked with gunshot and grenade by the loyalist Michael Stone, an event vividly captured on TV, and marking a new escalation in tension, as funerals had hitherto been considered sacrosanct. Three more people were killed, including an unarmed IRA man who confronted Stone, and who was seen in West Belfast as heroic in losing his own life to prevent further casualties. The funeral of the IRA man took place on the Saturday morning that is the setting of this poem. The day began under a leaden sky with a huge sense of foreboding, and Belfast was jittery. Events seemed to be developing with the remorseless consistency of a Greek tragedy, played out on live TV. In circumstances that have never been explained, two British army corporals drove into the funeral cortege: the panicked and confused crowd believed another attack a la Stone was being perpetrated. The soldiers were dragged from the cars: a local IRA unit was quickly on the scene: the terrified men were dragged to the local GAA Park (Casement Park), stripped of their weapons and clothing, and shot. All this time, a British Army helicopter(their 'eye in the sky') hovered helpless and impassive overhead, shooting footage that was relayed on TV (and which was to be used to prosecute the perpetrators later). The photograph of the distraught Catholic priest Fr Alec Reid of Clonard Monastery administering the last rites became one of the most poignant images of the entire Troubles, perhaps because it evoked centuries of Christian imagery of the deposition from the Cross. MacGuckian's poem is about her reaction to the events unfolding on the TV in her living- room (note the contrast between domestic harmony and the horrifying deaths outside), as her four children watch the TV screen in front of them. 'But the children were actually watching the mob violence as if it were a video game, not taking in that it was a real event in streets beside them. That was what I found most horrifying - their exposure to it as entertainment'.65 [Consider the appalled fascination with which people viewed the 9/11 images]The ethical question permeates the poem: are we complicit in the violence if we simply observe it calmly or vicariously on TV, even though it is taking place right in the heart of our own community? Can we afford to look away, to flinch? Can we stop the external bloodletting raining down on us, seeping into the family home and the very spaces we see as the most private and protected? Should not any violence pierce us, a wound to one a wound to all? And in the face of such horror, are aesthetics and the very idea of beauty itself tarnished irrevocably? Is silence the proper response?

ESTABLISHING THE NORTHERN STATE4

Tom Paulin called Belfast 'a city built on mud and wrath': Roger Casement called it in 1898 'a very stupid ill-bred town' in 1898 5 while the socialist Thomas Carnduff talked of the 'putrid prosperity' of Belfast.6 James Connolly predicted that partition would provoke 'a carnival of reaction'.Despite the hysteria whipped up by unionists, the IRA in the north had a very low profile in 1916-22 period, as Michael Collins realised their vulnerability, and tended to allow them to keep a very low and non-antagonistic profile. There was renewed unionist vitriol after Sinn Féin's sweeping success in the 1918 General Election. Mob attacks on northern Catholics ensued in July 1920, with 10,000 RCS ejected from the Belfast shipyards: the activities of the loyalist mobs was approved silently by Stormont. The IRA then positioned themselves as defenders of Catholic neighbourhoods - as a reactive and defensive force rather than the serious insurgent threat seen by unionists: 'the organisation was not strong enough for anything else', as one volunteer commented. The need for unity in the face of attacks softened the Civil War antagonisms that split the IRA in the south. In a stupid move, on 8 Feb. 1922 the IRA kidnapped 42 Unionists from Tyrone and Fermanagh and took them south to be held as hostages for the release of republicans. A few days later, a gun battle on the Border saw five police and one IRA man dead. This disastrous event led to a massive crackdown in the north, including internment and flogging, accompanied by renewed loyalist pogroms, supported by the overwhelmingly Protestant Special Constabulary. This onslaught turned the northern Catholic community against the police but it also discredited the southern Free State leadership, which was unable or unwilling to intervene.7The story of the SS Argenta encapsulates the essence of internment in daily lives beginning in May 1922. Submerged and overwhelmed under the British partition and formation of the Northern Government, nationalists were overwhelmingly affected. To subvert the nationalist economic position, the Minister of Home Affairs, Dawson Bates, imposed martial law tactics. 300 men were arrested on 22 May 1922, almost all nationalist and pro-Treaty, but enjoying professional and economic status within their respective communities. Between 1922 and 1925, over 900 men and women in the North were eventually arrested by order of James Craig, first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act.8Craig famously described Northern Ireland as 'a Protestant state for a Protestant people' and Unionist one-party rule was quickly established, with British assent. In the South, the 'Home Rule = Rome Rule' paradigm took shape, given the special position of the Roman Catholic Church. For Unionists, the south looked like a 'Potato Republic' as opposed to British industrial might, a perception that deepened with De Valera's insular economic autarky of the 1930s, and refusal to commit the south to fight Nazism. Knee-jerk anti-partitionism was the default response in the south, with a simplistic focus on uniting territory rather than people, and with no emphasis on making the south even minimally attractive to the Unionist population Despite the verbal posturing, the post-partition Irish Free State set out to stabilise the nation-state equation by rendering the state and the nation congruous with each other in a 26 county frame: the Free State treated the north (including its nationalists) as to all and intents and purposes an external population. World War II moved the two countries even further apart as America and the UK deepened their 'special relationship'. The importance of the NATO base in Derry to submarine warfare in Atlantic waters meant that the UK was strategically keen on Northern Ireland. De Valera, an adept at manoeuvring, developed a 'tactically neutral' stance, even to the extent of formally offered the sympathy of the Irish people on the death of Hitler.9 While southern neutrality in WW 2 may have been a striking and even necessary indication of Irish sovereignty, it also copperfastened partition. Catholics in the north had an ever-stronger sense of being left on their own and post-war emigrants went to a rapidly industrialising Britain rather than the USA in the 1950s. The Irish in Britain were a dislocated people, as depicted in Tom Murphy's angry play A Whistle in the Dark: Irish emigrants were often angry, violent, and bewildered. - A striking feature of the post partition generation of Northern Irish Catholics is their silence: they felt cowed and alone, abandoned by both the British and Irish states, isolated in a new state where they did not wish to be and in which they were treated as suspect aliens. They became a silent, watchful, betrayed generation, 'the bastard children of the Republic' in their leader Eddie MacAteer's striking phrase: Partition created marooned minorities on both sides of the Border because there were also substantial poor Protestant communities in Monaghan, Cavan, and especially Donegal. They too were silenced and the vogue for elegiac Big House novels in the south left them equally unspoken for. Consider the betrayal of the Derry children in the South in Seamus Deane's 1996 novel Reading in the Dark. They end up, through no fault of their own, dispossessed with no homes to go to, a metaphor for the Northern Catholic sense of abandonment by Free State. That in turn fed a Gothic sensibility, the latent possibility of an eruption of suppressed violence.

Government of Ireland Act (1920)

Treaty: De Valera despatched a reluctant Collins to lead the Irish delegation at the Anglo-Irish conference 11 October to 6 December 1921 at 10, Downing Street; Irish proverb: Don't sue the Devil if the court is held in hell: Collins did not wish to go: 'The task is a loathsome one. If I go, I go in the spirit of a soldier who acts against his better judgement at the order of his superior'.64 - Lloyd George threatened 'terrible and immediate war' if the Treaty was not signed: Delegates signed under duress without referring back to Dublin. Winston Churchill said of the Irish Treaty delegation leaving after signing: 'Michael Collins rose looking as though he were going to shoot someone, preferably himself. In all my life, I have never seen so much pain and suffering in restraint. - Bitter dispute ensued, not over partition but over monarchy. The proposed treaty contained an Oath of Allegiance to the British monarchy, viewed by Republicans as anathema, and a betrayal of the men and women of 1916. Liam Mellows refused to abandon the republic 'for the fleshpots of Empire'.67 Collins was pro-Treaty, De Valera anti-Treaty. Collins believed that the Treaty offered 'not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it'.68 The Dáil ratified the Treaty by a narrow 64-57 vote: this was the worst of all possible outcomes, as it encouraged the Anti- Treaty force to fight on. - Established Irish Free State: split in IRA: Terrible Civil War69 - effort to drive Republicans out of the Four Courts: Death of Collins at Beal na mBláth - - Free Staters executed seventy seven irregulars in reprisal:

Edward Carson

Unionists were now led by Edward Carson,17 a Trinity College Dublin-trained Dublin lawyer. He achieved notoriety through his aggressive defence of the Marquess of Queensberry during the celebrated 1895 libel suit brought against him by Oscar Wilde. He emerged as leader of Unionist opposition: 1912: Solemn League and Covenant - a potent mix of religion and imperialism: late nineteenth-century Belfast was at its zenith as a giant British industrial city: Home Rule = Rome Rule: Consolidation of Orange Order as umbrella body for diversities of Ulster Protestantism: Helped by rising evangelicalism-insistence on the Unity of Protestantism: Rev. Thomas Ellis exhorted the Orangemen of Portadown in 1885: 'Let us stand together as one man, never divided. In our concord is our glory. In our discipline is our victory. In our union is our strength'. - Taking sides: Imperialism vs. nationalism: British Empire vs. Irish-America: Commercial, Protestant, Saxon and civilised vs. violent, democratic, Popish and Celtic: Ulster Protestants strongly supported by the Tories [Conservatives]18 - defending British imperial interests: - In the 1912 debates, the exclusion of the North-East was already mooted by Thomas Agar-Robartes, a Liberal MP. He said 'The people of this country England] are bored to tears by the Irish question. They want to see it settled somehow; they wish to get rid of it; they wish to deal with their own affairs.'19 - By July 1912, thirteen thousand attended an anti-Home Rule rally in London, addressed by Bonar-Law, who pledged Tory opposition. By September 1912, Carson had 200,000 sign the Solemn League and Covenant. Ulster Volunteer Force [U. V. F.] established in 1914: By January 1913, 90,000 men were enrolled: Nationalists responded in kind: Redmond founded the Irish Volunteers - 180,000 plus the IRB and Irish Citizen Army [ICA] led by James Connolly: Massive paramilitarisation in North and South - civil war looming? - By March 1914, the British were proposing to exclude FAT DAD [the six counties]: in Spring 1914, the Larne gun running of 24,000 German rifles and the Curragh mutiny accelerated the search for a compromise solution to avert the drift to Civil War:20 The Third Home Rule bill of May 1914 pleased no one: most annoyed of all were the southern unionists who felt betrayed:

1897

Victoria Jubilee: zenith of empire: Dublin lit up by giant monograms of VR and the dates '37 and '97: outside TCD, on Sackville (O'Connell) Street, and other main streets: nationalists were disgusted by this enthusiasticdisplay of 'abject loyalty' in the capital: that is why they put so much energy into the 1798 centenary.

international index

We have massively improved our presence on the international index of the so-called 'creative' classes that are pivotal to the knowledge economy.18 This measures creative employees in an economy - scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, architects, managers, professionals., who - allegedly - are involved in creative or conceptual tasks. Ireland ranks sixth in the developed world after the US, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK, and forms part of an emerging crescent of Northern European economies set to challenge the previous US dominance in this area.19 Ireland has been the fastest growing economy in terms of numbers employed in this sector since 1995, adding 7.6% on average each year. We do not do so well on other aspects of this index: we are poor - eleventh of fifteen - in terms of R& D spending as a percentage of GDP, and we are thirteenth of fifteen in a 'tolerance' index which measures openness to newcomers and fresh ideas.

1915

When the KKK revived in 1915, it did so as an anti-immigration force, concentrating on the threat posed to true blue 100% Americans. President Wilson in (1916) could speak of 'the poison of disloyalty' within the immigrant community because of their continuing passion for the politics of their homelands, and described the Irish as 'creatures of passion, loyalty and anarchy.' This suspicion of immigrants closed off Irish emigrationdue to more stringent immigration laws, which further tightened after the Depression of the 1930s. It is this context that informed President Wilson's refusal to do anything for Ireland in the Versailles treaty after World War One, although that War had ostensibly been fought to safeguard the rights of small nations. When De Valera went on a coast-to- coast tour to the USA in June 1919, he stressed that Irish blood had flowed in every battle that America had ever fought, and commented acerbically that after WW One, 'Ireland was a squeezed lemon and cast aside'. Playing the race card, he also noted that Ireland was 'the only white nation on the earth still in the bonds of political slavery.

generation gap Irish immigrants

Young emigrants (incompletely socialised at home and abroad) suffered a double incompetence in negotiating the complexities of culture. This created an inner emotional personal history that was especially troubling for the more culturally confident and integrated children of the emigrants. As Ruth Gay has judged in the case of Jewish children, they had to develop a doubleness in which their American selves were hidden from their family - the sacrifice of Irish Catholic ethnicity on the part of socially ambitious Irish-Americans - The Irish even abandoned their food culture - usually the most tenacious of all cultural markers - The biggest - and least studied - Irish influence of all may have been in education. The Irish invented and exported educational institutions to the Anglophone world, exercising a huge influence on popular culture.38 Notable among these were the Christian Brothers and the various orders of teaching nuns. The teacher, especially the female teacher, was central to the diaspora, even more important than the politician, the priest and the publican. Consider ND - 15 of 17 of its presidents have been either Irish born or Irish American

Weakness of Irish Famine response

a) Daniel O'Connell was a tired old man locked into a loveless Whig alliance b) Acquiescence of Irish episcopacy (except Archbishop John McHale) c) Left Famine to Young Ireland as an issue

Summation: the five serious failures of British government policy

a) No stoppage of food exports (especially in 1846-1847) b) No intervention to slow eviction of half a million people c) Creation of a poor law system that facilitated clearance (with inadequate relief) d) Placing of fiscal burden of Famine on Ireland's (not UK's) shoulders e) Failure to implement government funded emigration scheme to the Colonies

SUCCESSES OF FREE STATE

a) Social stability (the real social revolution had been the Famine and the Land War) b) Successful transition to democracy/rule of law (contrast post-imperial Africa); Unarmed police force, the Gardaí Siochána established in 1924, drawing from both sides of the political divide and was quickly accepted as an impartial police force: in the same year the Civil Service Commission was established to ensure transparency in allocation of jobs. The new Irish State was remarkably free of personal corruption. The GAA also played an important role in the 1920s in soldering over Civil War divisions, especially in County Kerry. c) Avoided lure of Fascism in 1930s (unlike other Catholic countries like Spain, Portugal or Italy) d) Successful positioning as 'neutral' on world stage:Example for India: In spite of considerable Irish involvement in British imperial rule in India, Ireland also stood as an example of anti-colonial resistance for Indian nationalists, providing both examples of constitutional agitation and armed resistance. There were many tangible and imagined links between nationalists in both countries, but the most sustained contact between Irish and Indian revolutionaries took place in the USA.17 Strong Irish role in League of Nations and later United Nations18: Avoided World War II and Cold War entanglements:19 A further aspect here would be the intense Irish missionary involvement in the Third World after Independence, which can be viewed as both a recoil from empire, and an attempt to stamp a distinctive Irish Catholic identity on the world stage

Four main themes in relation to the pivotal events of 1916 to 1923:

a) Was the 'revolution' socio-economic as well as political? b) What was the relationship between the military, and the non-violent, dimensions of the struggle? c) The dual character of British policy in Ireland - coercion and negotiation - especially in the critical years from 1919 to 1922. d) The ways in which Collins and de Valera represented different ideological and strategic approaches to Ireland's freedom. Was Ireland's struggle for independence a real revolution, or merely a changing of the guard?

FAILURES OF FREE STATE

a)Partition - only lip service and rhetoric:20 b) Command Culture': Irish language: Censorship: Abbey theatre handed over to state control in 1925 and quickly ran out of creative steam.21 The same thing happened with the Irish language revival movement. c) Painting the post boxes green nationalism: The old red British post boxes with their monarchial insignia [VR= Victoria Regina] were simply painted green. Independent Ireland retained the institutions of the old state: This stasis would not have happened if the 1916 leaders had survived - lost the best of them - 1916 was as much a coffin as a cradle of the Revolution:Patrick Pearse was a visionary educationalist: Roger Casement had a great grasp of foreign affairs: Michael Collins was a gifted finance minister: James Connolly possessed an extraordinarily acute social conscience: failure to deal with Dublin slums with the exception of Monto d)close a link with Catholic Church: chill factor for Unionists c)Closed down opening space for women:23 Activist women felt betrayed f) Failure of the Irish left and social radicalism. In part this was a failure of leadership, in part a fatal attraction to the Russian experiment.26 In 1918, 10,000 Dubliners celebrated the Bolshevik revolution at Mansion House and between 1917-1923 seventy Soviets were established in Ireland, the most famous one in Limerick. The Socialist Party of Ireland was set up in 1918 but it was wound up by 1924, because it failed to gain Soviet backing. The Communist Party of Ireland was established in 1920 under direct Russian control, but it had a minimal impact in Ireland and became bogged down in internecine disputes about socialist arcana. When Jim Larkin came back to Ireland in 1924, the Russians decided to work exclusively through him: this was a big mistake as Larkin was too individualist and belligerent to run anything other than a one man band. Jews: 1937 constitution: Ireland one of the few states to explicitly recognise the citizenship rights and support the religious freedom of Jews.

Venture capital sector:

abysmally anorexic in Ireland:

CHARLES STUART PARNELL

aloof, patrician, even cold: 'an embodied conviction' (Patrick Pearse): disdained theory for political practice: An undisguised sense of superiority lay at the centre of Parnell's intimidating personality. The comments of the Catholic Irish Lord Chief Justice, Michael Morris: 'Parnell comes of the conquering race in Ireland, and he never forgets it, or lets his subordinates forget it': 'He strode in among them like a huntsman among the hounds'.1 Parnell's flirtation with Fenianism facilitated the development of a broad and dynamic nationalist front in the early 1880s. This gave his constitutional movement a cutting edge, which forced a reassessment of the Irish Question among the political elite at Westminster. Parnell's crowning achievement was bringing a major British political party - Gladstone's Liberals - to the realisation that self-government was inevitable for Ireland. Parnell was an absolute realist on Gladstone and the British: 'They will do what we can make them do' [1887].3 Parnell placed Home Rule firmly on the British political agenda, but he also polarised British politics: Liberals = Home Rulers: Conservatives = Unionists (playing the Orange card). Ireland was ultimately to become a casualty of British political divisions.

FREE STATE COINAGE

designed by English artist Percy Metcalfe; 1926 design committee chaired by William Butler Yeats: Ernest Blythe (Minister of Finance) claimed that the Free State should have 'a coinage distinctively our own, bearing the devices of this country.' Animals as a key product of the country; horse, salmon, bull, wolfhound, hare, hen, pig, woodcock; uncrowned harp on obverse, modelled on Brian Boru harp in TCD; 1927 designs submitted: minted by Royal Mint and issued in 1928; Blythe: 'an indication of sovereignty'; critics wanted 'Christian glories' or historical figures like O'Connell; secular and materialist aka 'pagan'; 'the material idea of eggs and bacon'; especially virulent opposition to the pigs as derogatory to national dignity and pandering to an old stereotype: Maud Gonne; the coinage was suitable for the Free State because it was 'designed by anEnglishman, minted in England, representative of English values, paid for by the Irish people'. Only Irish language Saorstát Eireann [Irish Free State] used on them; no royal head

Encourage scientific research at global level of excellence

establishment of National Science Foundation [NSF], headed up by an American Bill Harris.20 Innovation island aim: targeting of high value jobs that follow R & D, more sophisticated products. A strategic national aim then is to increase investment in R & D - at present, it hovers at 1%, half of the EU average, especially a problem with MNCs who don't tend to do R&D here. There is currently a major shift in thinking re FDI policy in Ireland. We are moving away from an almost exclusive naked focus on direct grants to attract industries into the country, towards a focus on funding R & D, in an effort to drive indigenous innovation. That aim is increasingly the focus of industrial policy: if we are unable to compete in R & D, we may miss out on the next big wave of development - whatever that might be. SFI [Science Foundation Ireland] has 114 million euro to allocate to academic research, while Enterprise Ireland has 83 million euro to aid industry-based research, and to promote commercialisation of academic research - an area pioneered by American universities on the MIT and Stanford model. This is a challenge for policy makers, as it involves a massive investment in future-oriented planning. The problem lies in predicting accurately what research areas will become hot in the next decade in terms of underpinning industrial development - and that is not an exact science.

The fall of Parnell (1891)

led to a profound shift in Irish consciousness. The lull in politics following his demise and the resulting infighting soured a generation against party politics: they turned instead to literature and culture. Yeats: - The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary politics: an event was conceived, and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event's long gestation. - Cultural energies feeding in: the Parnell fiasco poisoned young people's attitude to conventional Home Rule politicking: a generation turned inwards instead towards cultural activities: 'Ireland is a nation bound together by imaginative possessions' - W. B. Yeats: - Ireland was now like 'wax' (Yeats):

Biotech sector

need to develop this and move university education and research funding in this direction away from overemphasis on computing/IT. The next big thing could be the convergence of IT and Biotech, with enormous ramifications for what it means to be human: some predict the evolution of a post-human society, where people and machines slowly merge [Do we feel any the less human if we have a pace-maker?]. And there may also be an increased blurring of the real and the virtual. Is it possible to say that a natural realm exists anymore, if global warming etc have already altered it?22

Digital Hub

off Thomas Street in the Liberties based around the anchor tenant MIT Media-Lab Europe (which subsequently pulled out in 2005). This was developed from 2001, modelled on the success at the IFSC and Temple Bar, and the technology hub Internet City in Dubai. The nine acre site occupied space being vacated by Guinness. The timing was unlucky, as the dot bombs occurred shortly afterwards. Irish universities also groused a great deal about the 28m investment by the Irish government in Media-Lab - which has not exactly been a major success

E-Commerce

permissive legal regime; but efforts to promote internet accessibility etc have been focussed externally not internally: low take up in domestic scenario: in 2003, Ireland ranked 11 of 22 advanced countries in terms of e-government [measurement of maturity & scope of public services available on the internet]. 17

39 Merrion Square

petrol bombs and flares day of mourning in South on 2 Feb. For funerals RTE had live coverage 150 'Foxrock housewives' marched on the Sandyford ambassadorial residence. The state came to a standstill. 100,000 in Dublin city centre by afternoon; attack on embassy as thousands watched it burn. Gardaí baton charge once things escalated. Ferocity of the anger shocked southern establishment fear of anarchy and spread of disorder into the south. There followed a surprisingly rapid transition in mood from sympathy/anger to fear/resentment.29 - Bowing to international outrage, the British Prime Minister Edward Heath ordered a judicial investigation. The British adopted a 'conflict management' rather than a 'conflict resolution' approach. Before the Judge - Lord Widgery - flew to Ireland, Heath reminded him that 'they were fighting not only a military but a propaganda war' in Ulster. The sittings were removed to Coleraine to avoid local bias; 700 eyewitness statements gathered by NICRA were summarily dismissed, and the judge adopted an adversarial rather than inquisitorial stance to the local community. The Widgery Tribunal - a 39 page report issued on 18 April 1972 - ended up as a magisterial erasure of truth and a legal humiliation of the victims' families. It exonerated the paratroopers, in an effort to shield the British military, security and political establishment.30 Widgery claimed that responsibility for the deaths lay solely with those who organised the march. These findings incensed the nationalist community, who regarded it as a cynical whitewash, an institutional erasure of truth by the British state.31 Their bitterness is best captured in Thomas Kinsella's searing poem Butchers Dozen. 'People in our area did not wait for the Widgery report to find out the truth. They wanted to find if he would tell the truth'.32 It was a textbook demonstration that the British rule of law was not neutral but partisan, and it exposed the essential irreformability of the northern state. It was accordingly a massive boost for paramilitarism within the nationalist community, the best recruiting sergeant that the Provos ever had.33 - The fact that a tribunal of inquiry vested with all the powers and privileges of the High Court and chaired by the Lord Chief Justice could produce such a report had a devastating effect on nationalist confidence in the rule of law and the integrity of the state. If they could not depend on the judicial arm of the state to deliver justice when they were shot on the streets en masse by British paratroopers, why should they withhold support any longer from those within their community who would use force of arms in an attempt to overthrow that state? It was not as if the state had treated them up to that point with equality and fairness in economic, social, cultural, political and security matters. The Widgery Report was the final straw that pushed a large section of the nationalist community into supporting the IRA, therefore laying the foundations for bleak decades of 'armed struggle', which the British authorities would find impossible to quench by military or civil means.

1890

sensational 'Kitty' O'Shea divorce case: destroyed 'The Chief' and poisoned Irish politics for a generation: Massive literary influence, especially in Yeats and Joyce. Early death is always a good career move - James Dean, Michael Collins, Elvis, Lady Diana, Kurt Cobain

1880

stage set for new development in Anglo-Irish relations with the election of William Gladstone as Prime Minister.2

Religion

the Pre-Famine period, emigrants were drawn equally from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds. This switched to dominantly Catholic in the post-Famine period, as opposed to Presbyterian dominance in the eighteenth century, giving rise to the so- called 'Scotch-Irish'. After the Famine, Protestants increasingly went to British North America (Canada) rather than to the US. The Orange Order was a strongforce in Canada: and Toronto became known as the 'Belfast of Canada

First Bloody Sunday 21 November 1921

the twelve British intelligence operatives called The Squad or 'Cairo Gang' (because they had previously served in Egypt) were eliminated by Michael Collins - shot in their beds [plus two auxiliaries]:Led to 'Bloody Sunday' reprisals at Croke Park.61 Fifteen Crossley tenders plus two armoured cars rolled up to the stadium: mixed force of RIC, Auxies and military: the aim was to surround the ground, and individually search every male leaving it: alleged that they came under fire and returned it; 228 small arms rounds fired [by RIC?]; 50 rounds from army machine gun. The Auxies started the firing: - 14 killed, including a 26 year old woman Jane Boyle, one of the Tipperary football team Michael Hogan62 and two children: later that evening two leading Dublin IRA men McKee and Clancy were arrested and killed: fitted into patterns of reprisals- eg sack of Balbriggan in north Dublin and burning of part of Cork city centre: IRA knew that they would win the propoganda war if they could provoke the British into these reprisals - The British Army was merely implementing policies in Ireland that they had routinely deployed in their many colonial wars, but British opinion would not tolerate it so close to home. In 1919, for example, the British had murdered 379 people and injured 1,000 in a ten minutes burst of sustained firing into a Sikh crowd at Amristar in India. In Malaya, the Royal Marines had decapitated insurgents and severed their hands, before posing for photographs with the severed hands raised in mock salute beside the severed heads. It took a long time for news of these events to filter back into Britain, but similar, widely reported activities in Ireland soured even moderate Irish opinion, and also alienated popular support for their Irish war within mainstream British opinion - Sinn Féin/IRA strongly supported - De Valera smuggled out to America dressed as a priest (coast to coast tour - spoke to half a million people)The wily and immoral (he seduced both his two daughters-in-law) British Prime Minister David Lloyd George proposed Home Rule and partition. After WW1, a conservative not a liberal government was in power in Britain, who were the natural allies of unionists not of nationalists; Fourth Home Rule bill of 1920 [earlier ones were 1886, 1893, 1912) was much more sympathetic to the unionist position. Partition emerged as a compromise solution. Six northern counties [Fermanagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Derry, Armagh Down] with an overall unionist majority of two to one would serve as protection for unionists against both the southern state but also from the British politicians, who might at any time casually betray them.

Michael Collins

took charge of IRA - a ruthless, tough, talented organiser, and inspirational leader: Collins in 1919: 'The sooner fighting was forced and a general state of disorder created throughout the country, the better it would be for the country. Ireland was more likely to get more out of a state of general disorder than from continuance of the situation as it stood.'55 - His strategy: 'Sit down - refuse to budge - you have the British beaten. For a time they'll raise war - in the end they'll despair.'56 Strike at the 'Cairo Gang' of British intelligence agents. - If we were to stand up against the powerful military organisation arrayed against us, something more was necessary than a guerilla war. To paralyse the British machine, it was necessary to strike at individuals'.57 - Thomas Ashe went on hunger strike and died agonisingly. Collins's oration after the funeral volley: 'Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian'. Vinnie Byrne [one of the 'Twelve Apostles'] on Collins; 'Collins was a marvel. If he hadn't done the work he did, we'd still be under Britain. Informers and drink would have taken care of us'. 58 - Flying Column: safe houses: 'Blacks and Tans' and 'Auxies' - brutal reprisals in 1920/1921:59 14,000 Black and Tans & Auxies: mercenaries: 78% British: London, Glasgow, & Livepool: 14% Irish: 20% Irish-born: 65% of British Army; average age 26- 29: 82% Protestant

Báire' or 'ioman

was by contrast a summer game of southern provenance. The soft animal hair ball (the sliotar) could be handled or carried on the hurl which was flat and round headed. Unlike 'commons' this version was extensively patronised by the landed gentry as a spectator and gambling sport. The gentry formed and captained the teams, issued the challenges, supplied the hurling greens and supervised the matches. These gentry hurlers were especially active in Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Wexford and Galway. This game required level, well-drained pitches of the type especially found in limestone areas that also produced abundant ash, the best material for making hurls.

Landlord patronage

was essential to the southern game. But the impact of the French Revolution, sharpening class and political divides and the spread of metropolitan behavioural norms eroded the landlords' local loyalties. Their participation in hurling declined abruptly and the game descended into shapeless anarchy. The Famine also accelerated the decline of hurling from its mid-eighteenth century heyday, when the game had been sponsored by the landed gentry. Post 1798, the gentry withdrew their patronage and the game degenerated into crudity. - A modernising Catholic middle class abandoned the game as an embarrassing vestige of a past from which they wished to distance themselves. This modernising thrust was also aided by the impact of Fr. Matthew's temperance campaign, whose 'moral revolution' (as described by the German traveler Johan Georg Kohl in 1842) seconded O'Connell's political one. Both stressed the utilitarian, progressive strand of the Enlightenment, and both were hostile to popular culture and to non-'respectable' forms of behaviour. - After the Famine, faced with both gentry and Catholic disapproval, the game survived precariously in three isolated pockets: in east Galway (the Gort- Ardrahan-Kinvara area), around Cork city (the Aglish-Carrigaline area) and north of Wexford harbour (the Blackwater-Skreen-Castlebridge area). This precipitous collapse had other causes besides the Famine. In the late 1830s,commentators in Killarney and Kilkenny recorded the explicit hostility of Catholic priests to the game. Attacks on the game by anglicising Catholic clergy, by sabbatudinarians and by magistrates who feared its crowd-gathering and therefore subversive potential contributed to the sharp decline. This formed part of the rapid Anglicisation of Irish culture in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which saw the Catholic middle classes engaging in a precipitate retreat from vernacular cultural forms, a retreat conducted at a break-neck speed unprecedented in nineteenth-century Europe. Lacking support and controlling influence, the games disintegrated, allowing priests to demonise them as immoral and disreputable displays of atavism, occasions of violence, drunkenness and the promiscuous mingling of the sexes. The opprobrious term 'cailín báire' ('hurling girl' - an early example of groupies?) evolved to mean a girl of loose morals. Thus, in hurling, as with faction fights, patterns, wakes, the keen, and other robust expressions of vernacular culture, the priests intervened to quell it.

THE 1970s AND 1980s

with the Oil Crisis of 1973 - followed by two decades of severe depression: Oil crisis plunged Ireland into recession - footloose Multi-National Companys [MNCs] cut and ran (e.g. in textiles): especially Revival of out-migration (to America): 'We can't all live on a small island.' (Fianna Fáil Government minister Brian Lenihan): Collapse of rural employment and decline of small farms: By 1980s, 60,000 'new Irish' under age of thirty in Boston: Demographic bulge put huge pressure on welfare system: Mono-class housing projects on the edge of city - Tallaght, Blanchardstown, Ballymun - became drug-infested social sinks, breeding inter-generational deprivation. Drop in tourism due to Northern Troubles, which also poisoned southern cultural life (revisionism): Saved us from 'White Settlers' syndrome: only the rain prevented us from being the Bahamas: Sheltered indigenous industry opened to full blast of competition after full entry to EU in 1973: Government finances got out of control: spend your way out of a recession (Keynesian):