Irish Republicanism

The outcome of the first  West Cork History Festival

The advertising blurb for the First West Cork History festival this year told us that it,

"… will span a diverse set of places, historical subjects and periods, from the local to the international, ranging from the Knights Templar to the events of the Irish revolutionary period in West Cork. Leading historians will be joined by journalists and senior diplomats, and while much of their focus will be on Irish themes, the perspective will be international. The festival will be informal, participatory and with a menu for the intellectually omnivorous."

This was all very welcome but it is a pity that the Festival did not invite any local historians to address it on the history of West Cork and in particular on the controversial issues that have bedevilled that history since publication of the late Professor Peter Hart’s work. He created the current interest in West Cork’s history some twenty years ago. Everybody knows this. This Festival was indebted to him for this interest.

However, the serious discussion on his work occurred outside the Festival in the pages of the Southern Star and elsewhere. This is a collection of the correspondence from that paper and other items that deal in detail with the ‘legacy issues’ arising from
Professor Hart’s work. The first letter, from Tom Cooper, generated 22 more items of correspondence and a news report, between 27 May and 26 August 2017 on three topics:

1. Three letters, from Cooper and Simon Kingston, on the festival;
2. Four letters, from Cooper and from Gerry Gregg on his and Eoghan Harris’s documentary, An Tost Fada (‘The Long Silence’), plus one newspaper report;
3. Five letters each from Eve Morrison and Niall Meehan, three from Barry Keane, and one each from Donald Woods and John Regan, on Peter Hart, Tom Barry and the 28 November 1922 Kilmichael Ambush.

In addition, due to Barry Roche in the Irish Times reporting RTÉ’s re-editing of An Tost Fada, Tom Cooper had a letter published on his role in that decision. It occasioned three replies, to which the Irish Times denied Cooper a response, which we publish here. We also publish an important 2014 letter from Meda Ryan to History Ireland, in response to a commentary on Ryan by Eve Morison (in a review of Pádraig O Ruairc’s book, Truce).

This is by far the most useful outcome of the Festival despite not being part of it. Another event that played both on and offstage was the Sunday Times (‘Éire’ edition) dismissal of Peter Hart’s original supporter and a festival contributor, Kevin Myers.
In his column on the morning of the last festival day, Myers combined misogyny and anti-Semitism, attacking women generally and Jewish women in particular. He had made his reputation, alongside Hart, criticising IRA commander Tom Barry and other
republicans. Myers spent his festival afternoon beside a female Jewish rabbi, under a portrait of Tom Barry. That part, you couldn’t make up.

We hope that the organisers of next year’s Festival will arrange for a continuation of such forensic discussion of West Cork’s history. They can do so by ensuring that the local and national participants in the Southern Star discussion are invited to the
Festival. It is surely sensible that such contributions are made at the Festival as well as outside it. It would be useful also to ascertain how to apply to join the secretive Festival Committee.

Jack Lane, Aubane Historical Society.

Dublin review of Books asked three historians, Prof John Horgan, Dr Niall Meehan, Dr Robbie Roulston, to respond to the recent publication of Ian D'Alton and Ida Milne's edited collection, Protestant and Irish. Each was asked to write a short initial response to the book and then, each having read the first tranche, to write a second longer one [page four here] in which they were free to react to points brought up by the other contributors.

Authors:
Jane Addams,
L. Hollingsworth Wood,
Frederic C. Howe, Vice-Chairman,
James H. Maurer,
Oliver P. Newman,
Senator George W. Norris,
Rev. Norman Thomas,
Senator David I. Walsh

CONTENTS
Map
Personnel of the Commission
Personnel of the Committee ii
List of Witnesses Before the Commission v
Hearings of the Commission vi

I. History, Purpose, and Method of the Commission 1
Origin of the Commission, 1 ; Purposes of the Commission, 1
Method of Gathering the Evidence, 2; Witnesses Invited, 2;
British Prevent Investigation in Ireland, 4.

II. Review of the Situation and Statement of Findings 7
Events Leading to the Present Crisis, 7 ; How Great Britain
Met the Insurrection, 8; Irish Resistance, 10; British Responsibility, 11; Conclusion, 13.

III, Imperial British Forces in Ireland 15

IV. The British Campaign in Ireland 19; Ley de Fuga, 24; Reprisals, 27; "Sinn Fein Extremist," 37; Where the Responsibility Lies, 44; Destruction of Property, 45; Burning of Towns, 47; Official Sanctions for Destruction of Property, 47; Industrial Destruction, 48; The British Terror in Ireland, 52; Religious Services, 57; Deaths and Wakes, 57; Funerals, 59.

V. Physical Consequences to the Imperial British Forces in
Ireland 60; Causes of Casualties Suffered by Imperial British Forces, 62; Policy of Assassination, 73.

VI. Moral Consequences to the Imperial British Forces, 79; Imperial British Officers, 86 ; Imperial British High Command in Ireland, 92; Imperial British Government in Ireland, 96.

VII. Political Aspect of the Imperial British Policy in Ireland, 101; The Irish Republic, 103; Failure of the Imperial British Policy in Ireland, 105.

Supplemental Report: The Religious Issue in Ireland 111

Appendices 119
Index 137

The use of terrorism as a strategy for obtaining political goals by non-state actors persists in the international system, despite attempts by states to counter the phenomenon. This article explores the resurgent threat posed to British security by dissident Irish republicans in order to illustrate the limited utility of terrorism as a strategy in the current sociopolitical context. Therefore, it has three objectives: First, it explains how strategic theory can aid in constructing a conceptual framework for explaining the persistence of terrorism, in general, and dissident republican violence, in particular. Second, it examines the dissident threat in light of the general failure of “armed struggle” to achieve republican goals in Irish politics. It is argued here that dissident republicans have confused “means” with “ends” and that this, ultimately, demonstrates the futility of their violence. Finally, the article suggests ways of tackling the dissident republican variant of terrorism.

This article examines how historians use evidence when explaining the destruction by fire and explosion of Ireland’s national archive in 1922. At the commencement of the Irish Civil War in late June 1922, some historians attribute responsibility for Ireland Public Record Office’s (PRO) destruction to the IRA faction then occupying the Dublin Four Courts of Justice (then encompassing the PRO). Problems arise when it is acknowledged no credible evidence has come to light to support these interpretations. The article argues, interpretations of the PRO’s destruction as a premeditated act of IRA cultural vandalism form part of a historiography associating Irish republicanism with fascistic values among them, ethnic violence, including ‘ethnic cleansing’, sexual violence, anti-democracy, criminality and book burning. Where little or no evidence exists to these support polemic interpretations, some historians may resort to what Bernard Lewis calls ‘invented history’. Lewis’ invented history involves abandoning any strictly empirical methodology (i.e. historical research), when interpreting the past. Instead, invented history enhances stories deemed useful in the present. For example, republicanism in Ireland historically has been a species of fascism. But these enhancements often demand a creative approach to the use of sources repugnant to historical research. Simply put, invented history does not let the evidence get in the way of a ‘good story’. Rather, it demands evidence selection bias and in some extreme cases the fabrication of sources.

This article compares and contrasts the conceptualization and transnational circulation of abolitionist ideas in the mid-seventeenth century English Revolution and the late-eighteenth-century “Age of Atlantic Revolutions.” Our method stresses both continuity and change across time and Atlantic space in the multiple efforts republicans made to eradicate human bondage. In both the mid-seventeenth century and the late eighteenth century, major political revolutions informed the ideas and actions of those who opposed slavery. As revolutionary fervor spread in the late eighteenth century, conservatives reacted with repressive attempts to contain the radicalism that was spilling over into the closely guarded domain of economic enslavement.

These structuralist and behaviourist attitudes displayed by the P-CROs (Peace -Conflict Resolution Organizations) 1 studied, paralleled the wider academic debate surrounding the dynamics of the Northern Ireland conflict and possible approaches to managing or resolving it. These are those who argue, on the one hand, that the rival ideologies of Irish nationalism and Ulster 2 unionism can be transcended through behaviourist mechanisms such as greater contact, communication, dialogue, and new modes of thinking. Others take the structural perspective that these rival ideologies are separate and antithetical identities which cannot be integrated but must be recognized and accommodated through political mechanisms such as consociationalism. This debate is ongoing within the academic community, and is reflected by several contributions within this volume. 3

This is my first attempt at editing a published and well-known work. At present one volume only out of three has been worked on, and much work needs to be done.
However, I hereby submit my work so far it to the scrutiny of my peers, who, I hope will have some opinions offer.
Byrne’s career in the French army can be traced through the military archives at Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes (SHD) and other archives. Volume 1, which describe Byrne’s early life and his part in the rebellions in of 1798 and 1803, up to his escape to France, is far more difficult and much of the information is very hard to corroborate.
Many issues to which I refer in footnotes, biographical details etc, I hope to expand in my biography of Byrne: Soldier of Misfortune, A Military Biography of Miles Byrne, which is in the late stages of development.

Author: Miles Byrne  Editor: Nicholas Dunne-Lynch

2021 marks the 250th anniversary of the death of Charles Lucas, who died on 4 November 1771 in Dublin.   

In contrast to figures such as Swift and Grattan, Charles Lucas is little remembered today and has not infrequently been dismissed as a minor politician and anti-Catholic bigot. Born in County Clare in 1713, Lucas’s earliest surviving published work described Kilcorney Cave and the Burren. After moving to Dublin city he trained as an apothecary and agitated against abuses in that trade. Following his election to Dublin Corporation in 1741 Lucas led an unsuccessful campaign for municipal reform. Lucas’s candidacy during the Dublin by-election of 1748-49 was accompanied by copious pamphleteering on national as well as local issues, leading to his condemnation by parliament for alleged seditious writings and exile in Britain and Europe.
   
Having qualified as a medical doctor, Lucas promoted hydrotherapy in particular as a cure for many illnesses. Following his return from exile in 1761 Lucas succeeded in being elected as one of Dublin's MPs, and in parliament he continued to assert Irish autonomy and to oppose perceived English misgovernment until his death in 1771. A case is made in the present work that despite Lucas’s undoubted Protestant prejudices, he was more than a mere anti-Catholic bigot, and furthermore that his ideology was nationalist and marked a pivotal transition to the republican separatism of the United Irishmen.

On August 31, 1994, the Provisional IRA (PIRA) declared a cessation of military operations. For the past
thirty years, the conflict in Northern Ireland has been raging almost without pause.1 British security forces
have attempted to control the violence by establishing road blocks, conducting house searches, altering
the judicial system to allow conviction on informant testimony, instituting internment without trial for
paramilitary suspects, garrisoning over thirty thousand British soldiers in Northern Ireland, instituting
broadcasting bans of Sinn Féin, and conducting intensive interrogation of suspects. Despite the best
attempts of the British government over the past few decades to thwart PIRA, the conflict persisted. To
sustain a low-intensity war under these conditions requires more than guns and ammunition; it requires
the support of a political community, extensive organization of economic resources, and cultural values
that give meaning to the conflict.

A debate in 2017-18 in History Ireland on the killing of 13 Protestant civilians plus four members of the British Army (including three intelligence officers) in late April 1922 in West Cork. Beginning with Bielenberg's critique of Gerard Murphy's Year of Disappearances (2010). Letters were sent in response by the late Prof David Fitzpatrick, Barry Keane, Jeff Dudgeon, John Borgonovo (with Bielenberg) and Niall Meehan. See also: 'Examining Peter Hart', https://www.academia.edu/8348624/; 'The Embers of Revisionism', https://www.academia.edu/34075119/

The three titles, Unruly Equality by Andrew Cornell, Living at the Edges of Capitalism by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O’Hearn, and Immigrants Against the State by Kenyon Zimmer are exemplars from the interdisciplinary field of anarchist studies. This academic and lay-scholar tradition focuses on the study of (1) anarchists and anarchist movements and (2) non-anarchist subjects from an anarchist perspective. These three books emphasize the ways in which revolutionary social movements exist within and against the societal status quo. Radical, anti-authoritarian movements, such as anarchism, have throughout the 20th century (and before) challenged the centripetal forces of state and capitalism. In Cornell’s study, anarchists found a way to bridge the post-WWI abeyance in the US, as aging syndicalists, counter-culturalists, and white ethnic immigrants kept anarchism alive until its rejuvenation within the movements of the 1960s. Grubačić and O’Hearn note how entire social groups have attempted to reclaim their autonomy from the state, despite efforts to re-conquer and incorporate such exiles back into the state system. Finally, Zimmer’s research focuses primarily on the movements created by Yiddish and Italian immigrants in the US, who asserted their cosmopolitan and internationalist values, retained cultural aspects from their mother countries, and still critiqued their new, adopted home country. Together, these works help to push against the ever-expanding boundaries of anarchist studies, revealing a rich, radical counter-history below the surface of many societies and even beneath the scholarly study of social movements.

Portadown boy Billy Wright is considered to be close to Christ by many in The Province, while most people from The North consider him as the antichrist himself.

But who was he really? Who was the man with bible and gun who considered himself the armed arm of God?

How could someone without further education develop an ideology which was seed in so many people and brought so much interior love and exterior hate as a harvest?

His background, development and ideology have been examined in this research and are presented to the public for review.

The study focuses on the republican murals painted on the walls of two cities, Belfast and Derry, in May 2009. The idea for the study was born during a trip to Northern Ireland during which I had the opportunity to observe the murals and to talk with some of the authors and with persons who had actually experienced
the events represented in the murals.
The nationalist murals have been studied by the author under different perspectives: language, iconography, political symbolism and social environment. Murals are, for sure, the community’s reaction to the British political and violent domination on Northern Ireland and they become instruments of rebellion representing
a collective request for freedom and independence. But they also represent a more complex phenomenon as they embody values and perspectives of the entire nationalist community in Northern Ireland. The study analyses the murals both as single artworks and as a collective phenomenon.A strong focus is given at all the political and social themes represented in the murals and at the different linguistic and iconographic styles of communication
as well as how different themes and styles combine. The nationalist murals are also examined under an artistic perspective with a special focus on the figure of the “artista armato”, the artist as a warrior that uses art as an instrument for communicating higher, collective (moral, social, religious, political) values. This
perspective brings the author to draw and analyse a parallel between the phenomenon of nationalist murals and Futurist art: a comparison based on the themes represented in the artworks, on the placing of the art pieces and on the social role of the artists.
If words, pictures and colours used in the nationalist murals become, as analysed in the study, the voice of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, a voice not so often listened in the EU, it becomes crucial to understand what the artists
want to communicate, why and how. This study aims also to open up to a new research perspective based on a multidisciplinary approach through the integrated use of semiotics and semantics in ethnography in order to offer a more complete and holistic interpretation of the phenomenon of the Northern Irish republican
murals.

The essay accompanies and expands on a talk at Belfast's Feile an Phobail (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrpAi-Z3bk). It analyses research by Anne Dolan, Terence Dooley, Diarmaid Ferriter, Brian Hanley, Fearghal McGarry, Eunan O’Halpin and Tim Wilson, published between 1986 and 2018.

Over nearly thirty years, historians mistakenly depicted the IRA's killing of Kate Carroll in April 1921 in Monaghan as sectarian. Carroll was one of three women the IRA executed between 1919-21 during the War of Independence, out of approximately 196 in total.

The essay discusses errors of fact and of interpretation, and also how treatment of Carroll's death represents a symptomatic failure by revisionist historians in Ireland. The essay reproduces for the first time an explanation of why Kate Carroll was killed. The information had been in the possession of one of the historians discussed in the essay, but was not detailed in his available research on the subject.

The essay also discusses the phenomenon of historians’ interest in alleged sectarian attacks on Protestants in southern Ireland, compared with relative disinterest in anti-Catholic pogroms in and around Belfast in the new territory of Northern Ireland, whose 100th anniversary falls in 2020-22.

Niall Meehan is the author of The Embers of Revisionism (https://www.academia.edu/34075119). 31 August 2023, typo corrected p2, some sentences re-written, pp2-3. Earlier, in noting historians who mistakenly concluded that no Protestants were elected to the senate, I wrote that six were. That should have been five (p3, see n17).

This paper is a study of the blanket and no-wash protests in the Maze/Long Kesh and Armagh prisons, undertaken by Irish republican prisoners from the 1st March 1976 until the end of the hunger strike in October 1981. Using Michel Foucault’s work on liberal governmentality and biopolitics, it frames the protests in terms of the power relationship between the British government and the republican prisoners, engaging with the debate over who was responsible for the protests and their escalation. In doing so it covers three key areas: the criminalisation policy, how the protests were deeply linked to this policy but also resisted it, and the use of language and imagery by both sides in framing the protests. This contributes towards the argument that the prison protests represent a microcosm of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and became the battleground through which the British government and republican movement invested their ideological positions. The use of oral history and governmental records assists this aim of understanding the ideological and pragmatic standpoints, the state’s motivations of the criminalisation policy and the prisoners’ motivations in resisting. It contends that the complexity of the power relationships which endowed the prisoners with participation in their criminalisation meant that their resistance was not simply against the criminalisation policy but against the control to categorise and limit action by the British government. As such the struggle in the prisons was over more than special category or political status: it was a metaconflict over the framing of the conflict and a resistance to British involvement in Ireland.

Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London’s largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins’s John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet’s 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

by Margaret Urwin and Niall Meehan

On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times reported, ‘Two [car] bombs in Dublin city centre killed two [CIE workers], injured 127 other people, and dramatically changed the course of the Dáil crisis over the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill’. The legislation permitted a court to accept as proof of IRA membership the uncontested word of a garda chief superintendent.

The bombs were the second in a series of three in Dublin between November and January. They prevented a general election by collapsing Fine Gael opposition to the controversial measure. British involvement was suspected by then Taoiseach Jack Lynch. However, his government ensured that an MI6 agent John Wyman and Patrick Crinnion, Wyman’s mole in garda HQ, arrested nearly three weeks later, were freed prematurely.

A ‘third man’, whose role was hidden, led gardaí to Wyman. Gardaí told the Taoiseach about him. The Department of Justice, under then minister Desmond O’Malley, must also have known. Judge Henry Barron’s 2004 report on the 1972-73 bombings, that considered the Wyman-Crinnion scandal, ignored his existence. The Irish Press reported initially the arrest of two British agents, in addition to a garda member ‘employed in a clerical capacity at garda headquarters’ (Crinnion’s position). After that, this second British agent was forgotten.

The third man was 31-year-old Englishman Alexander Forsey (reported as ‘Fursey’). Gardaí initially thought him ‘sympathetic to the IRA’. On 15 December 1972 he appeared in court, charged with possession of explosive safety fuse, 710 rounds of .22 and eight rounds of .303 ammunition. Under interrogation, Forsey told gardaí that he was in contact with a fellow Englishman, John Wyman.

2014 marked the centenary of Cumann na mBan, the Irish Republican women’s organisation. While a number of recent publications have dealt with the first decade of Cumann na mBan, its existence in the second half of the 20th century has largely been neglected by academics. However, women played an integral part in the Republican struggle and many of these women held influential positions in the Irish Republican Movement. With this in mind, the article will discuss the role of Cumann na mBan within the so-called Provisional Republican Movement between 1969 and 1986. Based on 25 Oral History interviews with former members of the women’s organisation, the membership structure of the organisation and its activities will be discussed. In general, the role of women in the Irish Republican Movement will be examined along with a number of other factors which have hitherto been largely underplayed in the historiography of women activists in the Irish Republican Movement. This article will provide students and academics with literature for further in-depth research on Cumann na mBan. In essence, the aim of the article is to introduce Cumann na mBan into the historiography of the recent conflict in the North of Ireland.

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

For most of 1975 the Provisional IRA (PIRA) was officially on ceasefire. The ceasefire constituted a major and sustained political initiative by the Provisionals, despite the fact that there was a variety of breaches and that sectarian violence escalated during this period. The fact that it was maintained for such a long period, albeit imperfectly, raises the question of why it did not provide the basis for a lasting peace. It was the first time since its establishment in 1970 that the PIRA had maintained a ceasefire for more than a few weeks. It was not until 1994 that the PIRA would again maintain a ceasefire for a comparable duration. The 1994 ceasefire was a direct precursor to republican acceptance of major compromises in the comprehensive peace settlement of 1998. Why was it that the PIRA ceasefire of 1975 did not provide the basis for a settlement, given that a long PIRA ceasefire was a crucial element in permitting the negotiation of an inclusive peace agreement in the 1990s?

Psychotic as he is, does Mad Padraic in The Lieutenant of Inishmore represent anyone in the real world? I contend that critics have very largely overlooked an obvious real-life, Irish republican who providedMcDonagh with a model (of sorts) for Padraic.
This paper will show that McDonagh based “Lieutenant” Padraic on Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, a leader of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), but that some of McDonagh’s information was derived from a highly inaccurate image of McGlinchey provided by sensationalist British and Irish newspaper reports at the time of the prolific murderer’s heyday. In fact, rather than critiquing state-created stereotypes of Irish Republican violence, McDonagh may be the unwitting dupe of British military propaganda. I suggest that two cats in the play are the analogues of famous Irish republicans and I will also offer a likely explanation for the lengthy wait that the play endured before reaching the British stage

The political functions of conflict-related commemoration have been examined in Northern Ireland, as in other deeply divided societies. However, a gap in research has persisted. In order to properly examine and evaluate local commemoration as a political activity, we should find out the size and spread of this activity, and ascertain who is responsible for its production. Accordingly, this paper presents the findings of a scoping survey of ‘Troubles’- related commemoration in Northern Ireland. We supply survey data in relation to types of commemoration; categories of actor; frequency; and location. Combining this with field observation of the forms and themes of commemoration, we examine how these data can frame our understandings of the environment of ‘Troubles’ memory.

This article aims to investigate the use of the set-piece killing tactic by the SAS in East Tyrone from 1983-1992. Evaluating the use of the tactic through a domestic, international and human rights orientated legal lens, this article will examine whether the tactic was used as a method of security force containment in East Tyrone. Drawing on legislation, case law, existing academic literature on the use of lethal force, primary legal documents, the accounts of those involved in the killings and the views of victims this article will critically examine whether the set-piece tactic was designed and implemented in a manner to bring the killing of suspected IRA operatives within the law and if this took precedent to any intention of arresting suspected insurgents. This article will critically analyse the justification and defence proffered by the state for the use of the tactic and will balance this against the facts of the killings and the belief of victims that the tactic effectively equated a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy directed against Irish republicans by the state. Locating the tactic within a wider theoretical framework, this article will examine the use of extra-legal means by states to curb insurgent activity and will examine the legal, political and human rights consequences of the set-piece tactic and how these consequences evolved as the set-piece tactic developed.

During the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood decided to 'smash up' British craft unions in Ireland and replace them with an organisation that could be relied upon to support Sinn Fein and the IRA. The result was the creation of what became and remains, the largest craft union in the Republic of Ireland. The onset of Civil War saw this brief excursion by militant nationalists into trade union formation end.  (Published as a pamphlet and available on request from the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union, 6 Gardiner Row, Dublin 1, Ireland)

Recent scholarship on civil disobedience in Northern Ireland primarily focuses on the immediate period before the breakout of violence in 1969, and in some cases, on the mass protests of the late 1970s around the H-Block/Armagh prison protests. This paper attempts to fill the gap between these two periods in its analysis of the rent and rates strike of the early 1970s, which was initiated in response to the re-introduction of internment without trial. In doing so, it positions itself against simplistic approaches towards civil disobedience as either oppositional, or causally linked, to armed struggle. Instead, it probes the complexity of its relationship to armed struggle in relation to the Northern Irish and British state's security policies.

The Easter Rising was an insurrection staged in Ireland in 1916, mounted by Irish republicans with the aims of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing the Irish Republic at a time when the British Empire, including many Irishmen, were heavily engaged in the First World War. Organised by the military wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, with significant contribution from Patrick Pearse of the Irish Volunteers and James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, the Rising lasted from the 24th April, Easter Monday, to 30 April 1916. The rebels managed to seize key locations in Dublin, and optimistically declared an independent Irish Republic . The Rising was suppressed after seven days of fighting and its leaders were court martialled and executed, but the rebellion succeeded in bringing confrontational republicanism back to the forefront of Irish minds.

NEW CCOB letter in full to Mary Holland 30 September 1979.

In 1979 Mary Holland's freelance contract with the Observer newspaper was terminated. An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, she had written for the newspaper since 1964. Holland pioneered coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

As editor in chief, Conor Cruise O'Brien objected to her coverage of Northern Ireland, in particular to an article on ten years of the Troubles. O'Brien wrote to Holland after he had altered the article (causing an entire edition of the Observer magazine to be pulped). He noted, 'It is a serious weakness in your coverage of Irish affairs that you are a very poor judge of Irish Catholics. That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world and in this case I believe you have been conned'. It letter is included here in full.

O'Brien also wrote in relation to the subject of Mary Holland's piece, Derry woman Mary Nellis, 'Since Irish republicanism - especially the killing strain of it - has a very high propensity to run in families, and since the mother is most often the carrier, I incline to the view that a mother [Mary Nellis] whose [H Block prisoner] sons behave in this way has had something to do with what they believe and how they behave.'

O'Brien would not allow Holland to contribute similar material in future. Her contract was terminated in 1979. When O'Brien vacated his post in 1981, Holland returned to write for the paper.

Irish Press, Irish Times and Guardian coverage is also attached (pp3-6). Pages 1-2 contains cover of Embers of Revisionism pamphlet, and a leaflet handed out at TCD's Centenary Conor Cruise O'Brien Symposium.

Tales of the RIC, published in 1921, provided a parallel, British propaganda, account of the 1919-21 Irish War of Independence. The various chapters appeared first as articles in Blackwoods magazine.  Some chapter headings indicate the content: 'The Informer', 'An Outlaw' 'The Reward for Loyalty', 'A Brutal Murder', 'A Jew in Gaelic Clothing', 'The Great Roundup'.

The Irish language is witnessing a revival in some parts of Ulster. This revival is most visible in Belfast where An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta was founded to promote the Irish language. While Irish was marginalized during the conflict in the North, Belfast, for example, had more Gaelscoileanna than any other city in Ireland except Dublin and Cork in 2013. One of the most important aspects for this development was the release of the Irish Republican prisoners following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In contrast to the North, although considered as the national language in the southern Republic of Ireland, the Irish language is further declining in the South. Thus, while the former Republican prisoners perform a pivotal role in the North, their role in re-vitalising the language in the Republic is marginalised. By comparing the role of the Irish language in Long Kesh/HMP Maze and Portlaoise Prison, I will discuss two aspects for this North-South divergence. These two differences are first the role of former prisoners within their community, and second the colonial/post-colonial framework of the two states.

This paper is a summary of my doctoral thesis (still in progress) which aims to use the politics of recognition to address some of the antagonistic relationships within Northern Ireland. The focus is on working alongside Loyalists to co-produce a theory of civic Loyalism, which can then be used in discussion with 'others', namely middle-class Unionists and Irish Republicans.

This study examines the military and political role of women’s organisations in national liberation movements and the changing role of women in these movements as a result of acts of war on the basis of the Northern Irish conflict between 1969 and 1986. In this period between the two splits of the Irish Republican Movement, the Republican women’s organisation Cumann na mBan stayed loyal to the military leadership of the Provisional Army Council of the Republican Movement. To collect the data, qualitative expert interviews were conducted with female members of the Irish Republican Movement. These interviews were semi-structured with narrative sequences. The structure of interviews was based on archive material from Belfast, Dublin and Limerick, which was presented for interpretation to the interviewees. By means of theoretical sampling, women were selected as interviewees along the following criteria: In the period under investigation leading activists or rank and file members of Cumann na mBan, and female Volunteers of the Provisional IRA. This allowed conducting interviews with a representative range of republican women active in military organizations. 25 years after the last major split in the Irish Republican Movement in 1986 and nearly twenty years after the beginning of the so-called peace process, it is for the first time possible to explain how republican women in Cumann na mBan see their activities in the war during the 1970s and 1980s. What do they remember from their time in a military organization? What were their lives like, being at the same time a mother, daughter, sister, wife and a member of a secret, military movement?

The 1923 deportation of two Irish republican envoys was a signal moment in the construction of Australian immigration policy, remembered more in legal than political history. The arrival of the Irish Envoys, anti-Treaty, anti-Free State and anti-British, provoked anxieties about imperial loyalty and domestic harmony. This article contextualises the role of the Envoys as a performance of Irish republican politics in the dying stages of the Irish Civil War before analysing the responses to them by Australian governments determined to curb their activities. Immigration policy and administration was constructed in this episode as an element of national security, one that implied a consideration for relations between states of a changing Empire as well as the need for domestic harmony within Australian borders.