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Science, sociability and the improvement of Ireland: the Galway Mechanics' Institute, 1826–51

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2006

ELIZABETH NESWALD
ELIZABETH NESWALD
Affiliation:
Department of History, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue, St Catharines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Irish mechanics' institutes have received little attention from historians of science, but their history presents intriguing questions. Whereas industrialization, Protestant dissent and the politics of liberal social reformers have been identified as crucial for the development of mechanics' institutes in Britain, their influence in Ireland was regionally limited. Nonetheless, many unindustrialized, provincial, largely Catholic Irish towns had mechanics' institutes in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper investigates the history of the two mechanics' institutes of Galway, founded in 1826 and 1840, and analyses how local and national contexts affected the establishment, function and development of a provincial Irish mechanics' institute. Situating these institutes within the changing social and political constellations of early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, it shows how Catholic emancipation, the temperance movement and different strands of Irish nationalism affected approaches to the uses of science and science education in Ireland.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 503 - 534
Copyright
© 2004 British Society for the History of Science

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Footnotes

Research for this article was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Royal Irish Academy. I would like to thank Aileen Fyfe, Ben Marsden, Juliana Adelman, Francesca Benatti, Richard McMahon and especially John Cunningham for their constructive comments and support. Thanks to the anonymous referees and to Simon Schaffer for their suggestions and comments. Special thanks go to Patria McWalter, Archivist of the Galway County Library.