The Spanish Civil War was one of the most controversial conflicts of recent history. For many on the left, it was a struggle between democracy and fascism. In contrast, many Catholics and conservatives championed Franco as a crusader against communism. Others felt Spain was the beginning of an inevitable conflict between fascism and communism which had increasingly threatened the stability of inter-war Europe. Spain has remained a battleground of ideologies ever since. Many supporters of the Spanish Republic attribute its defeat to the failure of other democratic states to oppose fascism, a policy of appeasement which ultimately led to the Second World War; for others on the left, including Orwell, Spain came to symbolise the betrayal of socialism by the Soviet Union — a disillusioning suppression of liberty repeated in subsequent decades in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Ireland was no less drawn to Spain than other European nations. Within months of the war breaking out, close to one thousand Irishmen were fighting among the armies of both sides on the frontlines around Madrid. But for most Irish people, influenced by the Catholic church and sensational newspaper reports of anticlerical atrocities, the ideological conflict was perceived to be between Catholicism and communism rather than left and right. The outbreak of the war was followed by an immense outpouring of popular sympathy for Franco’s Nationalists. During the autumn of 1936 the Irish Christian Front organised mass pro-Franco rallies which attracted the support of opposition politicians, clergymen and much of the public. The dissenting voices of support for the Spanish Republic emanating from the marginalised Irish left were ignored or, more often, suppressed. De Valera’s Fianna Fáil government expressed its support for Spain’s Catholics while, somewhat awkwardly, adopting a position of neutrality for reasons of international diplomacy.

One of the criticisms most frequently made of O’Connell’s conduct of his agitation for repeal of the union has always been that he failed to build up a parliamentary party that would be a credit to his cause. The accusation comes in its harshest form, naturally enough, from his political opponents at the time. A whig journalist, for instance, writing in 1843, described O’Connell’s followers in these terms:

Cringed to his face, consulted, and revered
His oracles—detested him—and feared.

And it was either a whig or a tory journalist who invented for O’Connell’s party the wounding nickname of ‘O’Connell’s tail’, with its implication that the members of the party were without wills of their own, completely subservient to their leader’s commands. But it was not from whigs and tories alone that criticism came: earnest repealers themselves complained that their party was damaging the cause they had at heart.

F. S. L. Lyons in his Ford lectures at Oxford, and in a broadcast talk, has stressed the need for a new general theory of Irish culture, a wider understanding of the Irish tradition. This essay is an attempt to take a few steps in this direction. It will review some of the English literature written in Ireland between 1780 and 1820, and trace its connections with Ireland and with England. In the forty years after the Volunteer movement, it will be argued, Irish authors writing in English, influenced by new ideas about Celts and constitutions and even about Carthaginians, did something to establish a tradition of specifically Irish literature. This has all too often been neglected or misunderstood by literary historians, for whom Anglo-Irish literature begins more than half a century later.

The Irish mythology of the Great Famine of the 1840s explained the failure of the British government to prevent the deaths of some one million people in terms of a Whig government and ruling élite driven by a commitment to laissez-faire ideology which left them indifferent to the loss of Irish lives. At its most extreme, this mythology attributed a wilful genocide to the English. The term myth as used here does not necessarily imply that the account is untrue. Rather, the myth comprises a combination of fact, fiction and the unknowable in a narrative of such power that, for the people who accept it, the myth provides a guide to future understanding and action. In this respect, Irish mythology about the English and the Famine is rooted in facts: the resistance of the Whig government to any interference with the market; the staunch commitment to ideology of central figures in the making of famine policy such as Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury) and Sir Charles Wood (chancellor of the exchequer) and shapers of liberal opinion such as the political economists Nassau Senior and James Wilson (editor of The Economist); and the indifference to Irish suffering, and indeed the hostility to the Irish, as demonstrated in the language of the radical M.P.J.A. Roebuck.

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by theview that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.

In the 1940s and 1950s, irrespective of the government in power, Irish foreign policy faced strong domestic pressure to remain within parameters defined by religious sentiment, anti-communism and anti-colonialism. Yet two contrasting attitudes, corresponding to party allegiances, were nonetheless discernible: that of Fine Gael, which held constantly to a pro-Western line, and that of Fianna Fáil, which was capable of occasionally departing from it. By the 1960s the two approaches had converged, as Fianna Fáil under Seán Lemass repositioned itself more clearly in the American-led camp, a change most strikingly exemplified by Ireland’s response to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Yet before the end of the decade an issue was to arise in which Dublin’s Department of External Affairs was to find itself steering a course independent of forces both within the country and outside it.

The war which erupted in Nigeria in the summer of 1967, when its Eastern Region seceded, was to reverberate across the world, causing a response in Ireland unequalled by the reaction to any foreign civil conflict between that of Spain in the 1930s and that of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It was to bring about the greatest emotional involvement with an African problem since Ireland’s participation in the Congo conflict, leading directly to the foundation of the Africa Concern and Gorta organisations and marking a turning-point in the nature of Irish overseas aid.

The completion in 1967 of thirty years of Irish Historical Studies has been the occasion for a stocktaking (still in progress) of the achievement of those years in Irish historiography. They are coming to be seen as an era of remarkable advances in specialist research, in professional technique, in historical organisation, and in the publication of special studies, source materials, bibliographies and aids to research. Though this research has been unevenly spread, it has produced an impressive body of new knowledge on many periods and topics. The conditions for scholarly work on Irish history have thus been transformed; and there is a world of difference between the prospects for Irish historiography in 1938 and now.

From the autumn of 1918 until late in 1919 home rule was dead as a practical issue in British politics, and the government concerned itself with the administration in Ireland and the means by which republican violence might be stamped out. During the spring and summer of 1918 Lloyd George had attempted to follow what he called the ‘dual policy’ — home rule in return for military compulsion — and a cabinet committee, under the chairmanship of Walter Long, had drafted a home-rule bill which, in view of the deteriorating situation in Ireland, the cabinet had refused to take up. This bill had foreshadowed the basic outlines of the settlement which was to be embodied in the Government of Ireland Act more than two years later Despite the considerable historical attention given to Anglo-Irish affairs in the period 1918-22 comparatively little attention has been paid to the making of the Government of Ireland Act, though it was this piece of legislation which laid the basis for partition. The act is something of an historical aberration in that its application within nationalist Ireland was superseded within less than a year of reaching the statute book, for the treaty of 6 December 1921 effectively repealed it by granting full dominion status.

Little has been written of the optimism and excitement among Irish immigrants and other Americans during the revolutionary months of 1848, the European ‘springtime of the peoples’. Studies of Irish-American nationalism hasten over the mobilisation of funds and arms to register the impact of failure. The ignominious collapse of the Young Ireland rising in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch was to compel Irish-Americans to reconstruct their identity, to redefine the ways and means of their nationalist project. Irish-American nationalism became self-enclosed and self-reliant, an attitude evinced in a pattern of ethnic associational culture extending from mutual improvement to terrorist planning. During the heady months of 1848, however, a different mood prevailed. Looking across the Atlantic to revolutionary Europe, Irish immigrants invoked an international republicanism in which America, their adopted homeland, held pride of place. By recalling their hosts to their revolutionary past, Irish-Americans challenged narrow isolationism — and ‘Know-Nothing’ prejudice — to gain substantial, if temporary, native support.

About noon on Sunday 19 October 1777 there was a stir of attention in one corner of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. As the Freeman’s Journal reported,

It is easy to visualise the scene: the intimidating presence of the Sunday crowd building up around the pair, the frightened mother, the weeping child clinging to her. The story is told sympathetically; it is a minor incident but, one might think, revealing. It seems, on the face of it, to show that a single black woman and her child were a rare sight in eighteenth-century Dublin. But then the next sentence in the newspaper report turns that assumption on its head:

In the writer’s view, what was wrong was not simply the rudeness of the Dubliners in letting their curiosity get the better of them, and the distress this caused, but the fact that it was out of all proportion to the object that provoked it. There was not the excuse that black people like this particular mother and child were a novelty. On the contrary, they were ‘common to meet with’.

The Irish workhouse has had a troubled history, attracting mostly negative commentary from the inception of the national poor law system after 1838 to the final abolition of the poor law in Northern Ireland in 1948. The popular historian of the institution opens his account with the bald statement that ‘the workhouse was the most feared and hated institution ever established in Ireland’. While one might quibble with this (the penitentiaries and asylums of the nineteenth century were surely as much feared, and perhaps with more reason; the record of the industrial schools and Magdalene asylums has more recently attracted the appalled attention of Irish society), the statement contains a kernel of truth. Designed with the deterrent principle of ‘less eligibility’ to the forefront, and irrevocably associated with the horrors of mass mortality during the Great Famine, the workhouses became in Irish popular memory (and in the bulk of historical commentary) associated with the suffering and degradation of their inmates. Nevertheless, the early history of the poor law and its associated workhouses is more complex than this suggests and deserves closer attention.

The valiant efforts of certain professional historians to redeem the reputation of King John of England have had a limited impact on the public imagination: there he remains a cruel tyrant, the oppressor of his subjects’ liberty. Even within the profession, it must be said, John has never managed fully to endear himself, and while there is general acknowledgement that he was an innovative king who paid meticulous attention to the day-to-day workings of his civil service, this is hardly likely to overcome the lingering and firmly fixed impression that he was a nasty individual, an unpopular ruler and, ultimately, a failure. Curiously, apart from his reputation for administrative innnovation, John’s Irish policy is one of the few areas of either his public or his private life which has not been viewed unfavourably and where approval by modern historians approaches unanimity.

The historical importance of the Irish National Land League lies primarily in its contribution to the politicization of Irish agrarian society. During the years 1879-82 the Land League conducted a tenant right campaign embracing virtually every county in the south and west of Ireland, and an extensive portion of the midlands as well. In these areas it organized an impressive network of local branches, which drew large numbers of farmers into political activity. The movement was not, however, organized by farmers alone. The central direction of the agitation was assumed by a contingent of Irish nationalists, while local leadership was provided, in large measure, by a discontented segment of the town population. Townsmen were numerically well represented in the Land League, they played an instrumental role in initiating the agitation, and they continued, once league branches had become established, to help organize meetings and enforce the league’s authority in local land disputes. Hence, though the Land League was principally a farmers’ organization, and though, in the end, it served to politicize Irish farmers, it was the the product of an alliance between two distinguishable social groups.

Control over the media is a key lever of state power. During the First World War and immediate post-war period, British officials in Ireland exercised this power as they attempted to curtail radical Irish nationalism. While state control over the media can be wielded in direct form (usually through suppression), it frequently manifests itself more subtly and indirectly, through moderate censorship for example, especially when the state in question has a democratic dimension and liberal traditions or pretensions. In Ireland in the period covered by this article state interference with the media was both direct and indirect, partially mirroring the dual policy of coercion and conciliation that marked the final years of British governance over the whole island. Neither strategy succeeded in hobbling republican political advance, however, and censorship and suppression came to be regarded by radicals as irritants and obstacles that could be overcome.

Whether as a unionist, or as an independent, T W Russell was never taken lightly by the parliamentary representatives of late Victorian unionism: directly, and obliquely, his contribution to the evolution of their movement was immense. As a popular unionist missionary in Britain between the first two home-rule bills, and as a protégé of Joseph Chamberlain, Russell was a valuable medium of communication between the British and Irish unionist parties. Moreover, he was both a champion of unionist farmer demands and a loyalist member of parliament; so Russell also created a vital bond between Irish unionism and rural opinion. As a member of the parliamentary Ulster party, Russell worked unstintingly for its success, provoking flexibility among both the more obtuse landed elements in the commons and among radical farmers in the counties. Yet, when he left unionism, his influence (now indirect) remained. Confronted by the spectre of presbyterian farmer militancy led by Russell, Irish unionist members of parliament meekly tailored their public pledges; and when, between 1900 and 1902, his agitation peaked, these members went further, revising the structure of their party in order to deflate his criticism and restore old loyalties. As one of the most significant forces in moulding twentieth-century unionism from nineteenth-century toryism, Russell merits special attention: his relationship with the unionist leadership in the strategically crucial years between 1894 and 1906 is examined here at length.

I

‘A considerable number [of refugees] have left on a plea of compulsion without any justification whatever for that plea,’ declared the secretary to the Provisional Government in 1922, referring to the departure from the twenty-six-county area of disbanded members of the R.I.C., British ex-servicemen and civilians believed to have been loyal to the British régime in Ireland. Such a claim was greeted with scant belief in Britain in the spring of 1922 as perhaps as many as 20,000 people, some with their entire families, arrived on British shores and were given refugee status by the British government through its Irish Distress Committee, founded to aid Irish loyalist victims of the Civil War. The committee first sat in May 1922 under the chairmanship of Sir Samuel Hoare, a Conservative, and its function was to give loans of money to refugees from Ireland until they either found work in Britain or decided it was safe to return home. At first it had a budget of £10,000, which was fairly meagre, even by the standards of the early 1920s, considering that it dealt with 3,349 applicants in its first six months. Relief was available to claimants through loans and grants. Even at that early stage when the Civil War was far from over, the Irish Distress Committee realised that its work ‘only touches the fringe of the bigger question of compensation’, though perhaps it did not realise just how big that question was to be in the aftermath of Irish independence.

In August 1875, at the O’Connell centenary celebrations in Boston, three famous American abolitionists recalled the importance of O’Connell’s role in the American anti-slavery movement. John Greenleaf Whittier saw no reason to change the high opinion of O’Connell’s anti-slavery services that he had formed many years earlier; William Lloyd Garrison commented on the aid and inspiration he had always received from O’Connell; and Wendell Phillips noted how the Irishman’s actions as an agitator had influenced the abolitionists’ own concept of moral reform. Parallel celebrations in Dublin also mentioned this aspect of O’Connell’s career, but perhaps it is fitting that his anti-slavery commitment should receive greatest stress in Boston, which was not only an important Irish-American centre, but also the city with the closest links with British anti-slavery.

Ulster has not yet been invaded systematically, but from the information we have received, many important centres are taking to the fields in the most enthusiastic manner'. Thus wrote Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) founder Michael Cusack in 1885. It was fashionable then to refer to a national sports party ‘invading’ another land to exhibit a sport to the host country, but Cusack was probably parodying unionist depictions of recent nationalist political campaigns in the north-east as ’invasions’ – a term that itself mocked nationalism and its southern promoters as foreign entities in the north.

It is now almost impossible to reflect upon the historical reputations of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins without considering the recent war in Northern Ireland (c. 1969–97) and the challenges to Irish identities it has induced. In the Republic this is evident in the movement away from irredentist nationalism toward official recognition of partition, following a constitutional referendum in 1998. Against a similarly barometric historiography, de Valera and Collins's historical representations have transformed. De Valera, it is clear, long since fell from favour among mainstream nationalists.