'Ride rough-shod': evictions, sheriffs' sales and the anti-hunting agitation

Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 is an important contribution to a neglected topic in Irish literary and cultural history – the modes of protest and cultural forms available to the subaltern classes under landlordism. In this publication, Heather Laird demonstrates that the so-called unwritten 'agrarian code' of popular justice, though often depicted in political and fictional writings as anarchic and pathological, was pro-social as opposed to anti-social, emanating from an alternative moral code whose very existence undermined the legitimacy of the colonial civil law. Chapter III, " 'Ride Rough-Shod': Evictions, Sheriffs' Sales and the Anti-Hunting Agitation", is primarily concerned with the extensive resistance to hunting that took place in many parts of Ireland during the period of the Land War

"An Ireland as complex and various as possible": Seán Ó Faoláin's writings on partition as a precursor to peace process republicanism

The 1998 Belfast Agreement compelled Irish republicans to think about partition and unification in new ways. The year 2018, the twenty-year anniversary of the ratification of that agreement and nearly one hundred years after the establishment of the Irish Free State, offers an opportune time to revisit the writings of Seán Ó Faoláin, one of the most flamboyant public intellectuals to emerge in Ireland in the postrevolutionary period. This article, which challenges the identification of Ó Faoláin as a protorevisionist and more recent attempts to reclaim him for very different left-republican or poststructuralist intellectual/political projects, will concentrate primarily on Ó Faoláin’s writings on partition. Ó Faoláin’s thinking on partition will be linked here to his writings on the ethnocultural complexities of postrevolutionary Ireland and on literary form. The article will explore the extent to which Ó Faoláin was a precursor not, as has been claimed, of revisionism but of a latter-day nonmilitant pragmatic republicanism that decommissioned its weapons and, in the Belfast Agreement, accepted the principle of consent as the basis for a sovereign all-Ireland state. His writings both point to the range of positions available within post–Civil War republicanism and indicate that none of these positions was without its attendant difficultie

Sireacht: Longings for Another Ireland

Written during Ireland's decade of centenaries, Commemoration draws on the aims of the Síreacht series to re-imagine commemoration. A commemoration process that is shaped by a desire to re-invigorate the social imagination and encourage speculation on alternatives to current orthodoxies considers not only what happened in the past, but what else might conceivably have happened. By acknowledging the existence of historical alternatives at a given moment in time, we can access that moment's contingencies. These unrealised yet fully realisable past futures are especially numerous during periods of potent possibility; points in time when the future seems particularly open to being shaped by those living in the present. The book proposes ways that we can both make the roads untaken in history visible and 'remember' them. It links the untaken roads of the past to side-branching roads in the present: real possible alternatives to dominant ways of thinking and being, outlining commemorative practices that could connect these two sets of roads. Commemoration − while referring to history, literature, television drama and documentary, economics, politics, law and art − is grounded in concepts and practices of land and property occupancy and usage. That said, the ideas that it explores are relevant to the broader set of struggles concerning collective welfare that impel the Síreacht series. In keeping with series's utopian-inflected subtitle, 'Longings for Another Ireland', the book proposes that a commemoration process which recognises that the past could have been other than it was and that it could have given rise to other possible futures can assist us in the difficult but necessary process of imagining our future as both different to and better than the here and now

Decentring the Irish Land War: Women, politics and the private sphere

In historical accounts of Ireland in which the political is defined purely in terms of that which directly affects the state, and historical change is believed to be powered by these narrowly defined political forces, women, who were for the most part excluded from formal male political culture, tend to be assigned a marginal role. State-centred histories, in other words, are invariably patriarchal histories. One of the means employed to counteract this marginalization is to seek out examples of ‘exceptional’ women who did operate in the arena of the state, or close to it, and focus attention on them. While scholarship of this kind reminds us of the impressive contribution that women like Constance Markievicz made to Irish society, it fails to challenge the values and structures of the historiography it is supplementing. In this chapter, I demonstrate, with reference to women and agrarian unrest in the 1880s land agitation, that an historical framework which decentres familiar notions of power and the political is the most effective way to bring women in from the margins of Irish history. Relocating the ‘front’ of the Land War from the public sphere of organized politics to the civil domain of everyday life reveals the centrality of women to this episode in Irish history

Introduction: Daniel Corkery as postcolonial critic

In the one-paragraph dismissals of Daniel Corkery that are to be found in so many post-1960s studies of Irish history, literary and culture, his analysis and the questions that he posed tend to be disregarded in favour of the very limited solutions that he offered. This chapter reassesses Corkery’s critical writings, situating them within an international context of anti-colonialism and arguing that they offer some valuable insights into the cultural and psychological effects of colonialism. It points out that the central concerns of Corkery’s criticism – language displacement, cultural dislocation, a disconnect between dominant literary forms and local reality, “fractured” identity, education as a colonial tool, the gaps and silences of official historiography, the relationship between settler and native – have, until relatively recently, been the central concerns of postcolonial criticism

India and the translation of the Irish Brehon Laws

This chapter explores the relationship between colonial rule in India and attitudes towards both the Brehon Laws and English rule in Ireland. It opens with a brief overview of the connection between colonial rule in India and the translation of so-called native law. It argues that the concept of governing India according to its own laws and customs was linked to India’s status as an administrative colony, but that the success of this concept in legitimising English rule in India led many nineteenth-century commentators to endorse its application to Ireland, a very different colonial setting. This resulted, in part, to the British government’s agreement in 1852 to fund a project to translate and publish the Irish Brehon Law manuscripts

The ‘placing’ and politics of Elizabeth Bowen in contemporary Irish literary and cultural criticism

This chapter provides an overview and analysis of contemporary scholarship on Elizabeth Bowen. In particular, it examines the role assigned in writings from conflicting critical and ideological perspectives to what is sometimes described as Bowen’s lack of roots, but might more accurately be referred to as her profusion of roots, highlighting the more fruitful critical approaches to this aspect of her life and work. It details what tends to be omitted, particularly issues of gender and sexuality, in analyses of Bowen as an Anglo-Irish writer. It suggest ways that her in-between status can be most usefully linked to what might initially appear to be very different aspects of her writing, demonstrating the connections that exist between her writings set in Ireland and her other works of fiction

European postcolonial studies and Ireland: Towards a conversation amongst the colonized of Europe

In the 1980s, key Irish Studies scholars proposed that Irish culture, politics and economics – both past and present – are most usefully viewed in the context of imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. The result of this intervention is an Irish postcolonial studies which, over the past 35 years, has produced an influential body of scholarship premised on the idea that Ireland is a colony/former colony of the British Empire. Notwithstanding its considerable impact, Irish postcolonial studies has not been without its detractors, with the country's location within Europe forming the basis for one of most persistent objections to the application of a postcolonial framework to Ireland. Given the key role assigned to geography in the postcolonial debate in Ireland, this article explores the implications for Ireland of an emerging postcolonial critique centred on Europe. In addition to discussing the concept of internal colonisation as applied to such Western European countries as Italy and Britain, the article makes reference to postcolonial analyses of the region of Eastern and Central Europe and its relationship with both Russia and Western Europe. The article acknowledges that the branch of European postcolonial studies that focuses on uneven power relationships within and between European countries offers a useful challenge to the argument that Ireland should either be examined within a European framework or a postcolonial one, but argues that the categorisation of a greater number of European societies as colonies or former colonies raises important questions that require further debate

Subversive law in Ireland, 1879-1920: From 'unwritten law' to the Dáil courts

Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 is an important contribution to a neglected topic in Irish literary and cultural history – the modes of protest and cultural forms available to the subaltern classes under landlordism. In this publication, Heather Laird demonstrates that the so-called unwritten 'agrarian code' of popular justice, though often depicted in political and fictional writings as anarchic and pathological, was pro-social as opposed to anti-social, emanating from an alternative moral code whose very existence undermined the legitimacy of the colonial civil law. The book explores this clash in legal systems and the resulting crisis in law administration