By Daragh Fitzgerald
Alan Kelly’s The struggle for mastery in Ireland, 1442–1540: culture, politics and Kildare–Ormond rivalry documents the tussle for dominance of the English colony in Ireland between the leading magnate families at the time, the Fitzgeralds of Kildare and the Butlers of Ormond. These two leading houses of the old colonial community sustained an equilibrium on the island in which stability was generally preserved. This would all come asunder after the rebellion of Silken Thomas in 1534, an instrumental precursor to the cataclysm of the Tudor conquest and the subsequent horrors that followed. The context of this rebellion, along with its impact, is well covered in the text, which overall illustrates the significance of the Kildare–Ormond rivalry with great nuance, a rivalry that, amongst other things, gave us the idiom ‘chancing your arm’.
Early modern Ireland was transformed utterly by the aggressive programme of colonisation and Anglicisation that constituted the Tudor and Stuart campaigns, and Bríd McGrath’s The operations of the Irish House of Commons, 1613–48 illustrates how the Irish parliament’s history reflects the wider social, political, economic and demographic changes occurring in this period. The text deals specifically with the House of Commons, its composition, membership, operations and powers during this tumult. While the English parliament ended the period with enhanced powers, the opposite was true for the Irish parliament, which resumed its medieval role as an assembly acting in the interests of a small colonial élite of differing background, and now religion, to the majority in Ireland, as the House of Commons contained an increasing number of New English representatives loyal to the administration, while the number of Catholic representatives drawn from the island’s population plummeted, reflecting the increasingly desperate situation for Catholics.
As ever, art was an important medium through which the people experiencing this chaotic and traumatising transformation tried to process and understand what was going on around them, with Tugadh an t-ár-so ar Éirinn being one of numerous poems produced in north Munster during the final decade of James I’s reign. In the poem, the image of a mother’s children being taken away and replaced by a pseudo-family of strangers is used as a metaphor to illustrate the havoc and agony of the Nine Years War and subsequent plantation. Composed by Eoghan Mac Craith, it is the subject of one of the many excellent articles in The Other Clare, the annual journal of the Shannon Archaeological and Historical Society. Another article details a sex scandal at Lahinch in 1916, when dentist William Burke spent the night with domestic servant Lizzie O’Sullivan and then attempted to perform an abortion on her. The class and gendered power-imbalance between Burke and O’Sullivan made this an uncomfortable read, as did the threats made to O’Sullivan by local republicans to encourage her not to testify against Burke. Perhaps not exactly ‘all’ changed utterly in 1916, certainly for the marginalised.
Rút Nic Foirbeis’s A history of Irish republicanism in Dundee c. 1840 to 1985 is the first in-depth examination of Irish republicanism in Dundee, a city that tends to be overshadowed by Glasgow and Edinburgh in the historiography. Irish migration to Dundee was already well established prior to the Famine, as close trade links between Ireland’s linen industry and Dundee’s textile industry generated large-scale Irish immigration, particularly from south-west Ulster and north-east Connaught, since the 1820s. Chartists and Repealers worked in tandem in the city, with over a thousand attending a demonstration in 1844 to cheer the release of Daniel O’Connell from prison and to champion the cause of repeal. These links led to the creation of a tricolour flag, which was green, white and blue—with blue representing liberty, the colour of Scotland and the flag of radical Covenanters, which was appropriated by the Chartists. Jumping ahead, Dundee had representatives of all shades of Irish nationalist political life during the revolutionary period, with Hibernians, supporters of William O’Brien’s United Irish League and Irish Volunteers active in the city. Being in Scotland, the latter were primarily tasked with procuring and trafficking arms for the struggle back home, with Dundee per capita acquiring more arms than any other Scottish city, no small thanks to Lena McDonald, the most prolific gunrunner.
Sinn Féin’s recent success in the Westminster elections has given the calls for constitutional change in the North further momentum, making Lisa Claire Whitten’s Northern Ireland and the UK constitution an ever more prescient read. The text is a concise history of the North of Ireland from the Ulster Plantation to the Windsor Framework, examined within the broader context of the constitutional norms and narratives of the United Kingdom. Whitten points out that Northern Ireland constitutes a blind spot in UK-wide constitutional analysis and general discussions. It was therefore surprising to see very little attention paid to the Home Rule crisis in the book, as it is surely pertinent to any discussion of the constitution of the United Kingdom and of Northern Ireland that the state was established in large part owing to a threatened mutiny, rebellion and abeyance of democracy. Of course, given the nature and scope of the book there were always going to be lacunas, and the text’s strength lies in the legalistic analyses of the various constitutional developments in the North over the last century, from the Government of Ireland Act to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and Good Friday Agreement through to the Brexit arrangements and into the potential future constitutional frameworks.
Bernadette Whelan’s Irish first ladies and first gentlemen, 1919–2011 examines the lives, backgrounds and influence of the wives and husbands of Irish presidents over the last century. One of the first questions one might ask about such work is where to start. Depending on one’s politics, the state was founded in 1916, 1919, 1922, 1937 or even 1949. While a stickler may begin in 1937 when the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann was officially established, the First Dáil of 1919 is probably the first time a ‘president’ could fairly and unambiguously claim to represent the national beliefs of the majority population on the island. Whelan’s study illustrates how perceptions of the first ladies and gentlemen in an Irish context are heavily imbued with gendered assumptions, as first ladies have been expected to be an adoring wife, social organiser and hostess, while first gentlemen have been assumed to have options which include either fulfilling a political role or, indeed, continuing their own paid employment.
Heroic Mayo by Michael Feeney is an anthology of the life stories of an array of the Wild Geese of Mayo who fought in conflicts across the globe, from Ireland to Israel, Japan and Mexico. The life of Paddy Horken is one of many detailed in the book. Born in York in 1890, his family moved to Castlebar in 1898. Horken enlisted in the British Army during the Great War, seeing action on the Somme and in the Battle of Arras, for which he was awarded the Military Medal for Bravery, later meeting George V at a military hospital. Horken, however, was no royalist, and soon after would be a prominent member of the West Mayo Brigade of the IRA, captaining Castlebar A Company.
Rob Wills’s The sweet air of freedom: Convict Frayne’s narrative of politics, sex, religion and violence recounts another swashbuckling Irish adventure, this one of Dubliner Laurence Frayne, who was convicted of stealing rope, a petty crime for which he was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in New South Wales. Frayne ran afoul of the law in Australia too and ultimately ended up on the notorious Norfolk Island, where he participated in a mutiny in 1834. Frayne wrote a narrative of his life on the island, which was never published in full until now and makes for an extraordinary read.
Alan Kelly, The struggle for mastery in Ireland, 1442–1540: culture, politics and Kildare–Ormond rivalry (The Boydell Press, €89.50 hb, 202pp, ISBN 9781837650521).
Bríd McGrath, The operations of the Irish House of Commons, 1613–1648 (Four Courts Press, €58.50 hb, 594pp, ISBN 9781846828140).
Shannon Archaeological and Historical Society, The Other Clare (Shannon Archaeological and Historical Society, €15 pb, 100pp, ISSN 0332-088X).
Rút Nic Foirbeis, A history of Irish republicanism in Dundee c. 1840 to 1985 (Tippermuir Books, €19.99 pb, 580pp, ISBN 9781913836276).
Lisa Claire Whitten, Northern Ireland and the UK constitution (Haus Curiosities, €10 pb, 159pp, ISBN 9781913368951).
Bernadette Whelan, Irish first ladies and first gentlemen, 1919–2011 (Cork University Press, €49 hb, 584pp, ISBN 9781782056089).
Michael Feeney, Heroic Mayo (Michael Feeney, €40 hb, 522pp, ISBN 9781399968577).
Rob Wills, The sweet air of freedom: Convict Frayne’s narrative of politics, sex, religion and violence (Australian Scholarly Publishing, €27.50 pb, 180pp, ISBN 9781923068827).