By Daragh Fitzgerald
Trinity College students made history in May when their encampment achieved their demands for the university to divest from blacklisted Israeli companies, and the latest Trinity Journal of Histories shows that they are just as adept at writing history. This volume features essays on topics as diverse as the role of Japanese women in the Christianisation of Japan and Edmund Burke’s perceptions of a potential union between Britain and Ireland. The pick of the bunch is by Alexander Ross and discusses the trauma experienced by veterans of the Great War. By 1921, close to one in every ten veterans in Ireland was receiving a pension for neurasthenia, which was the diagnosis for shell-shock symptoms, compared to almost one in 90 in Britain. Ross argues that the more ambiguous and even hostile atmosphere to which the veterans returned in Ireland compared to Britain, coupled with Ireland’s dire economic situation, high levels of unemployment and lack of adequate facilities, contributed to this disparity.
While the experience of the Great War caused what we would understand today as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for many individuals, globally it also provoked a sense of alienation, enormous loss and a desire for a new world, reflected in the increase in labour militancy, workplace occupations, soviets and insurgencies. This ‘spirit of revolution’ has been regularly obscured in the historiography of the revolutionary period, which has often had a rather blinkered focus on the campaign to achieve formal national independence. Spirit of revolution: Ireland from below 1917–23 recovers this ‘history from below’ in its perceptive essays documenting the revolutionary currents across Ireland as they manifested in the period, from cattle drives in the west to soviets across Munster. Brian Hanley’s contribution discusses the Dublin Brigade of the IRA’s ‘Q’ Company, which comprised sailors, dockers, carters, stokers and ship’s officers and was involved in transporting communications, weapons, finance and people between North America, Europe, Britain and Ireland. Veterans claimed that ‘Q’ company’s escapades would put the best thrillers in the shade, which may be true considering the murky underworlds they navigated to secure arms. ‘Q’ company’s operations spanning the Atlantic world attest to the global nature of Ireland’s revolution and to the importance in these international networks of the working class, described by Liverpool-based Paddy Daly as ‘the only people who would take a risk’ on Merseyside.
From the dockers with whom ‘Q’ Company interacted in New York to Clann na Gael and Friends of Irish Freedom up to NORAID, Irish-America has long provided rhetorical, logistical and financial aid for the republican cause. This deep reservoir of support in the bosom of the most powerful nation on earth has proved a powerful tool and must be the envy of liberation movements globally. Timothy Meagher’s Becoming Irish American: the making and remaking of a people from Roanoke to JFK traces the creation and evolution of Irish-America from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In doing so, the book explores themes like the making and salience of race, class solidarity and social mobility, sectarianism and nativism.
Those familiar with the topic may have read Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became white, or may be familiar at least with Irish-America’s abrasive and often violent relationship with African-Americans. Irish-Americans were perpetrators of some of the most notorious outbreaks of racial violence in the US, such as the 1863 New York draft riots or the race riots in Chicago in 1919, which left over twenty African-Americans dead. Nevertheless, Irish-Americans were also prominent in progressive movements. Five of the nine House Democrats who supported an anti-lynching bill in 1922 were Irish, while the American Unity League, which brought together African-Americans, Jews, Poles and Italians to combat the Ku Klux Klan, was led and dominated by Irish-Americans.
In the popular mind, Irish migration to America is mostly associated with An Gorta Mór. A foundation story for Irish-America, the Famine was also foundational for normalising international charity, as argued by Anelise Hanson Shrout in Aiding Ireland: the Great Famine and the rise of transnational philanthropy. An array of varying and even diametrically opposed groups provided famine relief, from enslaved people in Virginia to abolitionists in Pennsylvania and even plantation-owners in the Deep South. Shrout explains this apparent incongruity by illustrating how the different groups participated in this transnational charity through the prism of their domestic political struggles and beliefs. While enslaved people may have been driven to aid the starving Irish as a critique of the dehumanisation that they themselves experienced and to demonstrate their moral autonomy, slave-owners in the South could interpret the famine in Ireland as the result of marginalisation by a federal government and thus link it to their own agenda. Altogether, Transnational philanthropy makes for a fresh and compelling examination of the Famine.
The spectre of famine haunted Ireland across the nineteenth century, and the fear was exacerbated in the latter half by the harrowing memories of Black ’47, evictions, the workhouses and the smell of rotting potatoes. Laurence M. Geary’s The Land War in Ireland: famine, philanthropy and moonlighting examines the famine of 1879–80 on the western seaboard, the fever epidemic it unleashed and the assorted responses across Irish society, which were generally mediated by one’s social class. Plugging the gaps in the current historiography of the Land War, the book outlines the causes of the famine, the philanthropic prerogatives of the wealthy who sought to ameliorate the situation, and the direct action of secret societies who combated the scourge of landlordism, such as the oxymoronic ‘Royal Irish Republic’.
Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s The disappeared: forced disappearances in Ireland 1798–1998 addresses another historiographical lacuna, examining the skeletons in the closet (or in the bog) over the last two centuries—the disappeared. Readers will know Ó Ruairc from his previous contributions to History Ireland on this topic, as well as his participation in multiple Hedge Schools. Ó Ruairc expertly documents the practice of forced disappearances in Ireland and the motivations behind them, recording all known incidents to date. The research is robust to the extent that his work has helped recover the body of British soldier George Chalmers, who was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA in 1921. In fact, given the contemporary attention to and political mudslinging over the disappeared in the more recent Troubles, it may surprise readers to learn that the IRA ‘disappeared’ more people in the two and a half years of the War of Independence than the Provos did in 30 years of the modern conflict—a fact that may be uncomfortable for those who like to draw a clear difference between the ‘good Old IRA’ and their more recent counterparts.
Readers who were interested in the engineers of Dublin Port covered by Bookworm previously and Brian Smyth’s article on Bindon Blood Stoney (Jan./Feb. 2024) should rush to get a copy of Dublin Port Heritage Conservation Strategy, which discusses the history and evolution of the port, as well as plans for its future. Once so central to city life and Dublin’s identity, the port has fallen from its perch over the recent decades and is very easy to avoid entirely even when living in Dublin. Dublin City Council is hoping to reverse this trend with their 2040 Masterplan, which will attempt to reconnect the port to the city and the bay. While less central to city life, Dubliners certainly seem to maintain some grá for the port, given the fetishisation of the Poolbeg chimneys that adorn the walls of almost every other café in town.
Medieval Mayo: churches and abbeys is similarly the initiative of a local council, hoping to illustrate the charms of Mayo’s medieval history to locals and visitors alike. This is a beautiful book, containing stunning photographs of ancient monasteries, churches, abbeys and relics while situating them within their historical moment.
Ethan Hutchinson and Clare Tobin (eds), Trinity Journal of Histories, Vol. III (Trinity Publications, 113pp).
John Cunningham and Terry Dunne (eds), Spirit of revolution: Ireland from below 1917–23 (Four Courts Press, €24.95 pb, 288pp, ISBN 9781801511186).
Timothy J. Meagher, Becoming Irish American: the making and remaking of a people from Roanoke to JFK (Yale University Press, €30 hb, 344pp, ISBN 9780300126273).
Anelise Hanson Shrout, Aiding Ireland: the Great Famine and the rise of transnational philanthropy (New York University Press, €35 hb, 272pp, ISBN 9781479824595).
Laurence M. Geary, The Land War in Ireland: famine, philanthropy and moonlighting (Cork University Press, €39 hb, 313pp, ISBN 9781782055525).
Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, The disappeared: forced disappearances in Ireland 1798–1998 (Merrion Press, €19.99 pb, 384pp, ISBN 9781785375026).
Niall Brady (ed.), Dublin Port Heritage Conservation Strategy (Dublin Port Company, 143pp, ISBN 9781399964494).
Peter Harbison, Medieval Mayo: churches and abbeys (Mayo County Council, €25 hb, 176pp, ISBN 9780957639669).