Ireland: the politics of enmity 1789–2006 Paul Bew (Oxford University Press, £35) ISBN 9780198205555 According to the preface, this book ‘is about the conflict between the Protestant British—both on the British “mainland” and in Ireland itself—and the Catholic Irish’, from the 1800 Act of Union to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. The various attempts by … Read more
In the 1880s many, including Dr Thomas W. Croke, archbishop of Cashel, maintained that ‘ball-playing, hurling, football-kicking according to Irish rules . . . may now be said to be not only dead and buried, but in several localities to be entirely forgotten. What the country needed was an Irish organisation to bring order and … Read more
After the partial repeal of Poynings’ Law in 1782, the Irish House of Lords became a much more important body than before. The Lords represented the great landowners and the Anglican Church; therefore, from 1782 to 1800, it required the best efforts of government in its management, thus demonstrating its true political significance. Support of … Read more
The term ‘municipal revolution’ was coined by Sidney and Beatrix Webb to describe the nineteenth-century transformation of borough corporations in England and Wales, and was first applied to Ireland by the present author in 2010. The Municipal Revolution in Ireland has been overlooked for a number of reasons. One is that Irish nationalism imagined the … Read more
The December election of 1910, which gave John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party the balance of power, and the subsequent passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, which removed the House of Lords veto, made the prospect of Home Rule a very real possibility for Ireland. Like the rest of southern Ireland, Kildare awaited the imminent … Read more