Popular culture has long been used in Europe in the construction of ‘national’ ideologies. With the development of the strong nation-state in Europe, elites have also tried to suppress or assimilate elements of popular culture which they regarded as threatening to order, whether civil or moral. In many countries, dance has been prominent in this … Read more
Sir Roger Casement deserves better. The former senior British Consular official 1895-1913 had, as his friend, the highly respectable Presbyterian minister /.B. Armour of Ballymoney put it, ‘an inborn hatred of tyranny and cruelty’ which led him to expose cruelties in the Congo and in the rubber plantations of Brazil. But his three professionally authenticated … Read more
On 27 and 28 April 1894 one hundred and nineteen delegates of labour organisations assembled in the Trades’ Hall, Capel Street, Dublin to found the Irish Trade Union Congress. Those present were the inheritors of a labour movement which at that time had over a century of tradition behind it. In Ireland, as elsewhere in … Read more
It must have seemed a God-given set of circumstances: in Ireland after the Williamite war many areas of depopulated and unproductive countryside; in Europe several hundred thousand displaced persons ready to migrate with their families, their small means and considerable skills. And to fit the two together were three key people: the begetter of ‘Ie … Read more
Collaboration usually implies betrayal, or deviation from some sanctified cause. Viewed from the opposite perspective, it is an ingenious, even admirable recipe for survival. This article considers the role of one magnate in Irish colonial society in the sixteenth century. It suggests a set of options in the face of the process of conquest and … Read more