The United Irish League in Cork, 1898-1918: Resistance and Counter-Resistance (original) (raw)
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Resistance and the United Irish League in Cork, 1900-1909
Resistance and counter-resistance are familiar tropes to those who labour in the garden of Irish nationalist history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the armed rebellions inspired by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1867 and again in 1916, to the agrarian struggles of the Land League, the Plan of Campaign and the United Irish League (UIL) in the 1870s, 1880s and early 1900s respectively, Irish nationalists sought to disengage from the hegemonic presence of the British state and its agents. Nationalists of all hues also sought to resist the creeping and insidious social and cultural influence of “England” through the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1892. Yet by far the most complex and comprehensive in terms of strategic resistance and the creation of a de facto alternative government was the UIL. This, by its very nature and appeal across a wide sector of nationalist support, meant that uneasy alliances were forged in the heat of battle which would be repudiated later. These were further enhanced by the structures of the UIL which functioned as an Irish nationalist state in embryo. Local branches were organised into executives at parliamentary division level, with a National Directory providing governance at an all-island level; a Standing Committee organised the League on a day-to-day basis. Coterminous with these stood the local government structures put in place by the 1898 Local Government (Ireland) Act. These county, rural and urban district councils allowed the UIL membership to practise electoral and popular politics, all the while taking control of governance from the agents of the British state (bar, of course, the policing and military which remained an invidious presence). All of these representatives gathered annually (sometimes more often) at a National Convention in Dublin, ostensibly to pass judgement on the performance of their parliamentary representatives in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) by scrutinising legislation recently passed at Westminster or forthcoming from the governments in power. The structures of the UIL were designed to provide more representation for grassroots nationalism and more interaction with an IPP which clung to the structures and tenets set down during the heydays of Charles Stewart Parnell. A consequence of the paralysing and psychological effects of the violent and damaging split of 1890-1, the eddies of which were still reaching the shores at the turn of the twentieth century, the relationships between the lieutenants of Parnell – John Dillon, O'Brien and John Redmond, as well as the gadfly Tim Healy – were fraught by the time O'Brien founded the UIL in 1898. Over the following two years, a complicated series of negotiations ended with the UIL merging with the IPP, a merger ratified at a National Convention held in June 1900 which approved the UIL Constitution and Rules. This Convention signalled the beginning of the end of ‘phase one’ of the UIL growth, and ushered in ‘phase two’, a consolidation of the League and clarification of its modus operandi. Consolidation somewhat blunted the UIL’s radical impulse, and brought to the surface tensions inherent within the movement.
Resistance in modern Ireland : introduction
Studi Irlandesi : a Journal of Irish Studies, 2017
The recent wave of Anti-Water-Charges protests, the refusal of meals by Republican prisoners in HMP Maghaberry, and the successful Gaymarriage campaign of early 2015 are but three examples of resistance to the status quo in Ireland. Throughout the history of medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary Ireland, the island has witnessed various forms of resistance both to foreign interference and domestic situations. It is a famous and overused illustration of modern Irish history that “since the Society of United Irishmen in 1798, in every generation, a section of the Irish people resisted British rule”1. Robert W. White quotes an Irish Republican saying: “There has never been a period of peace in Ireland” (2017, 3). The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic states that “[i]n every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms” (Lyons 1973, 369). While this ...
2020
Catholic Irish Australian activism for the political independence of Ireland, in the period from Federation to the Anglo-Irish treaty (1901-1921), features prominently in Irish-Australian studies. However, the critical role played by moderate Catholic Irish Australian associations in mobilising support for Irish self-rule, has regularly been accidentally underrated or overlooked. This thesis contributes to a scholarly reconsideration of their importance. Through an analysis of prior scholarship in the field, it will argue that these organisations have not received adequate attention in the historical narrative of the Irish independence movement. It contends that the role of the Catholic clergy and radical Irish nationalist organisations has been covered extensively within the historical literature, and that this has been at the expense of these societies. In order to fill this void, this study reconsiders the role of these associations in the Irish national campaign in NSW, alongside their role in championing Catholic Irish Australian interests. This thesis focuses on the prominent role played by the NSW district of the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society. It presents that this association, among others, was central in mobilising the organisational, moral and financial support of the Catholic Irish Australian community for Irish Home Rule and later self-determination. It also reviews Australian and Irish events, to contextualise this transnational movement in NSW. In addition, this thesis unpacks the role of organisations in this pivotal time in Australian history, particularly in their significance in defending the Catholic community against sectarian attack. The ‘withdrawal’ from Irish political affairs by these organisations after the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence, is also investigated to demonstrate how this marked the effective end of Irish political activism in Australia.
Young Ireland and Irish Revolutions
This paper gives an overview of the development of the republican armed force tradition in Irish politics from the 1790s. It concludes that while Wolfe Tone and Emmet may have been inspirational, it was the experiences in politics and developments in political theory stemming from the 1840s Young Ireland movement that had the greatest impact. Though the 1848 rebellion led by William Smith O’Brien has often been derided by historians, it was a pivotal event which led directly to the foundation of Fenianism, which in turn led directly to the Land League revolution 1879-82 and indeed the 1916 Rising. The influence of James Fintan Lalor is highlighted as it was Lalor who came up an alternative formula to constitutional agitation arguing that England’s treatment of Ireland had given the Irish a moral right to a legal tabula rasa over both land ownership and constitutional claims. Cette étude propose un bilan de la tradition de la force armée républicaine dans la politique irlandaise depu...
The persistence of nationalist and anti-state sentiment in Ulster, 1848-67
Between 1848 and 1867 in Ulster there existed numerous modes of political and social collective action which had their antecedents in pre-Famine developments and which Catholics continued to engage in. In these could be discerned nationalist and anti-state sentiment. Some of these forms were social rather than political in character. A curious mixture of associational Ribbonism and agrarianism had grown out of pre-Famine agrarian secret societies and Defenderism. This form of collective action reared its head in the south Armagh region of Ulster in the early part of the post-Famine years. Meanwhile, the popular anti-Orange action which Catholics had practiced during the times of the Armagh Troubles of the 1780s also persisted, especially in the Mourne region of south Down. The Ribbon societies were most prevalent on the province’s peripheries and in Belfast. Ribbonism lay somewhere between political network and social club. The Ribbonmen were vaguely nationalist, but certainly anti-state in outlook. They had adopted the mantle of Catholic defence and associational practice from the Defenders as early as 1811 and were still functioning in that role by the 1850s and 60s. Other modes of organisation were clearly political. The remnants of the Young Ireland movement, by 1847 known as the Irish Confederation, stood in the non-sectarian republican tradition of the United Irishmen. Though an entirely new phenomenon in many ways, the IRB and the Fenian movement from the early 1860s persisted in propagating the advanced nationalist ideology of the Young Irelanders who had come before them. Scholars such as W. E. Vaughan and R. V. Comerford have portrayed the post-Famine years as ones of Catholic political contentment with the Union and social contentment with the land system and Protestant hegemony. This proposed paper will argue to the contrary; that the continued survival of certain social modes of collective action and political traditions, though often a minority practice, restricted the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland and maintained foundations on which the more explicitly anti-imperial mass movements of Parnellism, Hibernianism and Republicanism could be built in subsequent years.