Teaching and learning in Brussels: Sinn Féin’s strategic ‘venue shopping’ approach in the European Parliament

Sinn Féin was once staunchly Eurosceptic and has periodically campaigned against the ratification of European Union treaties in Ireland. Since the early 2000s, however, they have rejected the Eurosceptic label and self-described as ‘critically engaged’ with the European Union. This article explores how Sinn Féin have used their membership of the European Parliament and the European United Left/Nordic Green Left parliamentary group since their first Members of the European Parliament were elected in 2004, with a particular focus on the acrimonious post–Brexit referendum period. The article argues that the European Union forum is seen in terms of its utility by Sinn Féin, as a venue to teach and learn from their colleagues on their particular understanding of Irish history, nationalism and party strategy. It concludes by arguing that, in a process beginning before Brexit, the opportunities the European Union platform affords Sinn Féin have led to the adaptation of a particularly novel engagement strategy with European institutions.

Dante’s Influence on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “An Afterwards” and “Ugolino”

Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him to contextualise some of the most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely the Great Hunger and the secular clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Heaney pays special attention to the problems originating from the outburst of the atavistic and sectarian violence—euphemistically known as “the Troubles”—between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland as from 1969, causing great suffering and wreaking havoc on the Northern Irish population for decades.

The Moral Parameters of Violence: The Case of the Provisional IRA

Over three decades, the Provisional Irish Republican Army waged a campaign of violence that claimed the lives of some two thousand people. This article explores the moral framework by which the IRA sought to legitimate its campaign—how it was derived and how it functioned. On the one hand, the IRA relied on a legalist set of political principles, grounded in a particular reading of Irish history. An interlinked, yet discrete strand of legitimation stressed the iniquities of the Northern Irish state as experienced by Catholic nationalists, especially in the period 1968–1972. These parallel threads were interwoven to build a powerful argument that justified a resort to what the IRA termed its “armed struggle.” Yet the IRA recognized that the parameters for war were set not simply by reference to ideology but also by a reading of what might be acceptable to those identified as “the people” or “the community.” Violence was subject to an undeclared process of negotiation with multiple audiences, which served to constitute the boundaries of the permissible. Often, these red lines were revealed only at the point of transgression, but they were no less important for being intangible. An examination of the moral parameters for IRA violence provides a new perspective on the group, helping to explain IRA resilience but also its ultimate weakness and decline.

Reactions to modernity

Emigration, which had been such a marked feature of Irish history since the nineteenth century, accelerated through the 1950s, creating the sense of an emptying countryside. Leaving the land is represented as alienation in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Uprooted’, a tragedy to be resisted at all costs in M. J. Molloy’s play The Wood of the Whispering, while the plight of the stay-at-home sibling when all the others have left is the focus of William Trevor’s ‘The Hill Bachelors’. Nostalgia for a pre-modern rural landscape features in the work of Michael McLaverty, John Montague, and Maurice Riordan. In the fully urbanized Ireland of the twenty-first century, there is a sardonic take on modern farming in Kevin Barry, but the remaining connections to the land of contemporary society are still very much present in novels by Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright.

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland

Over 3,800 entries This unique dictionary covers the majority of family names that are established and current in Ireland, both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. It establishes reliable and accurate explanations of historical origins (including etymologies), and provides variant spellings and geographical distribution for each name. Additionally, where relevant, it includes genealogical and bibliographical notes for family names that have more than 100 bearers in the 1911 census of Ireland. An extensive introduction gives the history and formation of Irish family names, of Gaelic and English-language origin, and the research methods and sources used to compile the dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland will be of the greatest interest not only to those interested in Irish history, students of the Irish language, genealogists, and geneticists, but also to the general public, both in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora in North America, Australia, and elsewhere.