Cartographies of Communicability and the Anthropological Archive

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-119
Author(s):  
Brigittine French
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
First Person ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Social Memories ◽  
Political Turmoil

This article traces ideological constructions of communication that enable powerful actors to determine what counts as silences, lies and surpluses in efficacious narratives about violence (Briggs 2007) in order to elucidate occlusions regarding legacies of the Civil War in the Irish Free State. It does so through a precise triangulation of multiple competing and overlapping narratives from unpublished fieldnotes, interviews, published ethnographies and other first-person accounts. The inquiry highlights social memories of the Irish Civil War that have been 'assumed, distorted, misunderstood, manipulated, underestimated, but most of all, ignored' (Dolan 2003: 2). The article argues that the excesses of the anthropological archive make the recuperation of a multiplicity of collective memories possible through a linguistic anthropological perspective that enumerates the kind of erasures at play in contentious memory-making moments, highlights polyvocality in metapragmatic discourse and tracks the gaps in entextualisation processes of historical narratives about political turmoil.

Southern Irish Loyalism from Home Rule Crisis to Republic: An Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Brian Hughes ◽  
Conor Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Final Section ◽  
General Election ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The Third ◽  
Thematic Framework ◽  
Irish Free State

This chapter-length introduction provides a chronological, historiographical, and thematic framework for the volume. It begins by setting out the book’s remit, outlining its understanding of loyalism, and broadly defining the individuals and groups under consideration. The introduction then provides an overview of the history and historiography of southern Irish loyalism in three sections. The first covers the period from the third Home Rule bill in 1912 to the 1918 general election while the second takes in the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and Irish Civil War (1922–23). This is followed by a final section on southern loyalists and loyalism after southern Irish independence, from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the exit from the commonwealth and declaration of a republic in 1949.

Defending democracy? The legislative response to political extremism in the Irish Free State, 1922–l39

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (134) ◽  
pp. 156-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Kissane
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Free State ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Irish Case

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

The politics of reaction: the dynamics of treatyite government and policy, 1922–33

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (120) ◽  
pp. 542-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Regan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Executive Council ◽  
Municipal Politics ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Irish Free State

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party. I find this break a painful operation in many respects. Even were my physique equal to the Dáil and political work it seems this slip should have been inevitable ... But we must be candid — in the sphere that one considered the least important but which was the most important we failed — viz to retain popular support. It should not and I believe it is not beyond the capacity of able men to discover a way to the people’s confidence and having found it to keep it.The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

The Parallax of Irish-Language Modernism, 1900–1940

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-184
Author(s):  
Brian Ó Conchubhair
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Free State ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Linguistic Terms ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter traces the emergence and development of modernism in Irish-language fiction from 1900 to 1940, a period incorporating the rise of cultural and linguistic nationalism, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the establishment of the Irish Free State. In literary and linguistic terms, these decades saw a seismic transition from editing and annotating classical Irish-language texts to the privileging of vernacular forms of the spoken language and the cultivation of contemporary fiction in vernacular dialects. This chapter assesses the importance and relevance of Irish-language modernist fiction in national and wider European terms, paying attention to writers’ narrative strategies in dealing with the complexities of modernity and to the manner in which they expanded the range and scope of Irish-language fiction beyond the nativist folkloric aesthetic endorsed by cultural nationalists.

The Orange Order and the border

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (129) ◽  
pp. 52-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Free State ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Dominant Response ◽  
Northern State ◽  
Fait Accompli ◽  
County Down ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Orange Order

Relief was the dominant response of northern loyalists and Orangemen to the tripartite agreement of December 1925, which confirmed the border as defined in 1920. A year later, when the Prime Minister visited Newry to preside over the Grand Orange Lodge of County Down, he and ‘Lady Craig were made the recipients of very handsome presents from the Loyalists and Orangemen of Newry and District in recognition of valuable services in connection with the settlement of the Boundary question’. The agreement promised to end fourteen years of uncertainty, during which the frontier of loyal Ireland had contracted to a point where it seemed barely defensible. Under relentless pressure from successive governments as well as nationalists, the opponents of Irish self-government had effectively abandoned hope for the three southern provinces in 1911, and for the three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities in 1916. The survival of the Irish Free State remained in doubt until 1923, and the incredibly vague terms for the proposed boundary commission created justifiable fear among loyalists that further attempts would be made to cripple the northern state by massive territorial transfers. Craig’s great success, apart from stifling the northern civil war in June 1922, was to hold the line of the six counties until Cosgrave’s government acknowledged the fait accompli.

Vatican Involvement in the Irish Civil War: Monsignor Salvatore Luzio's Apostolic Delegation, March–May 1923

2010 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. P. McCABE
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Government ◽  
Catholic Bishops

This article examines the delegation of Monsignor Salvatore Luzio to the Irish Free State between March and May 1923, and the reactions of the Irish Catholic bishops, who had proclaimed their support for the government of the Free State, and of militant republicans, who opposed it. The bishops viewed the mission with trepidation, fearing the damage that it could do to their authority, while the republicans deemed it and Luzio potential assets. Newly-released Vatican papers also allow for the inclusion of Luzio's perspective on the mission and his strongly worded criticism of the Irish hierarchy.

Irish Free State newspapers and the Abyssinian crisis, 1935–6

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 368-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cian McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Crop Production ◽  
Free State ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
High Tariff ◽  
Agricultural Labourers

Twenty-four years ago, Terence Brown raised very few eyebrows when he portrayed the Irish Free State in the 1930s as an insular society obsessed with self-sufficiency. The theme of insularity has dominated most narratives of the period, with emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Economic War, the Censorship Board and the 1937 Constitution. The de Valera government’s intention in the Economic War, after all, was to create native industries behind high-tariff barriers and to favour agricultural labourers by shifting the tillage/pasture ratio in Ireland in favour of crop production. This protectionist programme was insularity writ large. Likewise, the government’s censorship of domestic and imported literature ‘concelebrated’, according to J. J. Lee, ‘the intellectual poverty of the period’.

The Irish Free State: Its Government and Politics

1936 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
E. C. S. Wade ◽  
N. Mansergh
Keyword(s):  
Free State ◽  
Irish Free State
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document