“No Pope Here”: Britain, the Vatican, the IRA, and the Papal Visit to Ireland, September 1979

It is often assumed, particularly by outsiders, that the conflict in Northern Ireland—known euphemistically as “the Troubles”—in which some 3,600 people lost their lives, was an atavistic throwback to Europe's religious wars of earlier centuries. In 1979, by which time some 2,000 people had already been killed in the Troubles, Pope John Paul II proposed to pay a visit to Ireland and perhaps to cross the border into Ulster's sectarian cockpit. The idea provoked outrage from some Ulster Protestants and high anxiety for the British, concerned that the Pope might inadvertently inflame the situation or embarrass the British by raising difficult issues. But there were hopes, too, that an unequivocal condemnation of violence by the head of the Catholic Church might help to bring the conflict to an end. This article, based on extensive research in diplomatic archives, reveals deep divisions within the Catholic Church on the Irish question and points to the power and limitations of the British diplomatic reach into the Vatican. It reveals also, however, the powerlessness of prayer and pleadings in the face of terrorist violence.

‘Great angels’ in Antrim: Hugh Shearman, theosophist perceptions, and Ulster unionist public relations

This article argues that the career and writings of the Ulster unionist propagandist and man of letters Hugh Shearman (1915–99) were influenced by his commitment to theosophy, which he saw as a logical extension of Protestant belief in private judgement. His work as a publicist echoed theosophist preoccupation with illusion and the perceptions accessible to initiates. Many of his writings displayed theosophist in-jokes, esoteric references and mental reservations. His apologias reflected theosophist belief in the breaking down of personality compartmentalisation in order to merge with the world-soul. Shearman saw the Irish republic as the ‘Pakistan of the West’, represented by him as embodying self-destructive insularity shaped by Catholic authoritarianism. In response to the 1940s anti-partition campaign, Shearman developed an apologia for the Stormont government as an essentially progressive technocracy, which he saw as culminating in the regime of Terence O'Neill. This article uses previously unexplored writings to track Shearman's life and career into the 1990s, when he is shown to have combined a view of the Irish question formed in the 1940s with a semi-conspiratorial unionist narrative of British betrayal.

Frances Power Cobbe on Brutes, Women, and the Irish (Human) Landscape: Ethics, Environment, and Imperialism

This essay focuses on how the Irish philanthropist, feminist, and animal-rights defender Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) uses similar terms of reference and methodologies of exposition in the pamphlets and essays she published on ‘the claims of brutes’ and on ‘the claims of women’. Both discourses are tinged with hues of imperialism proper to her Anglo-Irish upbringing, which deploy a third, less-known interest on the part of Cobbe: ‘the Irish Question’ (O’Connor 2010). To make these points, the essay studies the author’s autobiography and five of her essays and pamphlets: “The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes” (1863), “Life in Donegal” (1866), “The Evolution of the Social Sentiment” (1874), “Wife-Torture in England” (1878), and Light in Dark Places (1883).

The Irish Revolution, early Australian communists and Anglophone radical peripheries: Dublin, Glasgow, Sydney, 1920–23

'Communism' and 'Ireland' remain, as a legacy of Cold War binarisms, two subjects that rarely converge in Australian historiography. This article explores the place of 'Ireland' in the political imagination of the nascent Australian Communist movement between its fractured formation in 1920 and the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. In challenging nation-centric and essentialist treatments of 'the Irish' in Australian political history, it foregrounds a diffuse politicisation around 'Ireland' itself that transcended identitarian ontologies. This article argues that, examined within the ambivalent translation of early interwar radical cosmopolitanisms in a white settler labour movement, 'Ireland' was a directly 'international', if racialised, coordinate in the imaginative geography of early Australian communism. Although the 'Irish Question' circulated within the existing networks of the Comintern, this contest was also produced within other 'routes' on the Anglophone peripheries of the Communist world. The mobile lives of Peter Larkin, Esmonde Higgins and Harry Arthur Campbell, and the momentary alliance of the Communist Party of Australia with the Sydney Irish National Association during the 1923 'Irish envoys' tour, allow for these connections to be reframed in non-primordialist terms within border-crossings and transnational encounter. An investigation of the 'Irish Question' within transgressions of cultural boundaries, instead of 'shared' national histories, can facilitate its extrication from Cold War narratives of ossified 'identity'.