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This chapter examines Irish responses to the changes that were being openly espoused by the government. It shows that ‘the outrages’ perpetrated by Catholics upon Protestants in 1641 were committed suddenly, and were therefore not the product of some long cogitated plot on the behalf of resentful Catholics. This does not suggest that Irish Catholics did not have grounds for resentment against the government authorities, or against their neighbours, or even against the king. Local anger had been repeatedly dampened down because those with most ground for resentment over the loss of land or social position had been ultimately forced, or persuaded, to become exiles on the Continent, even if they spent some initial time as woodkerne seeking to exact revenge upon those who had benefited from their ruin. This means that the ordered conditions which prevailed in Ireland for most of the first half of the 17th century were due first to the vigilance of the state which gave repeated object lessons in the futility of armed opposition to the changes being promoted, and then to the fact that those who would have been most likely to break the peace became part of the steady outflow of young men who are known to have enlisted in continental armies during the interval 1603-41.

This chapter traces the English construction of the Irish race, from the “incomplete conquest” in the sixteenth century to the completion of the process in the seventeenth century. By the 1690s, the English had constructed the foundations of an enduring and multifaceted Protestant Ascendancy. The seventeenth century was marked by two major wars, one of them lasting more than a decade. It was also marked by successive waves of dispossession, which ultimately meant that almost all Catholics east of the River Shannon ceased to be landowners. Increasingly, it appeared that Ireland was a nation defined by a fundamental antagonism between Irish Catholics and English (and Irish) Protestants. The events that played the key role in consolidating this perception were the Catholic rebellion of 1641 and the Cromwellian invasion of 1649.

This chapter examines the efforts made by Irish Catholic writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reconstruct the history of the Irish Christian past. This was undertaken both to counteract the claims of some reformers that early Irish Christianity was proto-Protestant in character and also to construct a workable Irish Catholic identity for the seventeenth century that would incorporate the historical narratives of both Old English and Gaelic Irish communities who now sought common cause against increasing waves of mostly Protestant settlers. In charting their way through a changing political and cultural landscape, Irish Catholic writers, both at home and on the Continent, would attempt to bring to bear on their polemical works the standards of Renaissance humanist scholarship to forge such an identity. In doing so, they also fully participated in the renewal of ecclesiastical history that was a feature of Reformation Europe.

While anger at the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill had united English and Irish Catholics, both laity and clergy, it had not brought unity to the Irish bishops. The question of the Queen’s Colleges still sharply divided them. Archbishop Murray remained calmly, if not obstinately, convinced of the value of the colleges despite the shock of the Titles bill. His long and excellent record as pastor and administrator for 40 years gave him a high standing within and without his own Church. Opposing those who accepted the Queen’s Colleges was a zealous group of bishops and priests who had distrusted the scheme from the start as dangerous to the faith and morals of Catholic youth. After the death of Murray, a Catholic university became feasible. The death of Murray removed a major obstacle. The Church had opted against integration into the state system and had set up a parallel Catholic system.

This chapter investigates the ways in which Irish and Scots place identities were mediated through discursive religious practice. It also addresses the nature of the religious networks which linked the major Irish and Scots denominations throughout the Empire. The policy of fostering Irish clericalism within the Catholic Church in Australia constituted one discursive network linking Australia and Ireland with other parts of the Empire. Churches were among the most important of all focal points for communities. Churches and other buildings attracted meanings that continuously changed according to time and circumstance. The Irish Catholic Church's transformation under the leadership of Cardinal Cullen privileged explicit missionary enterprise. Religious sites of the sort described here constituted an important part of the ever changing mosaic of semiotic meaning inscribed as place in the Australian landscape by hegemonic and subaltern groups in the white migration stream.

Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of Lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid-twentieth century, and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish American clergy who sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of a historically Protestant nation. In the early twentieth century, clergy and laity at Holy Cross converted Irish Catholic longing for an independent Irish nation and ambivalence about American society into a powerful synthesis of Irish American culture and American patriotism. In subsequent decades, Irish American Catholics at Holy Cross also participated in an emergent reactionary critique of the changing sexual mores and increasing ethnic and racial diversity of urban America. The white ethnic Catholic stance on American social change would become a key rhetorical and ideological element of resurgent American conservatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter discusses how the Catholic clergy and sisters became the leaders and role models of the Irish community. The vast majority of Irish Confederates whether in military service or on the home front, were Roman Catholics. The position of the Catholic Church on the Confederacy was fundamental in determining significant Irish support for the new nation.

This chapter examines Edmund Burke's views on the place of his homeland, Ireland, within the British Empire. It begins by situating Burke's biography, with its dual Protestant and Catholic elements, within the broader context of Ireland's ambiguous historical status both as a quasi-independent sister kingdom within the framework of “multiple monarchy” and as a colony subordinate to England. It then considers Burke's stand regarding absentee taxation, free trade, and Ireland's legislative independence to highlight his willingness to keep Ireland as a subordinate part of the empire and at the same time alleviate the plight of Irish Catholics. It also discusses Burke's fear that the Protestant Ascendancy was leading the Irish lower and middling orders of both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters to coalesce in support of the United Irishmen. The chapter argues that Burke would have favored the union of Great Britain and Ireland, which in fact occurred only a few short years after his death.

This chapter explores the revival in 1859 of religious enthusiasm in the north-east counties of Ireland. The effect of the 1859 revival was that the communities of Irish protestants became both more denominationally diverse and more politically united. Protestants who have not been brought together by the economic compulsion of the penal laws were instead combined by the powerful effects of evangelical faith and by fears about the possibility of home rule. In the same period, Catholic religion was similarly transformed. While never promoting the emotionalism that characterized the revivalist piety of the evangelicals, the Catholic ‘devotional revolution’ drew upon several generations of changes in popular belief and behaviour to promote, in the aftermath of the potato famine, catechism, regular confession, and weekly mass attendance. The power of these religious communities became increasingly important at home. In the early nineteenth century, the complexities of the ancien régime were radically simplified, as the multiple identities of the eighteenth century gave way to the differentiation of Catholics and nationalists versus Protestants and unionists.

This chapter examines the initial motivations behind Irish American Catholics' enlistments in the early years of the war; how their views of the conflict, as well as the opinions of their communities, changed as the war evolved; and how this influenced the memory of Irish American volunteerism during the Civil War. Nearly 150,000 Irish Americans served in the Union army during the Civil War. They participated in all the major eastern battles of the war, including First Manassas, the Seven Days' Battles, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Irish Americans volunteered for a number of reasons. Some were members of the Irish nationalist organization the Irish American Brotherhood, better known as the Fenians, and joined the Union army to gain military experience that they could apply to a future war of independence from Great Britain. Other Irish Americans volunteered to preserve America as a refuge for Irish immigrants like themselves. Some Irish men cited a sense of debt to America when they enlisted and hoped to prove their loyalty through dedicated service. Finally, Irish Americans volunteered to secure a steady income, especially when local, state, and federal enlistment bounties totaled several hundred dollars.

This chapter discusses the concept of sexuality as a moral problem in the first decades of the new Irish state. Irish Catholics were involved in social activism directed at issues of public morality. The new independent Irish state had organisations involved in this campaign, which included the Irish Vigilance Association, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, St Vincent de Paul Society and the Legion of Mary. These organizations aimed to incorporate the public morality framework into social policy and legislation.

This chapter demonstrates that, with social relations in a state of flux after the war, many Irish editors pressed an agenda that sought to break down, rather than build up, walls around the American polity. By demanding the right, bought with their blood, to pledge simultaneous loyalty to their new and old homes, the Irish successfully broadened how postbellum Americans thought about citizenship and mobility. The postbellum years were a period of fluidity in which notions of nationality and citizenship, turned upside down by war, were redefined. Immigrant groups, such as Irish Catholics, whose numbers were being continually augmented by a steady stream of newcomers, sought to use their military service as a lever to establish equality between native-born and naturalized citizens.

This chapter assesses the Irish reformation, which began as a consequence of religious change in England. After several years of growing pressure, the Irish reformation commenced in 1536, when Henry VIII was proclaimed as supreme head of the established church. However, despite strenuous and sometimes bloody efforts to impose its ideals, the protestant reformation in Ireland comprehensively failed. The Irish church did not develop any equivalent to the Scots Confession (1560) or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563) until its convocation accepted the Irish Articles (1615). The chapter then considers why Catholic resistance to the protestant reformation eventually succeeded. Ultimately, the protestant reformation failed to persuade the majority of Irish Catholics, but it also failed to persuade a large minority of Irish protestants.

This chapter roots the story of the Irish diaspora in the soil, people, idioms, and history of Ireland. Buoyed by a rising tide of popular support for political independence from Britain, yet wracked by an unprecedented natural disaster in the form of the Great Famine, weekly periodicals such as the Young Irelanders’ Nation constructed and disseminated a highly elastic historical image of Irish Catholics as “the original Celtic owners of the soil.” Once it was dislocated from the Irish natural environment, this dexterous discourse subsequently provided the template for global nationalism. Following their abortive rebellion in 1848, many of the Young Ireland leaders were arrested and sentenced to exile in Britain’s Australian penal colonies.

Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth century had its share of the rich and of middle-class arrivistes. One obsession for these classes was the education of their children. Although there was some provision in Ireland for such families, many chose to send their off-spring to English Catholic boarding schools such as Stonyhurst, Beaumount and Downside. The aim was to have their children acquire an (English) accent and to make social connections. Like all such socially ambitious groups they kept the prevailing political wind constantly in mind, in contrast, it must be said, to the sons of the same classes who attended similar schools in Ireland such as Blackrock, or Clongowes Wood College. Drawing on data collected for 1000 children the chapter delineates a series of networks which helped to sustain Irish Catholic identity based on wealth, privilege and educational advantage.