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This chapter considers Isaac Nelson’s relationship with Irish nationalism and the Home Rule movement. It looks at the personal, historical, and ideological factors that led to Nelson embracing Irish nationalism. Accordingly, it analyses the influence of Lockeanism, Classical Republicanism, and even Romanticism on Nelson’s thinking. The chapter also considers his support for the Land League and Peasant Proprietorship, his unsuccessful campaign to gain election for County Leitrim at the 1880 General Election, and his victory at Mayo for the seat vacated by Charles Stewart Parnell. It then considers his brief career as a Member of Parliament, and the relationship between Nelson’s Presbyterianism and Home Rule. While Nelson was clearly in a minority among his Presbyterian colleagues, this chapter argues that his views were not as idiosyncratic as they may first appear.

Did the Irish diet improve following the Famine? This culturally charged question troubled many late nineteenth-century contemporaries who referred back to the pre-Famine era as one when the Irish populace had enjoyed fuller nutritional health. In contrast, for critics, the poor had since existed in an unremitting condition of physical and psychological decay that seemed to be perpetually worsening. The commercialised economic system that evolved after the Famine differed profoundly from that predicted in the sanguine hopes of political economists and scientists who had idyllically envisioned a self-sufficient post-Famine population producing and consuming vegetables, meat and crops to attain the high levels of nutrition once obtained from the potato. This chapter identifies ongoing concern about food consumption and posits that physicians and other actors continued to problematise the Irish body through the lens of dietary intake long after the Famine. The decline of Ireland's mono-crop culture produced new sets of food discourses that were drawn upon to explain a lack of socio-economic development. As a case study, this chapter focuses on the problem of excessive tea drinking in post-Famine Ireland; a problem associated with rising national levels of insanity and physical degeneration among the poor.

In the late nineteenth-century, steps were taken to tackle food adulteration in Ireland as the concept of purity to be upheld as a new safety standard. This activity coincided with the post-Famine evolution of a consumerist culture. This chapter demonstrates that the advance of consumerism in Ireland was met with new forms of scientific engagement with consumers and producers that encouraged food quality to be considered in new ways. From the 1860s, public health officials made concerted efforts to delineate the boundaries between purity and impurity and to impose relevant legal standards. The war on impure food was fought on various fronts ranging from cattle raising to butchering and dairy production. Resistance played out on two interconnected levels. Producers contested the need for scientific standards of purity because these threatened to displace long-standing butchering and food production practices. In addition, resistance emerged in the fraught context of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish economic relations as anti-adulteration legislation, coupled with an absence of policies to protect the Irish economy, allowed Irish traders and politicians to openly question whether state legislation pertaining to food production was truly benefiting Irish economic life. This pessimistic narrative reflected mounting concern over the economic implications of British rule.

The immediate post-Famine period was marked by profound optimism about the potential of Irish agricultural development. For some improvers, agricultural practice offered a fertile ground upon which to plant the seeds of modernisation to facilitate fuller Irish integration into an international capitalist market economy. This chapter suggests that post-Famine agriculturists promoted new understandings of how to productively harness biological agro-material found on Irish farms during and after the Famine. It examines post-Famine scientific readings of the biology and physiology of crops, plants and animals and their subsequent promotion as an aid to Irish food production. In the 1850s, agricultural science was institutionalised via a state-supported network of agricultural schools and model farms aimed at all social classes. Ultimately, however, small farmers exhibited resistance and apathy towards these educational schemes for an assortment of social, political and practical reasons, a factor that restricted the socio-economic effectiveness of agricultural schools. By exploring these themes, this chapter reveals further connections made between food and national improvement while demonstrating that food production, as with consumption, evolved into a site of deep contestation between different Irish social groups and, sometimes, between colonising and colonised powers.

The late nineteenth century was marked by profound concern about national physical well-being. Despite initial post-Famine optimism in the 1850s about the prospects of national dietary reconstruction and agricultural prosperity, pessimism about the Irish condition quickly re-emerged. To introduce this theme, this chapter focuses on mid-century feeding in institutions and maintains that critics of institutional dietary policies invoked this seemingly internal institutional matter as a concern with national implications. Following the Famine, physicians paid closer attention to the issues of nutritional quality and deficiency and established firm links between an insufficient diet and permanent physical and mental weakening. Institutions provided opportunities for physicians and medical witnesses to witness, monitor and better understand the negative physical and mental effects of poor nutrition. Their well-publicised observations drew public attention to the idea that a nutritionally inadequate diet encouraged the onset of bodily conditions such as scrofula (or tuberculosis of the neck) and ophthalmia (or conjunctivitis). This chapter explores these themes by analysing dietary arrangements in mid-century prisons, workhouses, reformatories and industrial schools.

This chapter is concerned with the provisional nature of Ní Chuilleanáin’s treatment of history and with the role that memory plays in retaining, and reshaping, the past in her work. From her earliest publications, the relationship between detail and significance has been crucial, but it intensifies in importance from The Magdalene Sermon (1989) onward, when the individual woman’s relationship to her past – and its implications for her engagement with history – becomes a key preoccupation. In The Brazen Serpent (1994) remembrance is linked to the process of bereavement, which is revisited in oblique ways in later collections. These acts of textual return are crucial to the evaluation of Ní Chuilleanáin’s treatment of the past in her work.

The conclusion summarises the key points outlined throughout the monograph while offering a brief introduction to key food-related problems in the post-independence period. As such, it points to potential new research areas for historians.

This chapter examines the shipbuilding output in Ireland in the nineteenth century, and its relatively small industrial output with regard to the rest of the United Kingdom. Moss makes particular note of several unique shipyards in Ireland that prospered despite having no access to indigenous raw materials and depending on connections with the Mersey and Clyde. Moss also explores the impact of political unrest on shipbuilding development.