Search Results

Ireland is among the few countries to employ proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV), an electoral system that is highly rated by many researchers in the field. In the Irish context, STV is used in constituencies of small district magnitude, but it still delivers a high degree of proportionality. The party system has been characterised by moderate multipartism and, unusually for western Europe, by a significant number of independent MPs. Critics maintain that the provision for voter choice leads to intra-party competition with dysfunctional consequences, but the voters wield a veto over electoral system change and are unlikely to approve any new system that reduces their opportunity to participate in choosing their representatives.

This chapter explores literature in the English language in Ireland during the period from 1845 to 1921. It suggests that the relationship of Irish literature to Irish politics during this period offers both paradox and symmetry. The paradox lies in the contribution of the Anglo-Irish literary revival in fostering a new separatist political tradition, while the symmetry can be found in the fact that writers' disillusionment with politics gave way temporarily to a celebration of revolution. The chapter comments on the works of several Irish writers including Maurice Craig, James Joyce, and Thomas Davis.

This chapter demonstrates how the plantation issue remained central to Irish — and indeed British — politics throughout the entire period 1622-41, until differences over plantation policy brought about the downfall of its most potent advocate, who was destroyed not by the Catholics who would have become the victims of his plantation policy but by Protestants in Ireland who resented Strafford's interference in what they perceived as their exclusive domain.

This chapter describes the conflict in Ireland from 1891 to 1918. The first section of the chapter examines the plans for the 1916 rising. The second section explores the role of threats of force in Irish and British politics. Parnellism as an independent force, representing one-third of nationalists, was an ideology that survived after the death of Parnell. In the discussion of the extra-parliamentary agitation, none of the examples required the transformation of the politics of threat into actual armed struggle. It was more of a latent threat of force without application. The Ulster Unionists had employed the politics of armed threat from 1912 to 1914, but most of their leaders knew that it had many limitations.

This chapter details the life and career of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, from 1830–1834. Stanley's appointment as Chief Secretary for Ireland in November 1830 thrust him into the cauldron of Irish politics, confronting him with challenges both novel and familiar. Ireland tested the very foundation of Whig doctrine. Whigs were committed to responsible reform within a setting of social stability, progress being secured through timely political recognition of advancing social interests, standing on the bedrock of established legal authority and property rights. But Ireland, where legal authority and property rights were contested, exposed sharp differences among Whigs themselves.

This introductory chapter examines the existing scholarship in the area of the Irish revival and its theatre. It suggests that while there has been much valuable work on the Irish theatre and Irish politics of the period, a thoroughly integrated study and closer examination are now necessary. It argues that consideration of a broad range of works, and a conjunctural study of their complex relations with cultural nationalism, is required.

This chapter offers a history of Irish politics and nationalism in an imperial context, from the Home Rule movement of the 1880s to Ireland's departure from the Commonwealth, and its subsequent reorientation toward the European Union. The Home Rule debates illuminated the anomalies of Ireland's domestic and imperial position and highlighted the differences between Ireland and England. The debates provoked profound soul-searching about ideology, race, national character, religion, the constitution, and history. During the negotiations, which started in October 1921, allegiance to the Crown, membership of the Empire, and defence guarantees were the core of the British demands. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 established the Irish Free State as a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire. The Northern Ireland Troubles, which surfaced in the press from time to time, received more attention immediately before and after the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

The clash of temporal cultures implicit in modern imperial relationships is further evident in the next chapter, in which Eve Morrison asks how far ‘Irish time’ was irreplaceably lost through the processes of modernisation, war and revolution. In Ireland, the modern standard was often seen as a characteristic of English superiority. By turning attention to the expression of day-to-day existence in the Irish revolutionary movement, this chapter makes a fundamental connection between these high debates about the organisation of modern society and the experience of time in a period of violent upheaval. The clash between that lived existence and the increasing attempts of the British state to control daily life through time-measures such as the curfew was written into the politics of nationalist revolution. The quotidian experience of revolution gave Irish nationalism a sense of a living, albeit violently jarred, human present. Ironically, in the end, the independent state found Greenwich Time convenient and attempts to revive ‘Irish time’ tended to get nowhere – at least in Irish national political debate. The experience of the present was thus politicised; but the ordinary experience of time could also be mundanely local, in spite of those high debates in parliament and the early Dáils.

After 1848, much political activity in Ireland was directed into the emerging struggle for land reform. Nonetheless, the ideology of the Confederation had taken root, although its strongest advocates were in jail or in exile in France and the United States. This chapter moves the focus of Irish politics outside Ireland. Overseas involvement in the events leading to the 1848 rising was important, even if the much-vaunted Irish Brigade proved to be elusive (both to the authorities and to historians). Following Ballingarry the centre of Irish nationalism moved outside the island of Ireland. The presence of so many Young Irelanders in the United States, particularly New York, and the transportation of the state prisoners to Van Diemen's Land, extended Irish political debate to three continents.

This chapter examines the contentious politics that occurred when the equally contentious historical trajectories of the Irish and the city of Yonkers collided. It looks specifically at Irish bar politics, to the mass-produced “Guinness” pub and its good Paddy appeal, imagined as part of a larger $3.1 billion agreement to lure new investment in southwest Yonkers, and the policing of bad Paddy Irish immigrant bars in southeast Yonkers beginning in the 1990s. In tracing the separate treatment of Irish bars, and by extension Irish people, this chapter shows how neoliberal policies of aggressive privatization and policing accentuate disparities among the Yonkers Irish.

This chapter provides a guide to landmark episodes in James Joyce criticism and key examples of the different ways in which his work is currently being read. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some critics identified a stylistic advance beyond both Edwardian and naturalistic fiction. Arnold Bennett's review provides praise and condemnation of Ulysses. Stuart Gilbert takes pains to highlight Joyce's classical literary heritage. The years between the end of World War Two and the explosion of critical interest in Joyce's work caused by the emergence of modern literary and cultural ‘theory’ saw the debate over his achievement and legacy steadily intensify. Joyce's work has a long and involved relationship with psychoanalytic criticism. Joyce's ‘general awareness of Irish politics’ expressed itself in a number of lasting commitments. There has been a problem with Joyce's belief in the cultural redemptiveness of the artwork.

‘Each person in Ulster’, Seamus Heaney famously remarked, ‘lives first in the Ulster of the actual present and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.’ While explicit reference to the Middle Ages may seem conspicuous by its absence in the litany of formative dates which pepper contemporary political and popular narrative in the North of Ireland – whether 1690 (the Battle of the Boyne), 1798 (the Rebellion of the United Irishmen), 1801 (the Act of Union), 1912 (the signing of the Ulster Covenant), 1916 (the Easter Rising) or 1998 (the signing of the Good Friday Agreement) – this essay argues, through examination of three case studies – of Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster; the Red Hand; and St Patrick – that medievalism is at the very centre, both chronologically and conceptually, of the historicising reflexes of Irish politics.