The Damnable Question

The Damnable Question PDF

Author: George Dangerfield

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780760713501

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Ireland holds fiercely to her identity. Starting with the Act of Union in the 1800s, historian George Dangerfield dives into the "Irish Question." Dealing with such events as the Easter Rising and the famine, The Damnable Question explains Ireland's intense patriotism even after so many people immigrated to the United States. - Publisher

Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016

Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016 PDF

Author: James Heartfield

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2015-11-27

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1782798862

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One hundred years ago, Easter 1916, Irish revolutionaries rose against the British Empire proclaiming a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. The men and women of the Easter Rising were defeated by the overwhelming force of the British Army, in five days of intense fighting. Their leaders were executed. But the Easter Rising lit a fire that ended with the whole country turning against Westminster’s rule, and founding a nation. But today, the heirs to the Irish state are embarrassed about 1916. They are ashamed that their state owes its origins to a revolution. Along with academics and other commentators in the press and on television they dismiss the Rising as the work of violent fanatics, and the defeat of constitutional politics. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? explains why today’s Dublin elite are recoiling from the origins of their state in a popular struggle. Where the critics paint the Rising as an armed conspiracy, we explain that it was in fact a revolt against war; not a militaristic upsurge, but the first challenge to the awful slaughter of the First World War. The Statesmen of Europe sacrificed millions upon the altar of war. Their recruiting sergeants in Ireland, Edward Carson and John Redmond sent 200,000 Irishmen into the slaughter and nearly 50,000 were killed. The Easter Rising drew a halt to British recruitment, and the blow to the Empire was the first crack in a growing revolt against the war, followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German revolution the following year – which ended the conflict. The Easter Rising was an inspiration to those who were challenging the Empires of Europe, from India to Vietnam, from New Zealand to Moscow; it was an inspiration to British activists like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst; and it was an inspiration to the Irish men and women who rose up against British rule to free their nation.

The Irish through British Eyes

The Irish through British Eyes PDF

Author: Edward Lengel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-05-30

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 031301244X

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The mainstream British attitude toward the Irish in the first half of the 1840s was based upon the belief in Irish improvability. Most educated British rejected any notion of Irish racial inferiority and insisted that under middle-class British tutelage the Irish would in time reach a standard of civilization approaching that of Britain. However, the potato famine of 1846-1852, which coincided with a number of external and domestic crises that appeared to threaten the stability of Great Britain, led a large portion of the British public to question the optimistic liberal attitude toward the Irish. Rhetoric concerning the relationship between the two peoples would change dramatically as a result. Prior to the famine, the perceived need to maintain the Anglo-Irish union, and the subservience of the Irish, was resolved by resort to a gendered rhetoric of marriage. Many British writers accordingly portrayed the union as a natural, necessary and complementary bond between male and female, maintaining the appearance if not the substance of a partnership of equals. With the coming of the famine, the unwillingness of the British government and public to make the sacrifices necessary, not only to feed the Irish but to regenerate their island, was justified by assertions of Irish irredeemability and racial inferiority. By the 1850s, Ireland increasingly appeared not as a member of the British family of nations in need of uplifting, but as a colony whose people were incompatible with the British and needed to be kept in place by force of arms.

The Secret State

The Secret State PDF

Author: Richard C. Thurlow

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 1995-01-09

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0631160663

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This is a history of the secret activities of the British government in response to threats to the nation's well-being and stability during the twentieth century. It is based on intensive and widespread research in private and public archives and on documents many of which have only recently come to light or been made available. The dangers perceived by the state have been manifold and various, coming from within and from abroad. Anarchists, fascists, socialists, communists, the IRA, trades-unionists and animal activists as well as spies, terrorists and saboteurs have been the subject of undercover investigation, along with almost every large-scale movement from suffragettes to campaigners for peace and nuclear disarmament. The author describes the methods and people employed, and the mixed nature of their results. The British state has always seen itself as civil and liberal, but as Dr Thurlow shows it has sometimes been far from open. The government has had many weapons at its disposal, from public order acts, censorship, internment and proscription on the one hand, to covert operations, infiltration and manipulation on the other. Yet when examined in the light of new evidence, the activities of the state are fully comprehensible only in terms of those who comprised it. The author shows the tensions among the departments (between MI5, MI6, SIS and the Special Branch, for example), and the crucial part played by individuals whose motives were often far from what the government supposed them to be. This is an at times disturbing, at others almost comical, but always fascinating account. It throws light on the inmost workings of the state, as well as on the movements and people subject to investigation and action.

Small World

Small World PDF

Author: Seamus Deane

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1108898432

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Seamus Deane was one of the most vital and versatile authors of our time. Small World presents an unmatched survey of Irish writing, and of writing about Irish issues, from 1798 to the present day. Elegant, polemical, and incisive, it addresses the political, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of several notable literary and historical moments, and monuments, from the island's past and present. The style of Swift; the continuing influence of Edmund Burke's political thought in the USA; the echoing debates about national character; aspects of Joyce's and of Elizabeth Bowen's relation to modernism; memories of Seamus Heaney; analysis of the representation of Northern Ireland in Anna Burns's fiction – these topics constitute only a partial list of the themes addressed by a volume that should be mandatory reading for all those who care about Ireland and its history. The writings included here, from one of Irish literature's most renowned critics, have individually had a piercing impact, but they are now collectively amplified by being gathered together here for the first time between one set of covers. Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018 is an indispensable collection from one of the most important voices in Irish literature and culture.

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