Irish Revolutionary History

The historian Dr Cliona Murphy of California State University, Bakersfield. Photo taken from CSUB website. Continued from  previous post . The chronology of the revolutionary period in Ireland viewed through the lens of women’s history does not necessarily look the same as that of traditional or mainstream history of the period. For example, Senia Pašeta describes the period from 1900 to 1918, not usually thought of as a distinct historiographical phase, as “a discreet [sic] period…in which women built the foundations for the liberation of their sex and their country”. [1] It is also the case that some of what Cliona Murphy calls “the traditional landmarks in nationalist history” [2] take on new significance when viewed from the standpoint of women’s history. The proclamation of the Irish Republic by the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916, for example, while traditionally considered important for its role in the development of a nationalist consciousness in Ireland a...

The historian, author and playwright Ann Matthews. Picture taken from   her website . Continued from  previous post . Mainstream historians of both nationalist and revisionist stripes have tended to focus on the advanced nationalist strand within Irish politics during the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary period and emphasised the groundwork laid by this small group of militants which eventually became a popular movement with sufficient political and military strength to challenge British rule. Writers of women’s history, however, have been able to show the importance of a far more broad, collaborative challenge to both the established culture and to political authority as the revolutionary momentum began to build up, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The common factors of restrictive societal expectations, widespread institutional discrimination and unequal political and civil rights created, for women, a commonality of experience which formed the b...

The historian Professor Senia  Pašeta of Oxford University. Picture:  Irish World, 26 April 2018 . There have been many different historiographical approaches taken, and questions thrown up, in regard to the events in Ireland during the first quarter of the twentieth century, including the question of how to refer to the period. The events that occurred between around 1912 – the year the Liberal UK government introduced the third Home Rule Bill – and 1923 – with the cessation of hostilities in the Irish Civil War - are sometimes referred to as the Irish revolution. Some historians, however, have questioned whether what took place actually constituted a revolution at all, since it is widely acknowledged that the newly independent Irish state was of a conservative disposition in terms of its policies and in terms of the attitudes of its leaders towards economic and social issues. Certainly, after 1922, 26 counties of Ireland no longer constituted a part of the United Kingd...