On 16 February 1966 James Camlin Beckett, who by that time had taught in Queen’s University Belfast for twenty-one years, confided to his diary that he found it ‘hard to stay awake for an hour long lecture’ and wondered whether ‘we also go to sleep without knowing it, when we are giving a lecture instead of receiving it’. In this, the first of the lectures commemorating Beckett’s achievement, I propose — one hopes in a passably alert state — to examine three central aspects of his life and convictions: his politics and sense of national identity, his religious life, and finally his philosophy of history. The lecture draws upon Beckett’s writings, and on his papers and diaries (which are at present housed in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland); other Beckett letters, some in private hands, have also been used.

One of the most familiar facts in the history of the medieval lordship of Ireland is that, despite plans by Henry III in 1243 and by Edward III in 1331–2, no king of England came to Ireland between the expedition of King John in 1210 and those of Richard II in 1394–5 and 1399. I am not about to subvert the historical record by revealing a previously unknown royal visit to Ireland, but there is, as I shall try to demonstrate, enough evidence, some of it very strange indeed, to justify the title of this article. The unknown author of the prophecy entitled the Verses of Gildas, who was apparently writing in the middle of the reign of Edward II, forecast that in 1320 the king of England would come to Ireland after the passing of a certain grave crisis. Once in Ireland, he would bring about peace between the English and the Irish, who would live together in harmony under one English law. The English would demolish the walls of their fortifications, while the Irish would cut down the woodlands which served as their defences. On a charitable interpretation, one might find a parallel between these predictions and the letter written to Edward II by Pope John XXII in May 1318, in which the pope asked the king to give his attention to the grievances of the Irish: these grievances had been expressed at length in the famous Irish Remonstrance, which had probably been composed towards the end of 1317 and had recently been received in Avignon.

The riots that followed the introduction in 1793 of a system of raising the newly refounded Irish militia regiments by ballot have attracted the attention of several historians. In more recent years the political importance of the episode has been emphasised, and the riots have been represented as marking a crucial stage in the breakdown of social and political relations within Ireland in the 1790s that eventually resulted in rebellion.

This was not the view of Sir Henry McAnally, author of the only complete history of the militia itself, which was written in the 1930s and published in 1949. As befitted the work of a retired civil servant, McAnally’s history was very careful and restrained in its account and analysis of the Militia Act of 1793 and the introduction of the ballot. He did not devote much attention to the operation of the act, regarding the ensuing riots as peripheral to his main focus of interest. Indeed, in comparison to the widespread and serious rioting that accompanied the establishment of the English Militia in 1757, the Irish disturbances appeared to McAnally to be a transient phenomenon, of limited significance. They did not leave ‘in the popular soul any such bitter memories as remained after other episodes in Irish history’. ‘May 1793 is not one of the black months in that story,’ he wrote; ‘it is not the first chapter of 1798.’

The story of late Tudor Ireland is, in part, a story of language. The political and military developments that brought New English and native Irish into a closer and increasingly violent proximity also brought two languages into confrontation. The issue of language difference became caught up in the wider conflict: the Irish language joined glibs, brehons and pastoral nomadism as yet another element in the Elizabethans’ dystopic assessment of Gaelic Ireland; in turn, the promotion of English — and the linguistic colonisation which that entailed — assumed its place in their agenda of conquest. Leaving aside larger questions of policy and ideology, language itself — and the experience of language difference — was part of the texture of that encounter. Yet the question of precisely how exchanges across the language frontier were managed has been largely ignored. The misunderstandings between Elizabethan newcomers and the Gaelic Irish were, at their simplest level, literal.

Although Gaelic sports have been played in an organised fashion for over a century in the United States, academic research on the development and role of these sports among the Irish diaspora has been extremely limited. This is hardly surprising, given the more general disregard of the significance of sport in the burgeoning literature examining the Irish experience in America. In its most general aspect, this study seeks to redress this neglect. Drawing predominantly on archival material from the John J. Burns Library at Boston College and from Boston Public Library, the article charts and explores the processes involved in the transfer of Gaelic sports from Ireland to one of the most significant focal points of Irish immigration, Boston. This analysis not only identifies and examines the key agencies and individuals responsible for the early development of Irish sports in Boston, but also seeks to explore the role they played in the promotion and preservation of a distinctively Irish ethnic identity. In particular, the article assesses the extent to which Gaelic games have functioned as an arena in which Irish nationalism was fostered in the greater Boston area during the 1880s. Before turning to these central concerns, it is important to understand the social milieu in which these games developed. Thus the article begins with a brief context-setting discussion that charts Irish emigration to Boston and offers some insights into the socio-economic and political environment encountered by the Irish on completion of their journey.

Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, was a most unlikely antiquarian. A self-made man and a ruthless politician, by the early 1630s he had become the richest landowner in Munster and was entertaining ambitions to rule Ireland as Lord deputy. Yet in the same period the ‘great earl’ spent much time and effort sifting the archives for genealogical information about one of the most ancient noble houses of Ireland — the Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare and Desmond. In 1627 Cork paid for repairs to the ‘pedigree box’ he kept in his study at Youghal, and it was soon put to good use. In 1632 Cork ‘and … other his judicious friends by him imployed herein’ spent time searching ‘several ancient records and sundry other deeds and muniments’ in order to produce a genealogy of the senior branch of the Fitzgerald clan, the earls of Kildare. And shortly afterwards Cork prepared a ‘fair pedigree of the house and descent of the ancient and noble family of the Fitzgeralds earls of Desmond, drawn up by myself, and friends’ searches of ancient records’, which he later sent to Thomas Russell, whose own ‘Relation of the Fitzgeralds’, published in 1638, was dedicated to and probably commissioned by, the earl. Why should a blunt businessman and wily politician such as the earl of Cork spend so much time and effort researching the genealogies of the defunct dynasties of medieval Ireland?

About noon on Sunday 19 October 1777 there was a stir of attention in one corner of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. As the Freeman’s Journal reported,

It is easy to visualise the scene: the intimidating presence of the Sunday crowd building up around the pair, the frightened mother, the weeping child clinging to her. The story is told sympathetically; it is a minor incident but, one might think, revealing. It seems, on the face of it, to show that a single black woman and her child were a rare sight in eighteenth-century Dublin. But then the next sentence in the newspaper report turns that assumption on its head:

In the writer’s view, what was wrong was not simply the rudeness of the Dubliners in letting their curiosity get the better of them, and the distress this caused, but the fact that it was out of all proportion to the object that provoked it. There was not the excuse that black people like this particular mother and child were a novelty. On the contrary, they were ‘common to meet with’.

Chronic rural disturbances have featured prominently in the modern history of Ireland. In particular, the period from the 1760s to the 1830s witnessed frequent and widespread disturbances, ranging over several counties and lasting for years. The disturbers — contemporaries sometimes called them ‘Whiteboys’ — were often sworn into secret societies which operated at night under the command of a mythical leader, known variously as Captain Right, Captain Steel or Captain Rock. Historical scholarship has shed light on many of these disturbances. However, the Rockites in the south of Ireland in the early 1820s remain somewhat mysterious. Although this was the only instance of rural unrest in Munster in the early 1820s, the Rockite movement nonetheless constituted one of the most extensive and serious rural disturbances in Ireland before the Famine. Five regiments of troops were dispatched from Britain, ‘for the purpose of putting down actual, & most formidable Danger in Ireland’, as the home secretary admitted. The Insurrection Act, with its curfew at night and trial without jury, was introduced into eight counties, and in its first year the act brought to trial more than 1,500 men in Munster, of whom more than 200 were convicted and transported. In County Cork, where the movement was at its most formidable, open engagements between thousands of the Rockites and the military occurred in several places, while incendiarism prevailed to an extent unprecedented in the history of Irish agrarian disturbances. The special commissions appointed in February 1822, specifically to try Rockites in the county, convicted thirty-six men of capital crimes.

Between 1840 and 1914 approximately a third of a million people left Ireland for Australasia. Of this total, New Zealand received a comparatively meagre amount. For instance, when the Irish peaked in sheer numbers in New Zealand in 1886, they supplied just 51,408 of the country’s total population of half a million. Despite such low numbers in comparison with those arriving in other destinations in the Irish diaspora, investigation of the Irish in New Zealand has flourished during the last decade or so. This recent historiography, however, lacks the sustained intensity and depth of work exemplified in other regions of settlement in the diaspora from Ireland. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made in central issues such as the critical importance of kin and neighbourhood networks in the processes of relocation and adaptation from Ireland to New Zealand.

There is now an extensive literature on agrarian protest and unrest in Ireland from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, ranging from studies of secret societies to large-scale organisations such as the Land League. There has not, however, been any detailed published account of the dynamics and character of a most extensive and significant Irish agitation, the United Irish League, which was launched in January 1898. A study of this body is important, not only in its own terms, but for the light it throws on the nature of Irish agrarian agitation generally, especially as there exist more extant records than for earlier examples. By early 1900 this organisation had spread across most of Ireland, and it was to have major implications for the future course of Irish nationalism. Its methods were partly a consequence of a cumulative experience from the past, focused particularly on its immediate predecessors, the Land League of 1879–82, the subsequent Irish National League, and the Plan of Campaign in the latter half of the 1880s. Its political and agrarian purposes were to an unusual degree clearly articulated, thereby enabling a more precise analysis of the way in which particular methods of protest were related to objectives.

In 1783 Henry Grattan complimented Charles James Fox by describing his views as ‘liberal to Ireland and just to those lately concerned in her redemption’. He also claimed that ‘Fox wished sincerely for the liberty of Ireland without reserve.’ Sir James Mackintosh’s draft inscription for Westmacott’s statue of Fox in Westminster Abbey stated that he had ‘contended for the rights of the people of America and Ireland’. Whiggish historians subsequently built upon this notion of Fox and his followers as great friends of Ireland. For the most part, modern scholars have avoided passing judgement on Fox’s views on Ireland, but a few authors have challenged early assumptions, depicting Fox as unprincipled in his use of Irish politics as a stick to beat the North and Pitt ministries. Christopher Hobhouse, commenting on Fox’s commitment to Catholic relief, claims that he ‘gave himself away’ and that ‘the House could distinguish by this time between Fox the religious liberator and Fox the artful dodger’. John Derry asserts that Fox ‘ruthlessly and irresponsibly exploited anti-Irish prejudice in England’ during the controversy over Pitt’s trade proposals of 1785. L.G. Mitchell notes that ‘his sympathy for American patriots had had real limits, and so had his concern for Ireland’, and that ‘Irish patriots were never sure of Fox, and their doubt was entirely justified.’ There is a good deal of substance in these comments, and in this article I also intend to argue that Fox was first and foremost a British parliamentarian. However, his conduct towards Ireland was not solely ruled by this stance. Free from the shackles of government, Fox was disposed to be generous to Irish patriotism and his friends and relatives in the Irish opposition.

Modern colonialism, writes Gyan Prakash, ‘instituted enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges — the colonizer and the colonized, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the underdeveloped’. Such dichotomies ‘reduced complex differences and interactions to the binary (self/other) logic of colonial power’, and colonial rulers ‘constituted the “native” as their inverse image’. Such perceptions of difference as ‘other’ expressed what ‘civilized’ Westerners believed themselves not to be — but also what they feared they might become, should they lose rational self-control. The ‘other’, writes Eva Kornfelt, ‘threatens the integrity of the self by offering alternative, unrealized, and suppressed possibilities’. As shown by Western fascination with the ‘noble savage’, this process could sometimes produce positive representations. Yet even these expressed the needs of the perceiver rather than the reality of the perceived. ‘Othering’, then, is a complex process, one implying deep cultural and individual needs, which may occasionally result in accurate representations, but more often produces self-justifying positive/negative dichotomies.

Relief was the dominant response of northern loyalists and Orangemen to the tripartite agreement of December 1925, which confirmed the border as defined in 1920. A year later, when the Prime Minister visited Newry to preside over the Grand Orange Lodge of County Down, he and ‘Lady Craig were made the recipients of very handsome presents from the Loyalists and Orangemen of Newry and District in recognition of valuable services in connection with the settlement of the Boundary question’. The agreement promised to end fourteen years of uncertainty, during which the frontier of loyal Ireland had contracted to a point where it seemed barely defensible. Under relentless pressure from successive governments as well as nationalists, the opponents of Irish self-government had effectively abandoned hope for the three southern provinces in 1911, and for the three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities in 1916. The survival of the Irish Free State remained in doubt until 1923, and the incredibly vague terms for the proposed boundary commission created justifiable fear among loyalists that further attempts would be made to cripple the northern state by massive territorial transfers. Craig’s great success, apart from stifling the northern civil war in June 1922, was to hold the line of the six counties until Cosgrave’s government acknowledged the fait accompli.

This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has been a focus of concern for feminist historians in particular, and recent work has clearly demonstrated the salience of questions of gender and sexuality for the politics of the Saorstát. This article is directed at these same concerns, elaborating on a series of proposals to regulate prostitution in the Free State in the mid-1920s. But when discussing prostitution or sex work, the word ‘regulation’ can be used in a quite specific sense, ‘regulationism’ referring to the argument that the state should control venereal disease by registering prostituted women, inspecting them for signs of communicable venereal disease, and incarcerating the contagious in order to protect the health of both nation and state. The history of ‘regulationist’ policies in Europe and beyond allows a point of comparison by which we may understand the specifics of Ireland’s situation in the post-revolutionary era. The history of regulationism, in this technical sense, is a particularly useful context, not least because such policies amply acknowledge ‘the enduring power of the state as the author and executor of regulation’. Particularly important, in ways that suggest a direct parallel to the Irish experience in the early twentieth century, is the coextensive experience of state formation and the regulation of sex work, the most notable example being that of modern Italy.

The Irish question in the form of home rule reasserted itself in British politics during the years 1910-18, first as the central issue in British political debate, then as a secondary, though still significant, concern for Britain during the First World War. One of Britain’s national institutions, Punch, a weekly magazine of political commentary and satire with a circulation of 100,000, reflected the significance of the Irish question by devoting a great deal of attention during these years to the leaders of the two opposing forces in Irish politics, the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond and the Irish unionist leader Sir Edward Carson. Redmond and Carson became regular members of Punch’s leading cast of characters in its political cartoons in the 1910s, a group which included the Liberal premier H. H. Asquith, his leading ministers David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, and the opposition leader Andrew Bonar Law.

In the late nineteenth century Irish rural labourers had few consistent advocates willing to pursue their social and economic claims at a national level. Those that did exist, such as P.F. Johnson of Kanturk, have generally managed to elude the scrutiny of historians. A number of studies on the Irish land question have referred to Johnson, but he has remained a shadowy figure despite his role as the leading labourers’ advocate between 1869 and 1882. Rural agitation during this period is most often associated with tenant farmers and their perturbations with regard to the prevailing land-tenure system and its administration. The rural working class, especially before 1885, had limited political influence, and neither the British government nor the Irish Parliamentary Party treated its claims with the seriousness that they accorded to the perceived needs of tenant farmers. Nonetheless, many commentators remarked on the wretched condition of the rural labouring population in Ireland, and it was undoubtedly the greatest demographic and socio-economic casualty of the Famine. Wages, working conditions, unemployment and underemployment, housing and access to land were all issues that agitated labourers in the late nineteenth century.

The Spanish Civil War was one of the most controversial conflicts of recent history. For many on the left, it was a struggle between democracy and fascism. In contrast, many Catholics and conservatives championed Franco as a crusader against communism. Others felt Spain was the beginning of an inevitable conflict between fascism and communism which had increasingly threatened the stability of inter-war Europe. Spain has remained a battleground of ideologies ever since. Many supporters of the Spanish Republic attribute its defeat to the failure of other democratic states to oppose fascism, a policy of appeasement which ultimately led to the Second World War; for others on the left, including Orwell, Spain came to symbolise the betrayal of socialism by the Soviet Union — a disillusioning suppression of liberty repeated in subsequent decades in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Ireland was no less drawn to Spain than other European nations. Within months of the war breaking out, close to one thousand Irishmen were fighting among the armies of both sides on the frontlines around Madrid. But for most Irish people, influenced by the Catholic church and sensational newspaper reports of anticlerical atrocities, the ideological conflict was perceived to be between Catholicism and communism rather than left and right. The outbreak of the war was followed by an immense outpouring of popular sympathy for Franco’s Nationalists. During the autumn of 1936 the Irish Christian Front organised mass pro-Franco rallies which attracted the support of opposition politicians, clergymen and much of the public. The dissenting voices of support for the Spanish Republic emanating from the marginalised Irish left were ignored or, more often, suppressed. De Valera’s Fianna Fáil government expressed its support for Spain’s Catholics while, somewhat awkwardly, adopting a position of neutrality for reasons of international diplomacy.

During the 1920s the Communist International, or Comintern, attached exceptional importance to Ireland for the potential of its anti-imperialist forces to foment revolution at home, enlist the Irish diaspora, and encourage unrest in Britain and the Empire. In this way the Comintern might strengthen its relatively feeble bridgehead in the anglophone world and embarrass Britain, the keystone of Russia’s enemies. However, the Comintern encountered repeated frustration in attempting to direct its Irish sections until 1929 when it approved an initiative to create a Bolshevised party. At national level, Bolshevisation meant the application of the Leninist principles of unity, discipline and democratic centralism. Crucially, Bolsheviks understood their national sections to belong to a world party directed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (E.C.C.I.) in Moscow. In the global context, it also meant the subordination of the Comintern to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (V.K.P./b.), as the Soviet party was called, and the interests of the Soviet Union. Both levels of Bolshevisation went hand in hand in Ireland, where a new party was built from scratch between 1929 and 1933.

The relationship between constitutional and advanced or physical-force nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland was always tense and intimate. Both traditions professed to repudiate the stated aims and strategies of the other, while at the same time often co-operating across the apparent ideological and organisational divides. The Fenians worked with Isaac Butt’s early home rule movement, while the New Departures of the late 1870s facilitated I.R.B. involvement in the Land League and the home rule movement, proving crucial to the emergent leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. Although this ideological flexibility was often motivated by a self-interested desire to be associated with influential organisations and personalities, it also arose from the realisation that the ideal strategy was currently inappropriate. The essence of the New Departure lay in allowing physical-force men to join the agrarian agitation of the Land League on the understanding that this did not compromise their separatist ideals. Consequently, the self-identification of separatists at the time of the 1916 rising as belonging to an immemorial tradition, consecrated by the blood of martyrs, needs to be set against both the contingency of political engagement and the lack of precision as to the form of state a separate Ireland might take.