This chapter outlines the effective remobilisation and arming of elements of the Monaghan Ulster Volunteer Force in 1920 and refutes claims of a loyalist “collapse” by providing evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities after a wave of republican counter-reprisals in late March 1921. It contends that a number of IRA operations in the area of County Monaghan bordering Rosslea went badly wrong, and that a successful, well-organised loyalist defence helped to bring both sides to agree a formal truce in April 1921. Loyalist resistance continued elsewhere in Monaghan until the national truce of July 1921, putting the IRA under considerable pressure in parts of the county. It also argues that ties between Ulster loyalists in Belfast and those in Monaghan persisted, helping the latter to resist boycotting of their business interests, and shoring up their political position through the Protestant Defence Association in the new Free State.

This chapter sets out why a history of Ulster loyalism in the three counties after partition matters and outlines the literature on ethnic conflict, Ulster loyalism, and terrorism and political violence in Ireland. The chapter then sets out the book’s two main arguments. First, memories of the violence experienced by one generation of Protestants in the three counties entrenched a sense of separation from the new Irish state on the part of subsequent generations. Intergenerational grievance and inter-communal distance kept loyalism alive and set the conditions for militancy and revenge in the future, including during the Troubles. Three-county loyalists played an important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.

This chapter considers the presence and efficacy of loyalist armed resistance in Cavan from 1920 to 1923. It argues that resistance was generally less intense and more poorly organised in Cavan compared to Monaghan. A dispersed population meant that loyalist deterrence was primarily focused on pockets of the county that had sufficient numbers to contest republican control. The IRA in the area near Cavan town, where much of the Protestant population was concentrated, was more reluctant to carry out executions or inflict significant violence than in County Monaghan. This made resistance to arms raids less dangerous and successful relative to elsewhere in the county. Nevertheless, a poorly organised loyalist defence network in the Rathkenny area underlined the dangers of provoking republican violence through overt and ineffective resistance. West Cavan resembled shared similar experiences of IRA violence to that seen in neighbouring County Leitrim. A willingness by the IRA in West Cavan and Leitrim to resort to occasionally shocking acts of violence meant that the loyalist community in this area suffered disproportionately from acts of intimidation compared to east and south Cavan.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of three-county loyalists’ considerable impact on Northern Ireland’s security forces and radical or militant Ulster movements since partition. It describes how these individuals generally came from families that were threatened with, or experienced, republican or agrarian violence after partition. The chapter also explores the important roles played by three-county loyalists in paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association during the Troubles. A number of these individuals came from areas that had seen high levels of loyalist militancy in the first half of the century, suggesting an intergenerational consistency across the twentieth century.

This chapter underlines the main contribution of the book. It argues that Ulster loyalism has survived within the Irish state to the present day. The ’affective bonds’ or culture created in previous generations persisted. Three counties’ loyalists were still willing to embrace an Ulster identity even after the partition of the province. What mattered more than political logic or calculation was sentiment. It also observes an enduring strain of frontier militancy in Ulster, summarises the tactical successes of three counties’ loyalists and their wider movements in the 1920s and again in 1970s but concludes that militancy in successive conflicts only served to delay conciliatory reforms, truces and peace agreements.

This chapter considers evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities and resistance in County Donegal in the early 1920s. It investigates why a vibrant UVF movement, active in the county from 1912 to 1914, did not mount a sustained resistance to the IRA in the county from 1920 to 1923. It suggests that low levels of republican violence in the county during the Anglo-Irish War required a more limited response and goes on to demonstrate that Donegal’s loyalists prioritised the defence of Londonderry during a critical period in 1920. Unlike Monaghan, a number of Donegal’s outstanding UVF leaders were killed during the First World War or did not return home. There is also some evidence that erstwhile units of the Donegal UVF quickly and collectively allied themselves with pro-treaty forces during the Civil War (26 June 1922–24 May 1923). The exception was Pettigo, where loyalists targeted republicans in the wake of the British occupation of the village over a seven-month period, during which time they also campaigned to be included in the new Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines the resurgence of suspicions among republicans towards real or imagined loyalists in the three counties, that some Protestants were acting as a loyalist ’fifth column’ for the security forces and/or paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. A successful loyalist cross-border paramilitary campaign in the early 1970s precipitated an IRA counter-intelligence operation to eliminate spies in the three counties. Families that were well known locally for their historical involvement in loyalism were again targeted by the IRA in the 1970s. The chapter outlines the suspicions and inter-communal violence in County Monaghan that led to the murder of Senator Billy Fox and the burning of the family home of his fiancée, Marjorie Coulson.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.

The UK is an ‘evolved’ state1 that has become a devolved state. It was created by a series of bilateral arrangements to become a ‘state of unions’.2 The centre is key to how any state develops, extending its authority over a wider geography, whether by enforcing uniformity or permitting diversity. The rationale for each union has changed over time, reflecting the changing views on how the UK should stay together as a multi-national state.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

Brexit imposed a new binary on Northern Ireland politics which has interacted with the national question in complex ways. This interaction is the focus of this chapter. It begins by reviewing the position of the five main Northern Ireland parties on Europe prior to 2016. It explains the parties’ stances during the Brexit referendum campaign and examines how the parties responded to the referendum result. The chapter argues that Brexit produced constitutional restlessness in Northern Ireland because the vote lacked legitimacy according to the standards of consent contained in the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. The chapter then traces how the new constitutional debate became established, highlighting how, although the debate was initiated by Brexit, it was intensified by subsequent developments in British and Irish politics. The chapter also explores key dilemmas that the debate posed for the political parties. The conclusion suggests that constitutional deliberations look set to continue but possibly at a lower intensity. Their direction will be shaped by developments in 2019-20 including the Boris Johnson Brexit agreement, the new Irish government, the restoration of devolution in Northern Ireland, and the coronavirus crisis.

“Reformist Option: Grassroots and Political Activism” situates grassroots or community power as the locus of the democratic essence. Through these parts, it engages the narrative of Nigeria focusing on the existing grassroots structures and their formation; it suggests how grassroots efforts can work in a global comparative context while identifying possible ways to move the country forward as it is a mobilizing tool operating from a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one, to implement policies, effect change, and drive development. A combination of poor education, repression from the military years, and the unconscious perception that politicians are untouchable prevent the people from revolting against poor governance. These, coupled with factors like corruption, ambiguous division of power, citizen apathy, and political patronage systems have turned the beneficial concept of grassroots governance on its head, and benefits to the citizens are severely limited. However, through participative governance, the citizenry can be empowered and re-energized to make active commitments and contributions toward achieving collective growth and sustainable development. This active political engagement helps to emphatically reject poor governance, which would allow disciplined and visionary leaders, and an active and involved populace, to work together for relevant socioeconomic projects that improve the country's indices in all sectors and improve the welfare of its citizens.

A dominant theme running throughout Heaney’s writing was the tension between art and political commitment, between personal vision and the demands of the community. The relationship between his writing and his politics is complex but insistent. Raised in a Catholic family in County Derry with a broadly 'anti-Partitionist stance', he was always alert to social, political and sectarian difference. He claimed his family background was nationalist, with little emphasis on the Republican tradition. His first overtly political journalism appeared during the Civil Rights period. He later found “emblems of adversity” in poetic images of bog bodies which he described in mythic method poems, but he wrote many historical, allegorical and parable poems which were infused with a political undercurrent. Generally he was wary of becoming co-opted by political dogma, but his deepest impulses were compassionate and allied with personal and artistic liberty, human dignity, political freedom, and civil rights.

The formation of the National Government and the debates around national recovery bring into stark focus the national distinctions that still shaped British politics in the age of mass democracy and mass media. This chapter explores the effect of these distinctions on how Scottish Unionists and Welsh Conservatives related to the National Government, how they presented its record of economic recovery to local voters, and how their opponents responded. Drawing on case studies including Dunbartonshire and Dundee in Scotland, Pembrokeshire and Gower in Wales, the chapter analyses the popular politics of National Conservatism as it traversed the so-called ‘Anglo-Celtic frontier’. Starting with a discussion of the 1931 general election campaign, it demonstrates how the National Government helped the Conservatives to neutralise old hostilities while also helping their opponents to renew or inspire anti-Tory sentiment. This was reflected in the election results: in Scotland, the Unionists gained twenty-eight seats, including Dundee for the first time, while in Wales it gained only five seats and failed to regain Pembrokeshire. The chapter argues that this in turn set the politics of recovery in Scotland and Wales on different trajectories. Through its MPs and ministers, the government enjoyed a high-profile presence in Scotland that it lacked in Wales. Even so, in both nations its claims of recovery, like the National Government itself, provoked renewed anti-Tory – and often anti-Westminster – rhetoric among Liberals, Labour and, in Scotland, nationalists. At the 1935 general election while little changed in the relative strengths of Scottish Unionism and Welsh Conservatism, Labour emerged as the net beneficiary.

The Great War altered the means by which women conducted political activity as they adapted to wartime circumstances, while also bringing new opportunities for women’s mobilisation and politicisation. Competing loyalties of suffrage, nationalism, republicanism and unionism also affected attitudes towards Irish women’s role in the war effort and provided dissenting voices against the mechanisms of wartime mobilisation. This chapter examines the mobilisation of suffragist, nationalist and unionist women for the war effort, the participation of women in acts of dissent and the impact of the war on the achievement of female suffrage in 1918. It contrasts the opportunities for politicisation offered by the nationalist and unionist movements and argues that the differing approaches to the war effort resulted in the further polarisation of unionist Ulster and southern Ireland. The chapter argues that the war created a space for political activism, evident through the mass mobilisation of previously unorganised women in the 1918 anti-conscription campaign and the actions of working-class soldiers’ wives in Ireland in defending their interests against the growing republican movement.

The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the Irish context upon the outbreak of war in 1914. It sets the scene for the topic of Irish women and the Great War, outlining the involvement of Irish women in the British war effort and the significant impact of the war on women’s lived experience. It contextualises the wartime experience through a brief examination of women’s role in early twentieth-century Irish society, focusing on the social and economic context and women’s political participation in the nationalist, unionist and suffrage movement. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography, focusing on concepts such as everyday life and gender emancipation. The analysis of the Irish historiography charts the slow emergence of First World War scholarship in Ireland and the recent transformation in attitudes towards the war in Ireland. The chapter further outlines the methodological approach of the book, with its emphasis on empirical archival research and the use of samples alongside ego documents. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, situating each chapter within the existing historiography.

This chapter focusses on the largely separate development of a network of Protestant nationalists in Ulster. It shows how an older generation of activists, notably Alice Milligan and Francis Joseph Bigger, sought to inculcate nationalist sentiment in younger Protestants. It traces the development of a mostly Belfast-based network, from their beginnings in various cultural nationalist groups, including the Ulster Literary Theatre, towards their adoption of a nationalist ideology, largely under the influence of the young Quaker nationalist Bulmer Hobson. This chapter also discusses the unusual development of the Independent Orange Order, whose leadership adopted a home rule ideology, and some of whom later defected to republicanism. It also assesses the efforts of Hobson and Denis McCullough to revive the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ulster; and Hobson’s efforts, by means of the Dungannon Clubs, to promote republicanism among northern Protestants. The chapter closes with a discussion of the manner in which pressure from unionist co-religionists resulted in the breaking up of the Belfast group of Protestant nationalists, and their dispersal throughout Britain and southern Ireland.