Richard English

The IRA at War ( 1916–1923)

Peter Hart?s ten chapters explore the IRA in what is defined by him as the Irish Revolution of 1916?23. All essays save two have been published over the last decade as book chapters or articles in leading academic journals. All deserve to be revisited. Thematically organised, Hart examines the structure of revolutionary violence in Irish and wider British contexts. Essays on the geography of the Irish Revolution and the Protestant experience in it feature among some of the more stimulating writing on twentieth-century Ireland in recent years. OUP?s decision to gather Hart?s work in a single volume is therefore both welcome and timely. More than any other scholar of his generation, Hart has explored and questioned the violence which facilitated Irish state formation. The methodology owes much to the work of David Fitzpatrick: quantitative, forensic, thematic in approach and exhaustive in use of sources. Hart?s comparative sociological approach is, as ever, invigorating. He has reinvented his subject and opened up new understandings of events, processes and personalities. It is, however, the opening mission statement ? ?A new revolutionary history? ? which provokes attention.

Public intellectuals and the question of British decline

This article proposes a refocusing of the debate on British decline, to concentrate attention on declinism rather than on historical decline itself. In particular, it addresses the ways in which intellectuals have perceived, diagnosed and proposed remedies for decline. Public intellectuals have exerted significant influence on British politics in ways not usually acknowledged in scholarly analysis. We explore three key themes in intellectual declinism: ideology, methodology and national identity. Declinism has proved rhetorically enriching to intellectuals of a variety of ideological hues, the latter drawing on a paradoxically shared reservoir of cultural and symbolic resources. Declinist intellectuals have influentially framed arguments about the English nation, the British state and the supposedly exceptional British developmental experience.

Socialism: Socialist Intellectuals and the Irish Revolution

Writing to his London publisher about his 1933 play, Wrack, Peadar O’Donnell opened with typical impishness: ‘Dear Mr Cape, I am glad to hear you like Wrack; I like it myself!’ Later in the same epistle O’Donnell commented, in a slightly dismissive tone, ‘I really can’t say when I may have other plays — I have to break up my time a good deal to do hack work for badly paying working class journals.’1 If his words here echo Karl Marx’s lament about newspaper work (‘the continual journalistic muck annoys me’),2 then they appropriately point towards one of O’Donnell’s main intellectual influences. Like James Connolly, he drew heavily on Marx, whom it appears he first encountered during the Irish revolutionary period itself. According to one close associate, somebody ‘gave him Marx to read. He just couldn’t get over this.’3 And O’Donnell himself presented this period as one of intellectual awakening: ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted to find how ignorant I was. I read omnivorously, day and night, attended lectures, and prepared for the road.’4

Countering Twenty-First Century Terrorism

It is time that politicians recognised that minimising the threat from groups such as Islamic State and the new IRA is far more realistic than pretending terrorism can be completely defeated, writes Richard English.

Socialism and republican schism in Ireland: the emergence of the Republican Congress in 1934

In the words of one veteran communist, the Irish republican movement has experienced throughout its existence ‘a constant searching’ on social issues. In 1934 the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) was fractured when a group of members who believed in socialism seceded to establish the Republican Congress movement. This article will examine a programme for government published early in 1934 by the I.R.A., consider the schism that occurred in March 1934, giving rise to the Republican Congress, and describe the aims, character and early activities of the new movement. It will be argued that there existed among republicans in 1934 two significant interpretations of the relationship between social radicalism and republican philosophy. The first involved a multi-class, Gaelic communalism. Public and private ownership were to be blended in post-revolutionary Ireland and emphasis was placed on class harmony rather than class struggle. Advocates of this approach employed radical rhetoric but tended to avoid any tangible involvement in immediate social struggle. Socio-economic radicalism was effectively obscured by nationalism. The second interpretation was socialist. This held that class conflict and the national struggle were necessarily complementary. Any attempt to restrain the social advance until independence had been achieved was ill-advised, since the republic could only be won through a struggle that was deeply imbued with class struggle.

Directions in historiography : History and Irish nationalism

Nationalism remains arguably the most important framework within which to explore, explain and understand modern Irish history. The object of this article is, first, to reflect on some impressive recent scholarship on the Irish nationalist past and, second, to propose a related set of suggestions intended to deepen and enrich our approach to the subject. It therefore offers both a respectful assessment of how we have thought about history and Irish nationalism, and also an agenda-conscious programme regarding how we should do so in future.

Shakespeare and the Definition of the Irish Nation

The absorption of influential Revolutionary Irish Republicans in Shakespeare and in Shakespearean criticism provides a valuable setting for the reconsideration of key aspects of modern Irish politics.1 Notable early twentieth-century Republicans as varied as Peadar O’Donnell, Ernie O’Malley, Sean O’Faolain and Frank Ryan exemplify this trend, neatly captured in memorable prison statements from O’Malley in the early 1920s such as: ‘I have a decent library now and have ample time to browse deep in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton’, or ‘I like Shakespeare best’.2 These Irish Republicans exhibited an enthusiastic attachment to British literary culture. O’Malley’s IRA [Irish Republican Army] colleague, Peadar O’Donnell, wrote of his own prison excitement over Defoe, Shelley, Dickens, Stevenson, Wodehouse, and (with characteristic impishness) of his passion for Shakespeare: I don’t remember on what day of the week I finally escaped from prison but it was on a Wednesday that I saw a copy of Shakespeare in the officers’ lavatory when I was outside having a bath; I stole it! Well, listen here, there’s no punishment I could ever receive for that theft that would exceed the joy its capture gave me. I’m telling you, Shakespeare was a great man, and I would suggest to the British ruling class that the least they can do when they jail folk like me is to present each of us with a copy of his works. It is true that in this case I rescued Shakespeare from a few of my countrymen but that must not be used as an argument to resist my plea, for it is only that section of my countrymen who can be hired to serve the Empire who would use Shakespeare in a lavatory.3

The Same People with Different Relatives? Modern Scholarship, Unionists and the Irish Nation

Responding to the suggestion that there were two nations rather than one in Ireland, the eminent Irish republican Peadar O’Donnell impishly replied that he thought it ‘nonsense to suggest that we are two peoples. We are the same people with different relatives.’1 O’Donnell’s socialism made him something of a dissident figure within the modern republican movement in Ireland.2 But in his dismissal of the problem which Irish unionism posed for Irish nationalism he was, perhaps, rather typical. For within nationalist circles there has tended to be a certain complacency in regard to the question of unionist opposition to the nationalist project. The Irish nation, it has been assumed, is coextensive with the Irish island; and separatist sympathies have been taken as indicative of authentic Irishness. Coupled with the view that History (indeed, Providence) is in sympathy with the completion of the Irish nationalist agenda, these assumptions have proved powerfully resilient well into the contemporary period. Moreover, they have coloured the actions of crucial players outside the nationalist canip. As Patrick Roche has recently observed, ‘The policy orientation of the British political parties is … based on the acceptance of the intellectual coherence and practical feasibility of Irish nationalism.’3

Change and continuity across the 9/11 fault line: rethinking twenty-first-century responses to terrorism

ABSTRACT This article asks the following questions. Which terrorism threats, challenges and responses did key players consider to have been decisively changed by 9/11? On close inspection now, nearly two decades after those attacks, how are we to assess such claims? What did 9/11 really change regarding terrorism and counterterrorism? And what remained unaltered? The article’s central argument is this: some western states exaggerated the extent to which terrorist threats and challenges had been changed by 9/11 and, as a consequence, they did significantly alter some of their responses to terrorism; but at the heart of this ironic process was the tragic reality that, had there been a more serious-minded and historically sensitive recognition of how little had necessarily been changed by 9/11 in terms of terrorist threats and challenges, then the twenty-first-century experience of non-state terrorism would have been much less painful than has been the case in practice.

George Kassimeris. Inside Greek Terrorism.

However, the book almost never offers the reader any conclusions based on such data. As a result, the reader is presented with exaggerated claims about lone wolf terrorism that are based on a few isolated cases. For example, Simon claims that lone wolves are more innovative than organized terrorist groups and more dangerous because lone wolves, particularly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, are more likely to use weapons of mass destruction since they are unconcerned about the impact on their potential constituency. Using airplanes to crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was certainly innovative, and the multiple attacks of 911 could only have been carried out by an organized group. Does Simon really believe that the threat from Islamic extremists is less now that Al Qaeda has been largely destroyed as an organization and that jihadist wannabes like Carlos Bledsoe are now the main danger? The economist, Ronald Coase, won a Nobel Prize for pointing out why the economy is dominated by firms, not individual entrepreneurs, and his thesis explains why terrorist organizations are far more deadly than lone wolves. Leaderless resistance was advocated by Louis Beam because extremist rightwing organizations had been successfully repressed by the U.S. government, and Islamist lone wolves emerged because of the demise of Al Qaeda’s central command.