Senia Paseta

Nationalist responses to two royal visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903

In July 1903 Maud Gonne hung a black petticoat from the window of her Dublin home, insulting her unionist neighbours and provoking what became known as ‘the battle of Coulson Avenue’. Aided by nationalist friends, athletes from Cumann na nGaedheal and her sturdy housekeeper, she defended her ‘flag’ against police and irate neighbours. Gonne’s lingerie — allegedly a mark of respect for the recently deceased pope — flew in stark and defiant contrast to the numerous Union Jacks which lined her street in honour of King Edward VII’s visit to Ireland. This episode heralded a month of spectacular protest which polarised nationalist opinion. Like the visit to Dublin of Queen Victoria in 1900, King Edward’s tour provoked both enormous public interest and rivalry between various Irish institutions which vied to express their loyalty to the crown. But the royal tours also instigated fierce debate within the nationalist community and highlighted the ever deepening rifts between constitutional nationalism and ‘advanced’ nationalism.

The Catholic Hierarchy and the Irish University Question,1880–1908

The ‘Irish university question’, as it came to be known, claimed the attention of the most powerful forces in Ireland: the Catholic church, British legislators and influential lay people, all of whom were aware of its potential impact on its beneficiaries, the future ruling class of Ireland. This article questions the simplistic terms in which the Irish university question is conventionally understood; it challenges the notion that the issue was simply a conflict between a succession of unyielding British governments and an intransigent Catholic hierarchy which refused to give up its demand for a state-funded Catholic university. This understanding of the issue ignores the significant lay contribution to the debate and also obscures the intricacies of a highly complex political and social question. The Irish university question in fact prompted numerous attempted settlements, bitter debate and deep dissension within the Catholic hierarchy. It also led eventually to unprecedented compromise when all the major participants in the debate agreed finally in 1908 to the establishment of two new universities which reflected political and religious divisions in Ireland.

FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ACTIVISM IN REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND, c. 1880–1918

Feminist thought and activism was a feature of Irish political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the womens suffrage campaign coincided with and was at times influenced by wider debates on the national question, it has often been understood almost entirely in relation to Irish nationalism and unionism, and usually in the specific context of acute political crisis such as the third Home Rule. The Irish suffrage movement should instead be understood both in terms of wider political developments and in particular Irish contexts. This paper surveys aspects of feminist political culture with a particular emphasis on the way that nationalist Irish women articulated and negotiated their involvement in the womens suffrage movement. It argues that the relationship between the two was both more nuanced and dynamic than has been allowed, and that opposition to womens activism should be understood in structural and cultural terms as well as in broadly political ones. The relationship should also be understood in longer historical terms than is usual as it also evolved in the context of broader political and social shifts and campaigns, some of which predated the third Home Rule crisis.

New Issues and Old: women and politics in Ireland, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of politically active Irish women during the First World War. Focusing on political campaigns including womens suffrage, nationalist activism and pacifism, it argues that Irish women were particularly well placed to respond to the demands of total war by virtue of their existing political commitments and the highly incendiary condition of Irish political life in 1914. Although the outbreak of war complicated relationships between female activists and obliged some of them to take very public stands on the efficacy of war, feminist activism continued in the period 1914 to 1918 and was in many ways strengthened by the opportunities provided by it.

‘Another Class’? Women’s Higher Education in Ireland, 1870–1909

Dissension, denominationalism and deep division characterised the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate about reform of higher education in Ireland. The establishment of the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges in 1845 marked the beginning of the protracted and sometimes bitter Irish University debate which claimed the attention of the most powerful forces in Ireland: the Catholic hierarchy, successive British governments and lobbyists of varied denominational and philosophical stripes, all of whom understood that its role in the development of the expanding Irish middle classes was a matter of the highest importance.

Ireland’s Last Home Rule Generation: The Decline of Constitutional Nationalism in Ireland, 1916–30

We all took it for granted that if Home Rule was achieved, we would be among the politicians of the new Ireland. A Home Rule Parliament in College Green in those days would, no doubt, have been dominated by the Irish Party, which would have earned the credit for its establishment. We, in the College, had many connections with the Irish Party…We all confidently expected that in a short time we would be exercising our oratory, not in the dingy precincts of the old Physics Theatre in 86 [Earlsfort Terrace], but in the ‘Old House in College Green’. It was because of this hope that we took our debates so seriously. We had heard that future prime ministers were picked out because of their performances at the Oxford Union, and we believed that, when the chair at the ‘L. & H.’ was taken by distinguished visitors, such as John Dillon, some future Irish Prime Minster might attract influential attention if his oratory aroused sufficient admiration. Debating took such a large part of our energies that I remember Arthur Cox saying to me that there were only three positions for which we were being fitted by our education – prime minister, leader of the opposition and Speaker of the House of Commons.1