This collection explores how the British left has interacted with the ‘Irish question’ throughout the twentieth century, the left’s expression of solidarity with Irish republicanism and relationships built with Irish political movements. Throughout the twentieth century, the British left expressed, to varying degrees, solidarity with Irish republicanism and fostered links with republican, nationalist, socialist and labour groups in Ireland. Although this peaked with the Irish Revolution from 1916 to 1923 and during the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s–80s, this collection shows that the British left sought to build relationships with their Irish counterparts (in both the North and South) from the Edwardian to Thatcherite period. However these relationships were much more fraught and often reflected an imperial dynamic, which hindered political action at different stages during the century. This collection explores various stages in Irish political history where the British left attempted to engage with what was happening across the Irish Sea. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Contemporary British History.

This book was written as part of a much wider criminological enterprise, designed at creating a real and critical basis for criminological enquiry in Ireland. Properly understood the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is every bit as important to society as the circular flow of money. No government would dream of conducting its business without the advice of an economist or, indeed, providing an econometric model of the economy. Yet when it comes to the CJS, governments take the opposite view and legislate in the dark, hardly reconnoitering for a moment to see what effect proposed legislation will have on the several institutions it invariably affects. Maybe this was okay when those effects could not be calculated. But such is no longer the case. In 1967 a President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice featured a model of criminal justice entitled "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society." Incredibly misunderstood and widely neglected, this model marked a breakthrough -- the first step, as it were -- in coming to terms with the multiple agencies that go to make up what has come to be called the Criminal Justice System (CJS). In Volumes 2 and 3 of the present series Seamus Breathnach traces the initial steps necessary to complete the revolution begun by the President's Commission. In doing this he reveals the systematized neglect of the CJS in the Republic of Ireland for years 1950-80. In eight lectures he delineates the Republic's inability to get its act together or to engage the terms or significance of the '67 landmark - an inability that is anchored both in a deep religious resistance to the secular social sciences as well as an exaggerated estimation of the criminal lawyer as social commentator. From this study it appears that the first step for criminologists is to see the CJS as a totality - to see it as a social process clamoring to be rescued from the spokesmen of the discrete agencies that comprise it.

The twentieth century was a time of rapid social change in Ireland: from colonial rule to independence, civil war and later the Troubles; from poverty to globalisation and the Celtic Tiger; and from the rise to the fall of the Catholic Church. Policing in Ireland has been shaped by all of these changes. This book critically evaluates the creation of the new police force, an Garda Síochána, in the 1920s and analyses how this institution was influenced by and responded to these substantial changes. Beginning with an overview of policing in pre-independence Ireland, this book chronologically charts the history of policing in Ireland. It presents data from oral history interviews with retired gardaí who served between the 1950s and 1990s, giving unique insight into the experience of policing Ireland, the first study of its kind in Ireland. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of transition, the early encounters with the IRA, the policing of the Blueshirts, the world wars, gangs in Dublin and the growth of drugs and crime. Particularly noteworthy is the analysis of policing the Troubles and the immense difficulties that generated. This book is essential reading for those interested in policing or Irish history, but is equally important for those concerned with the legacy of colonialism and transition.

Professor Dermot Keogh's Twentieth-Century Ireland, the sixth and final book in the New Gill History of Ireland series, is a wide-ranging, informative and hugely engaging study of the long twentieth century, surveying politics, administrative history, social and religious history, culture and censorship, politics, literature and art. It focuses on the consolidation of the new Irish state over the course of the twentieth century. Professor Keogh highlights the long tragedy of emigration, its effect on the Irish psyche and on the under-performance of the Irish economy. He emphasises the lost opportunities for reform of the 1960s and early 70s. Membership of the EU had a diminished impact due to short-term and sectionally motivated political thinking and an antiquated government structure. Professor Keogh looks at how the despair of the 1950s revisited the country in the 1980s as almost an entire generation felt compelled to emigrate, very often as undocumented workers in the United States. Professor Keogh also argues that the violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s was an Anglo-Irish failure which was turned around only when Britain acknowledged the role of the Irish government in its resolution. He extends his analysis of the twentieth-century to include a wide-ranging survey of the most contentious events—financial corruption, child sexual abuse, scandals in the Catholic Church—between 1994 and 2005. Twentieth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents - A War without Victors: Cumann na nGaedheal and the Conservative Revolution - De Valera and Fianna Fáil in Power, 1932–1939 - In the Time of War: Neutral Ireland, 1939–1945 - Seán MacBride and the Rise of Clann na Poblachta - The Inter-Party Government, 1948–1951 - The Politics of Drift, 1951&1959 - Seán Lemass and the 'Rising Tide' of the 1960s - The Shifting Balance of Power: Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave, 1966–1977 - Charles Haughey and the Poverty of Populism - Ireland in the New Century

This comprehensive study describes the major political events of the Twentieth-century in Britain in a cogent, lucid way. William D. Rubinstein presents the history, key personnel, problems and achievements of Britain's administrations, from Lord Salisbury's government in 1900 to Tony Blair's 'Cool Britannia'. Ideal for both students and general readers, Rubinstein's book provides a detailed examination of Britain's political evolution in the Twentieth-century.

Anglo-Irish relations in the twentieth century can be described as being close but tortuous. This paradox is fused with Ireland's geographical location - both isolated from Europe and in close proximity to the main island of the British archipelago. Using a geopolitical analysis based on the theories of Sir Halford Mackinder, this book provides a new understanding of the strategic imperatives that have driven British policy throughout the turbulent events of the twentieth century. Containing material which has only recently been released by the Public Record Office, this book brings an entirely new perspective to the reality of Irish neutrality, and the pivotal importance of Northern Ireland in the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War. Furthermore, using US archival material, it gives a new insight into Ireland's geopolitical importance in the First World War, and her contribution to victory against the German U-boats.

Scholarship on the history of the British Isles is currently experiencing a golden age. The breakdown of modernism and the eclipse of both the Marxist tradition and the 'Whig interpretation' that sees all history as progress, combined with the trajectories of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have generated unprecedented intellectual activity. Nor has the world stood still: the collapse of communism, the issue of integration into the EU, and the advance of multiculturalism have led more and more people in the English speaking world as a whole to sense that their collective landscape now looks profoundly different from that inhabited by their ancestors even a few decades ago. In A World By Itself, six distinguished historians offer the most definitive and compelling history of the British Isles to date. Tracing the political, religious and material cultures from the Romans to the present day, this is at once an urgent reassessment of our shared past, and an inspirational celebration of British history. It focuses on the major themes and most dramatic moments of the last two millenia: the rise and fall of empires; reformation, revolution and restoration; wars both civil and global; and the enduring question of what it means to be British.

During much of the twentieth century, Irish women's position was on the boundaries of national life. Using Julia Kristeva's theories of nationhood, often particularly relevant to Ireland, this study demonstrates that their marginalization was to women's, and indeed the nation's, advantage as Irish women writers used their voice to subvert received pieties both about women and about the Irish nation. Kristevan theories of the other, the foreigner, the semiotic, the mother, and the sacred are explored in authors as diverse as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, Mary Dorcey, Jennifer Johnston, and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, as well as authors from Northern Ireland like Deirdre Madden, Polly Devlin, and Mary Morrissy. These writers, whose voices have frequently been sidelined or misunderstood because they write against the grain of their country's cultural heritage, finally receive their due in this important contribution to Irish and gender studies.

This Guide surveys existing criticism and theory, making clear the key critical debates, themes and issues surrounding a wide variety of Irish poets, playwrights and novelists. It relates Irish literature to debates surrounding issues such as national identity, modernity and the Revival period, armed struggle, gender, sexuality and post colonialism.