History - Doctoral Theses
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- Item‘Clear-Hold-(Re)Build’: an examination of the Irish Civil War(University College Cork, 2022-11-26) Prendergast, Gareth; Fitzgerald, David; Borgonovo, JohnWhat was achieved by the Free State during the Irish Civil War was remarkable. Within a period of less than a year they raised and equipped a standing National Army of nearly 60,000 soldiers, defeating an insurgency by the anti-Treaty elements of the IRA. Using the counterinsurgency framework of Clear-Hold-Build, and concentrating on the Civil War actions of the National Army in Cork, I will explain how the Free State managed to attain this remarkable achievement. Outnumbered at the start of the fighting, the Free State overcame the IRA insurgency by utilising a number of key concepts that included the combination of kinetic clearance operations and ‘Good Governance’ stability actions. Ultimately the disintegration of the anti-Treaty IRA occurred because of their inability to gain outright public support and the ability of the Free State to undermine their cause. The Free State also employed a superior force generation strategy using local forces living amongst the population. When these advantages were combined with enhanced Information Operations and the use of superior counterinsurgency tactics, they ultimately brought victory for the National Army.
- Item'Clear - Hold - (Re)Build': an examination of the Irish Civil War(University College Cork, 2022-12-02) Prendergast, Gareth; Fitzgerald, David; Borgonovo, JohnWhat was achieved by the Free State during the Irish Civil War was remarkable. Within a period of less than a year they raised and equipped a standing National Army of nearly 60,000 soldiers, defeating an insurgency by the anti-Treaty elements of the IRA. Using the counterinsurgency framework of Clear-Hold-Build, and concentrating on the Civil War actions of the National Army in Cork, I will explain how the Free State managed to attain this remarkable achievement. Outnumbered at the start of the fighting, the Free State overcame the IRA insurgency by utilising a number of key concepts that included the combination of kinetic clearance operations and ‘Good Governance’ stability actions. Ultimately the disintegration of the anti-Treaty IRA occurred because of their inability to gain outright public support and the ability of the Free State to undermine their cause. The Free State also employed a superior force generation strategy using local forces living amongst the population. When these advantages were combined with enhanced Information Operations and the use of superior counterinsurgency tactics, they ultimately brought victory for the National Army.
- ItemLife from above? An investigation into the genesis and deployment of no-fly zones during the 1990s(University College Cork, 2022-07-01) O'Brien, Liam David; Ryan, David; Fitzgerald, David; Irish Research CouncilThis thesis examines how the “no-fly zone” emerged as a distinct and recognisable foreign policy tool in the years immediately following the Gulf War. Based primarily on a close reading of archival sources collected from the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, and the British National Archives at Kew, London, it provides a detailed analytical narrative of how key officials in the George H.W. Bush administration, along with their British and French allies, came to “invent” no-fly zones over Iraq as they grappled with Saddam Hussein’s post-Gulf War survival and resurgence. By providing the first monograph-length, primary source-based investigation of these events, this thesis demonstrates that the creation of the first no-fly zone over Kurdish-held northern Iraq in April 1991 was not a conscious, humanitarian decision by Bush and his advisers, as often claimed, but instead the first, initially self-serving act in the untidy, gradual emergence of a concept now frequently discussed, but rarely understood, by observers of US foreign policy. As this thesis documents, from the beginning the relationship between the ban on Iraqi flights over northern Iraq and the Kurdish people on the ground was more complicated, and less altruistic, than many assumed, and by the Bush administration time had decided to create a second no-fly zone, over southern Iraq, in August 1992, its motives had shifted entirely. Frustrated with Hussein’s stubborn endurance, Bush and his advisers planned the new no-fly zone as part of their effort to “win back the peace” in post-war Iraq, cynically using humanitarian rhetoric to sell an operation premised on punishing the Iraqi president with military force. As will be shown, a rushed, heedless planning process ensured the wider plan faltered, leaving behind the no-fly zone over southern Iraq as a vain, long-lasting reminder of the Bush administration’s failure.
- ItemWomen and trade unions in Ireland, c. 1860-1937: class, gender and society(University College Cork, 2022) Sugrue, Elaine; Ó Drisceoil, Donal; University College CorkThis thesis aims to assist in the task of writing women back into the history of Irish trade unionism. The date range is c.1860 to 1937, but the main concentration is on the period from 1880 to 1937. The first part considers attitudes voiced towards women’s involvement in paid work and efforts to organise female industrial workers in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Women’s involvement in the following sample of trade unions is also explored and analysed: the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, the Irish Union of Distributive Workers and Clerks, the Irish Women Workers’ Union, and the Irish Local Government Officials’ Union. Insights into the role of gender in Irish trade union history and factors that could be divisive amongst female workers feature. Rather than a focus on a small number of particularly prominent female trade unionists, this thesis attempts to provide a broader view of women’s participation in these bodies. It enhances our knowledge of women and trade unions in Irish history.
- ItemA reluctant pacifist: Thomas Merton and the Cold War Letters, October 1961 – April 1962(University College Cork, 2021) Cronin, James G. R.; Ryan, David; University College Cork; University College DublinThomas Merton believed nuclear war was the single greatest threat facing humanity, whereas American Catholic commentators considered that nuclear war was winnable or at least survivable. What made him a reluctant pacifist was the tensions he faced between speaking frankly without being partisan. Merton had an intellectual duty to his readers to both fairly and accurately set out his position on nuclear pacifism. In order to evaluate whether he did this with integrity as a writer it is necessary to set his declared motivations against his actions and to evaluate what the tensions between his views and his actions reveal about him as a writer. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated through archive research at the Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and supported by a substantial secondary literature. Research for this dissertation highlights previously unacknowledged associations between Merton’s Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and radical pacifism of the Catholic Worker movement. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated in five chapters through examination of his character, cloistered life, and correspondences within the institutional context of Merton’s tussles with his superiors and censors in reaction to the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing by the Soviet Union in September 1961 and the U.S. in April 1962. He represented himself through correspondence as being a writer who was committed to a central American Catholic ideal that America was good for Catholicism and Catholicism could save America. He was committed to a consistent ethics of life. The few mainstream readers who engaged with Merton’s ideas were shocked and confused that he reduced political reality to symbols of moralism that rejected all war, not just nuclear war. The broader significance of Merton’s pacifist writing was as a bellwether of a broader cultural shift in American Catholic life from American Catholic triumphalism to prudential judgement in the responsible exercise of the democratic life.