Historyhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/3102024-03-29T14:32:35Z2024-03-29T14:32:35Z1111'Clear - Hold - (Re)Build': an examination of the Irish Civil WarPrendergast, Garethhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/140582023-04-04T10:57:57Z2022-12-02T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'Clear - Hold - (Re)Build': an examination of the Irish Civil War
dc.contributor.author: Prendergast, Gareth
dc.description.abstract: What 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.
2022-12-02T00:00:00Z'Its inhabitants are a reading people': from Cork city bookshops and voluntary libraries to the Cork Public Library, c.1792–1920Lantry, Margarethttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/144172023-11-06T11:42:38Z2022-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'Its inhabitants are a reading people': from Cork city bookshops and voluntary libraries to the Cork Public Library, c.1792–1920
dc.contributor.author: Lantry, Margaret
dc.description.abstract: This thesis investigates the local reading culture of Cork city over the long nineteenth century, focusing on bookshops, libraries and reading rooms. It considers the question of the affordability of reading material and the ways it was accessed by the city’s population. It begins by looking at the city’s bookshops and book auctions and, by analysing booksellers’ catalogues, establishes what was available to purchase. The high cost of books and journals put these beyond the means of most of the city’s population. Borrowing from voluntary libraries was cheaper, which was reflected in the high, if fluctuating numbers of such libraries throughout the course of the century. The thesis establishes that this patchy provision was due to funding difficulties in what was a very small market of readers who could afford the borrowing fees. It was also because access to such libraries was stratified along class and sectarian lines. For the first time, a full picture is provided of the scale and range of voluntary libraries and reading rooms established over the long nineteenth century in Cork, including commercial circulating libraries, subscription or institutional libraries, as well as some standalone reading rooms; extant catalogues have been used to assess the range and changing nature of their holdings.
An important milestone in Irish library history is the passing of the Public Libraries Act in 1855, although it was to be almost four decades before the Cork Public Library opened. This delay, which was not unique to Cork, is fully investigated in this thesis as are the reasons why eventually it was decided to open the public library. Although no archive survives relating to the pre-1920 public library, fortunately the printed annual reports do and excavating these provides a wealth of data from which to ascertain the services and reading material supplied to the people as well as how much use was made of the Cork Public Library. The advent of this facility resulted in an information store that was open to all, of any religion, class, gender or economic background. Furthermore, research shows that the Cork Public Library responded to the changing demands of the society in which it was embedded. During the nineteenth century increased educational provision enabled citizens to expand their economic prospects but, as this thesis highlights, the Irish public library in particular played an, up to now, under-investigated role in the self-improvement and autonomous development of citizens.
This study principally aims to demonstrate the value of focusing on libraries and reading rooms in general so as to draw attention to their key role in providing intellectual stimulation and an educational resource for people over and above that which the state was prepared to furnish for much of the long nineteenth century.
2022-01-01T00:00:00Z'James Fitzpiers Fitzgerald, Captain Thomas Lee, and the problem of 'secret traitors': conflicted loyalties during the Nine Years' War, 1594-1603'Canning, Ruth A.https://hdl.handle.net/10468/31662023-04-04T12:36:19Z2015-11-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'James Fitzpiers Fitzgerald, Captain Thomas Lee, and the problem of 'secret traitors': conflicted loyalties during the Nine Years' War, 1594-1603'
dc.contributor.author: Canning, Ruth A.
dc.description.abstract: Existing evidence pertaining to Ireland’s Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) strongly lends itself to the impression that the majority of Old English Palesmen, at least those of higher social status, chose to support the English crown during this conflict rather than their co-religionist Gaelic Irish countrymen. Loyalties, however, were anything but straightforward and could depend on any number of cultural values, social concerns, and economic incentives. Nevertheless, James Fitzpiers Fitzgerald, a ‘Bastard Geraldine’ who served as sheriff of Kildare, seemed to have been driven by a genuine sense of duty to the English crown and establishment. With the outbreak of hostilities in the 1590s, Fitzpiers proved to be a devout crown servitor, risking life and limb to confront the English queen’s Irish enemies. But, in late 1598 he suddenly, and somewhat inexplicably, threw his lot in with the Irish confederacy, defying the government he had once championed. During the ensuing investigation, the Dublin administration accumulated much damning evidence against Fitzpiers, including a patriotic plea from rebel leader Hugh O’Neill which urged Fitzpiers to defend his Irish homeland from the oppressions of English Protestant rule. Yet, at the very same time, a counter case was made by Fitzpiers’s controversial English friend, Captain Thomas Lee, which argued that Fitzpiers’s actions were more loyal than anyone could have imagined. Through an examination of Fitzpiers’s perplexing case, this paper will explore the complicated nature of allegiances in 1590s Ireland and how loyalties were not always what they seemed.
2015-11-01T00:00:00Z'La Violence et la mauvaise foi': Context and rhetoric in Pierre Bayle's Ce que c'est que la France toute CatholiqueBrowne, Jennifer Margaret Maryhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/11322023-04-04T07:00:04Z2013-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'La Violence et la mauvaise foi': Context and rhetoric in Pierre Bayle's Ce que c'est que la France toute Catholique
dc.contributor.author: Browne, Jennifer Margaret Mary
dc.description.abstract: My thesis presents an examination of Ce que c'est que la France toute Catholique (1686) by Pierre Bayle, a prominent figure in the Republic of Letters and the Huguenot Refuge in the seventeenth century. This pamphlet was the first occasional text that Bayle published following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in which the religious toleration afforded to the Huguenot minority in France was repealed, a pivotal moment in the history of early modern France. In my thesis, I analyse the specific context within which Bayle wrote this pamphlet as a means of addressing a number of issues, including the legitimacy of forced conversions, the impact of the religious controversy upon exchanges in the Republic of Letters, the nature of religious zeal and finally the alliance of Church and state discourses in the early modern period. An examination of this context provides a basis from which to re-interpret the rhetorical strategies at work within the pamphlet, and also to come to an increased understanding of how, why and to what end he wrote it. In turn this allowed me to examine the relationship between this often overlooked pamphlet and the more extensively studied Commentaire Philosophique, in which Bayle argued in favour of religious toleration. Ultimately, understanding the relationship between these two texts proves essential in order to characterise his response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and to understand the place of the pamphlet within his oeuvre. Furthermore, an analysis of the pamphlet and the Commentaire Philosophique provide a lens through which to elucidate both Bayle's intellectual development at this early stage in his career, and also the wider context of the rise of toleration theory and the evolution of modes of civility within the Republic of Letters on the eve of the Enlightenment.
2013-01-01T00:00:00Z'Moral Neutrality': censorship in Emergency IrelandÓ Drisceoil, Donalhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/30392023-04-04T12:36:35Z1996-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'Moral Neutrality': censorship in Emergency Ireland
dc.contributor.author: Ó Drisceoil, Donal
1996-01-01T00:00:00Z'My pen is just a weapon': politics, history and the fiction of Peadar O'DonnellÓ Drisceoil, Donalhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/30852023-04-04T12:36:10Z2003-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'My pen is just a weapon': politics, history and the fiction of Peadar O'Donnell
dc.contributor.author: Ó Drisceoil, Donal
2003-01-01T00:00:00Z'The best banned in the land': censorship and Irish writing since 1950Ó Drisceoil, Donalhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/7332023-04-04T12:36:20Z2005-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'The best banned in the land': censorship and Irish writing since 1950
dc.contributor.author: Ó Drisceoil, Donal
dc.description.abstract: This article examines the censorship of Irish writing since 1950. It gives an historical overview of the evolution of literary censorship in twentieth-century Ireland, with particular reference to the operations of the Censorship of Publications Acts, 1929 and 1946. It includes a list of books by Irish authors that were banned since 1950; an account of the supplanting of the Catholic activists who had controlled the Censorship of Publications Board since its inception; the fundamental reforms introduced in 1967; and an account and analysis of the impact of censorship on Irish writing and Irish writers, and the variety of their responses.
2005-01-01T00:00:00Z'We are trying to do our share': the construction of positive neutrality and Irish post-war relief to EuropeO'Driscoll, Mervynhttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/39262023-04-04T12:36:33Z2016-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: 'We are trying to do our share': the construction of positive neutrality and Irish post-war relief to Europe
dc.contributor.author: O'Driscoll, Mervyn
dc.description.abstract: This paper explores aspects of Ireland's post-war relief programme, including the provision of relief to Germany. Irish efforts in the immediate aftermath of World War Two should inform the wider debates about the nature of Irish neutrality and Ireland's relationship with the post-war world, but they are overlooked in the major analyses on Ireland and 'the Emergency'. The provision of relief on the basis of need led to the diagnosis that Germany deserved relief just as the other war-torn countries did. This article argues that many factors intertwined in the instigation and sustenance of the relief programme to Europe. The Irish project was unprecedented in the history of Irish state and popular humanitarianism.
2016-01-01T00:00:00ZA history of the Irish Red Cross Society, 1939-1971Lehane, Shane G.https://hdl.handle.net/10468/19382023-04-04T07:06:29Z2014-01-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: A history of the Irish Red Cross Society, 1939-1971
dc.contributor.author: Lehane, Shane G.
dc.description.abstract: This research is concerned with assessing from a national perspective the role, work and historical impact of the Irish Red Cross Society (IRCS) between 1939 and 1971. During this period the IRCS discharged three primary functions: it provided first aid services both in war-time and peace-time; it pioneered public health and social care services; and acted as the State’s main agency for international humanitarian relief measures. Although primarily a national organisational history of the Society, it is not a history in isolation. A broader perspective demonstrates that the work undertaken by the IRCS has relevance to the medical, social, religious, cultural, political and diplomatic history of twentieth century Ireland. This study assesses the impact of a number of significant public health and social care initiatives which the IRCS implemented and developed since its inception and how most of these were subsequently developed independently by the State. During the early 1940s, the Society’s formation of a national blood transfusion service ultimately laid the foundations for the establishment of a national blood transfusion service. The Society’s steering of a national anti-tuberculosis campaign in the 1940s brought the issue of the eradication of TB to the fore and helped to change public attitudes towards the disease. The concept of caring for the needs of the elderly in Ireland was largely unknown until the IRCS began addressing the issue in the 1950s and, for more than two decades, was effectively the only organisation in the State that campaigned and introduced innovative services for the aged. The IRCS made a significant impact in terms of its commitment to the needs of refugees and the provision of international humanitarian relief from Ireland. The Society’s donation in 1945 of a fully equipped hospital to the population of Saint-Lo in France, its war-time overseas relief efforts and its post-war work for child refugees earned Ireland significant international recognition and prestige and, more importantly, justified Ireland’s war-time policy of neutrality. With Ireland’s admission to the UN, the government became more dependent on the IRCS to consolidate that position.
2014-01-01T00:00:00ZA kingdom near lost: English military recovery in Ireland, 1600-03O'Neill, Jameshttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/32702023-04-04T12:36:28Z2016-11-01T00:00:00Zdc.title: A kingdom near lost: English military recovery in Ireland, 1600-03
dc.contributor.author: O'Neill, James
dc.description.abstract: Ireland was rarely a peaceful realm for Elizabeth I, but Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and his allies brought the edifice of English power in Ireland to the brink of collapse. The war in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century devoured money, lives and reputations at a prodigious rate. However seven years of Irish success ended when in 1600 the Queen appointed Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy as Lord Deputy. Success replaced failure, but only after the new Lord Deputy transformed English strategy and rebuilt the army into an instrument fit for purpose.
2016-11-01T00:00:00Z