Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for StabilityThe search for stability proved elusive. Nationalist Ireland mobilised a mass democratic movement under O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. The mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912-22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. "...a substantial and thoroughly crafted study of a very complex period.... His virtues as a historian predominate - clarity of thought and style, and a mastery of the telling quotation, which penetrates to the heart of the matter." The Irish Times |
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... kind of political and social ballast , and after 1882 became an increasingly dominating force in Ireland . The heady days of the Land League seemed to promise some sort of social revolution in Ireland ; but its issue was a stabilising ...
... kind of vacuum in Irish life that might be filled by other , more fruitful and less divisive activity . In reality it had done nothing of the sort ; it had merely driven Irish politics back into particularism and dissent . But for ...
... kind . But none of them fought to bring about any kind of social revolution . In 1919 and 1920 some kind of social uprising seemed possible as strikes and militant industrial activity surfaced : workers in creameries , breweries and ...
Contents
The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers 180829 | 37 |
Testing the Union 183045 | 63 |
The Land and its Nemesis 18459 | 105 |
Copyright | |
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