Journal articles on the topic 'Ireland History War of Independence'

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.

In his pamphlet The independence of Iceland: a parallel for Ireland, published in June 1921, Alexander McGill, a Scotsman of Irish descent, argued that Irish nationalists could learn salutary lessons from the history of the people of Iceland, not least from their pertinacity, since the Icelanders had never wavered in their demands for independence from the kingdom of Denmark. McGill went so far as to say that Icelandic history could be used to justify the strategy of Irish nationalists, who were at the time making a last stand in their bloody and violent war of independence. ‘Iceland is a small land, but a very interesting one, and her people understand Ireland’s demands and rights. She understands the problem of the Irish people, because Iceland as a nation has been evolved from similar beginnings.’

AbstractThis article analyses excesses carried out against civilians in Ireland and Poland after the First World War. It shows how the absence of a centralised state authority with a monopoly on violence allowed for new, less inhibited paramilitary groups to operate in parts of Ireland and Poland. The article argues that certain forms of violence committed had a symbolic meaning and served as messages, further alienating the different ethnic and religious communities. By comparing the Irish and Polish case, the article also raises questions about the obvious differences in the excesses in Poland and Ireland, namely in terms of scale of the excesses and the number of victims and, central to the Polish case, the question of antisemitism.

ABSTRACTThe Irish Party, the organization which represented the constitutional nationalist demand for home rule for almost fifty years in Westminster, was the most notable victim of the revolution in Ireland, c. 1916–23. Most of the last generation of Westminster-centred home rule MPs played little part in public life following the party's electoral destruction in 1918. This article probes the political thought and actions of one of the most prominent constitutional nationalists who did seek to alter Ireland's direction during the critical years of the war of independence. Stephen Gwynn was a guiding figure behind a number of initiatives to ‘save’ Ireland from the excesses of revolution. Gwynn established the Irish Centre Party in 1919, which later merged with the Irish Dominion League. From the end of 1919, Gwynn became a leading advocate of the Government of Ireland Bill, the legislation that partitioned the island. Revolutionary idealism – and, more concretely, violence – did much to render his reconciliatory efforts impotent. Gwynn's experiences between 1919 and 1921 also, however, reveal the paralysing divisions within constitutional nationalism, which did much to demoralize moderate sentiment further.

‘The Irish are out in force’: it was a rainy summer day on the fields of the Somme, and they were very young, in their early teens, in fact. However, this was not 1916, but 2016, when the centenary of one of the bloodiest battles in history attracted an international crowd, including large contingents of school children from the Republic. In contrast to the 50th anniversary, which, in 1966, had been a ‘Unionist’ commemoration – claimed by the Northern Irish loyalists as their own, while the survivors of the Southern veterans kept their heads down and suppressed this part of their past – in 2016, the conflict was widely construed as an inclusive experience, which saw men and women giving their lives ‘for Ireland’ even when fighting ‘for King and Empire’. A generation ago this would have shocked traditional nationalists, who regarded the Great War as an ‘English’ one, in contrast to the Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. However, European integration and the Peace Process gradually brought about a different mindset. Among historians, it was the late Keith Jeffery who spearheaded the revision of our perception of Ireland's standing in the war. This reassessment was further developed in 2008, with John Horne's editingOur war, a volume jointly published by RTÉ (the Irish broadcasting company) and the Royal Irish Academy, in which ten of the leading historians of the period – including Keith Jeffery, Paul Bew, David Fitzpatrick, and Catriona Pennell – presented Ireland as a protagonist, rather than merely a victim of British imperialism. By 2016, this new understanding had largely reshaped both government and public perceptions, with ‘the emergence of a more tolerant and flexible sense of Irish identity’. This has been confirmed by the largely consensual nature of the war centenary commemorations. While Dublin took the initiative, Northern Ireland's Sinn Féin leaders were ready to follow suit with the then deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, visiting the battlefield of the Western Front to honour the memory of the Irish dead, and the Speaker of the Belfast Assembly, Mitchel McLaughlin, and his party colleague, Elisha McCallion, the mayor of Derry and Strabane, laying wreaths at the local war memorials.

AbstractWhen the British government declared war against Germany in August 1914, a great drive to gain popular support by presenting the conflict to the public as a morally righteous endeavour began in earnest. Stories of German violence against French and Belgian civilians, largely based in fact, were central to this process of ‘cultural mobilisation’. The German serviceman thus came to be widely regarded in Britain as inherently cruel and malevolent while his British counterpart was revered as the embodiment of honour, chivalry and courage. Yet by the autumn of 1920, less than two years after the Armistice, the conduct of members of the crown forces in Ireland was being publicly drawn into question by British commentators in a manner that would have been unthinkable during the war against Germany. Drawing on contemporary press reports, parliamentary debates and personal narrative sources, this article explores and analyses the moral climate in Britain in 1920 and 1921 and comments on the degree to which memories of atrocities committed by German servicemen during the Great War informed popular and official responses to events in Ireland.

ABSTRACTThe Tudor regime faced its greatest challenge in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century. The extension of royal authority had run into fierce opposition from a confederacy of Gaelic lords led by Hugh O'Neill. The Tudors stigmatized such resistance as rebellion but the fact that it was taking place in a dependent kingdom in which the monarch was not resident quickly rendered it a war of liberation. This prompts comparison with the other great independence struggle of the early modern period – the Dutch revolt. In both cases the language of faith and fatherland came to the fore. In Ireland this rhetoric was directed at the English-speaking descendants of the Norman conquerors whose support was crucial to the success of O'Neill's cause. Yet it fell on deaf ears because the confederates were unable to legitimize their struggle in the eyes of these catholic loyalists. The sources of political and religious legitimacy were stronger in The Netherlands. While the Netherlandish provincial estates were founts of popular sovereignty, the Irish parliament was an organ of the Tudor state. And whereas in Holland the source of ecclesiastical authority was the non-hierarchical Dutch Reformed Church, in Ireland it was externalized in the person of Clement VIII who could not be won over in spite of the efforts of Peter Lombard, O'Neill's agent in Rome.

This article examines one of the most intense divisions between Irish nationalists during the Northern Ireland conflict. The Provisional I.R.A. claimed to be waging a similar war to that of the I.R.A. of the revolutionary era (1916–1921); an assertion disputed by many. The argument was significant because all the major political forces in the Irish Republic honoured the memory of what they called the ‘old’ I.R.A. (defined in a popular school history book as ‘the men who fought for Irish freedom between 1916 and 1923’). They argued that in contrast to the Provisionals, the ‘old’ I.R.A. possessed a democratic mandate and avoided causing civilian casualties. Echoes of these disputes resurfaced during Sinn Féin's bid for the Irish presidency during 2011. Commemorating Denis Barry, an anti-treaty I.R.A. prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1923, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin claimed that in contrast to men like Barry ‘those who waged war in Northern Ireland during the more recent Troubles were an impediment to Irish unity and directly responsible for causing distress and grief to many families. Yet they still seek to hijack history and the achievements of the noble people who fought for Ireland in our War of Independence … to justify their terrorist campaign.’

In 2012 the governments in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland launched their Decade of Centenaries projects to ‘focus’ on ‘significant centenaries’ occurring between 2012 and 2022-3, with an unusual degree of co-ordination between them. The initiatives have generated major public interest in the commemoration of events like the third Home Rule crisis, the 1913 Lockout, the 1916 rising, the First World War, the War of Independence, extension of the franchise to women, and partition, and also in the meaning and relevance of historiography. This paper examines the thinking behind the Decade of Centenaries, the state of the Irish Labour History Society and Irish labour historiography, the involvement of state authorities with labour anniversaries, and the consequences for publications on labour and on the public understanding of labour historiography. While the Decade of Centenaries is patently an attempt to manage the remembrance of the controversies and violence that led to the creation of the two Irish states between 1920 and 1922, it has been beneficial for historians by encouraging popular engagement with the past. Traditionally, Irish labour historiography has been weak in its presence in the academy, but strong in its organic connections with the trade union movement. The Decade of Centenaries has allowed it to exploit its strength to secure greater state and public recognition. Among the positive outcomes have been a significant increase in the number of labour historians and publications on labour, and an extension of the ambit of labour history into new fields of enquiry.

Do large franchise extensions bring about dramatic electoral changes? Electoral reforms in 1918 nearly tripled the number of people eligible to vote in Ireland. Following the reforms—the largest franchise extension in U.K. history—the previously obscure Sinn Féin party secured 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats, an outcome that precipitated a guerrilla war and ultimately independence from the United Kingdom. However, our analysis finds little evidence that the franchise reforms benefited Sinn Féin. New female electors appear less likely to have supported Sinn Féin while new male electors were no more likely to vote for Sinn Féin than the existing electorate. Women also appear less likely to have cast a vote at all. Economic and social factors did matter when it came to voting, however, as did public opinion in relation to armed rebellion. These results remind us that dramatic political changes, such as those that took place in Ireland 1918, do not require dramatic changes in political participation. Sinn Féin’s electoral success was more likely driven by a change of heart on behalf of the Irish electorate, rather than a change in its composition.

AbstractCapital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.

AbstractThe Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 spurred organized political activity among women in Britain, including former suffragists who campaigned against coercion in Ireland and members of the Irish minority in Britain who supported more radical republican efforts to achieve Irish independence. Their efforts are particularly significant because they occurred immediately after the granting of partial suffrage to women in 1918. This article argues that the advent of female suffrage changed the landscape of women's political mobilization in distinct ways that were made visible by advocacy on Ireland, including the regendering of the discourse of citizenship and the creation of new opportunities beyond the vote for women to exercise political power. At the same time, the use of women's auxiliary organizations and special meetings and the strategic blurring of the public and private spheres through the political use of domestic spaces all indicate the strength of continuities with nineteenth-century antecedents. The article further situates women's political advocacy on Ireland in an imperial and transnational context, arguing that it was part of the process of reconceptualizing Britain's postwar global role whether through outright anti-imperialism, in the case of Irish republicans, or through humanitarianism and the new internationalism, in the case of most former suffragists. Finally, the article examines the failure of these two groups of women to forge alliances with each other, underscoring the ways in which both class and nationality challenged a notional common interest based on sex.

The movement for ‘military preparedness’ in America and Britain gained tremendous momentum at the turn of the century. It assimilated the cult of manliness — the key public virtue, which allowed a person to claim possession of himself and a nation to reclaim possession of itself. An army was the means of marshalling a mass of people for regeneration. The symbol of a nation's preparedness to take control of its own soul was the readiness to bear arms. Although this movement originated in the middle-class, Protestant cultures of the USA and England, its core ideas were adopted by many political movements. Affected by these ideas, as well as the formation of the Protestant Ulster Volunteers in 1913, a movement to reclaim Irish independence through the mass bearing of arms began in South and West Ireland in autumn 1914. Women were excluded from these Volunteer companies, but set up their own organization, Cumann na mBan, as an auxiliary to the men's. The Easter Rising in 1916 owed as much to older ideas of the coup d'état as new ideas of mass mobilization, but subsequent history recreated that Rising as the ‘founding’ moment of the Irish republic. It was not until mass conscription was threatened two years later that the mass of people were absorbed into the idea of an armed campaign against British rule. From 1919 to 1923, the reality of guerrilla-style war pressed people into a frame demanding discipline, secrecy, loyalty and a readiness to act as the prime nationalist virtues. The ideal form of relationship in war is the brotherhood, both as actuality and potent myth. The mythology of brotherhood creates its own myths of women (as not being there, and men not needing them) as well as creating the fear and the myth that rape is the inevitable expression of brotherhoods in action. Despite explicit anxiety at the time about the rape of Irish women by British soldiers, no evidence was found of mass rape, and that fear has disappeared into oblivion, throwing up important questions as to when rape is a weapon of war. The decade of war worsened the relationship of women to the political realm. Despite active involvement as ‘auxiliaries’ women's political status was permanently damaged by their exclusion as warriors and brothers, so much so that they disappear into the status of wives and mothers in the 1937 Irish Constitution.

AbstractIn 1778, in response to news of the American alliance with France, the British government proposed a series of Catholic relief bills aimed at tolerating Catholicism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Officials saw the legislation as a pragmatic response to a dramatically expanded war, but ordinary Britons were far less tolerant. They argued that the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France. Through an elaborate and well-connected popular print culture, Britons living in distant Atlantic communities, such as Kingston (Jamaica), Glasgow, Dublin, and New York City, publicly engaged in a radical brand of Protestant patriotism that began to question the very legitimacy of their own government. Events culminated in June 1780, with five days of violent, deadly rioting in the nation's capitol. Yet the Gordon Riots represent only the most famous example of this new, more zealous defense of Protestant Whig Britishness. In the British Caribbean and North America, unrelenting fears of French invasions and the perceived incompetence of the government mixed with an increasingly confrontational Protestant political culture to expose the fragile nature of British patriotism. In Scotland, anti-Catholic riots drove the country to near rebellion in early 1779, while in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics took advantage of this political instability to make demands for economic and political independence, culminating in the country's legislative autonomy in 1782. Ultimately, Catholic relief and the American alliance with France fundamentally altered how ordinary Britons viewed their government and, perhaps, laid the foundations for the far more radical political culture of the 1790s.

Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article focuses on the legal writing of four Israeli lawyers in the period immediately after Israel's independence in 1948, showing how Polish law was used by these lawyers as a source for occasional precedents, for critiquing Israeli law (dominated by English law), and, mostly, for constitutional precedents.The relatively greater impact of Polish law in the constitutional realm can be attributed to the fact that Poland (like other new countries established in the interwar period in the periphery of western Europe, such as Ireland) offered Israeli lawyers constitutional models that were both more modern, and more relevant to the specific circumstances of the new state, where religion played an important role in defining the identity of the nation. The history of the impact of Polish law on Israeli law can thus serve as an example of interwar constitutional innovation in the European periphery, and its later impact on post-World War II constitutional law.

Parliament and foreign policy in the eighteenth century. By Jeremy Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+261. ISBN 0-521-83331-0. £45.00.Art and arms: literature, politics and patriotism during the seven years' war. By M. John Cardwell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 0-7190-6618-2. £49.99.The British Isles and the war of American independence. By Stephen Conway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. vii+407. ISBN 0-19-820649-3. £60.00.Revolution, religion and national identity: imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795. By Peter M. Doll. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-8386-3830-9. £38.00.Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. By Bob Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 392. ISBN 0-19-924693. £45.00.Parliaments, nations, and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850. Edited by Julian Hoppit. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+225. ISBN 0-7190-6247-0. £15.99.Politik-Propaganda-Patronage. Francis Hare und die englische Publizistik im spanischen Erbfolgekrieg. By Jens Metzdorf. Mainz: Verlag Philip von Zabern, 2000. Pp. xv+566. ISBN 3-8053-2584-3. DM 114.00.Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783. By Vincent Morley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x+366. ISBN 0-521-81386-7. £48.00.Breaking the backcountry: the Seven Years War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765. By Matthew C. Ward. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Pp. 329. ISBN 0-8229-4214-3. $34.95.The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750. By Rebecca Wills. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. 253. ISBN 1-86232-142-6. £20.00.It has never been possible to write the history of eighteenth-century Britain as that of an island entirely by itself. Over a century ago, the Cambridge historian, J. R. Seeley, famously insisted that the history of England (sic) lay as much in America and Asia as in England, whilst G. M. Trevelyan's classic narrative of England under Queen Anne (3 vols., 1930–4) was presented against the background of the War of the Spanish Succession. More recently, John Brewer's remarkable Sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1784 (1989) demonstrated the extent to which the British state, and its fiscal-political structures, were geared towards the mobilization of military power, primarily to be deployed against France. In The sense of the people: politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (1995), Kathleen Wilson revealed the importance of empire and imperial expansion in popular politicization, whilst Linda Colley's Britons (1992) showed just how central the struggle with France was to the development of eighteenth-century British national identity. At the same time, our understanding of the European and global state system in which Britain played such a prominent role has been illuminated by Hamish Scott's British foreign policy in the age of the American revolution (1990), together with many publications by Jeremy Black including British foreign policy in the age of Walpole (1985) and America or Europe? British foreign policy, 1739–1763 (1997).

This article surveys independent Ireland’s economic policies and performance. It has three main messages. First, the economic history of post-independence Ireland was not particularly unusual. Very often, things that were happening in Ireland were happening elsewhere as well. Second, for a long time, we were hampered by an excessive dependence on a poorly performing UK economy. And third, EC membership in 1973 and the single market programme of the late 1980s and early 1990s were absolutely crucial for us. Irish independence and European Union (EU) membership have complemented each other, rather than being in conflict: Each was required to give full effect to the other. Irish independence would not have worked as well for us as it did without the EU; and the EU would not have worked as well for us as it did without political independence.

Many of the new states that emerged or reconstituted themselves after the First World War used declarations of independence or preliminary constitutions, or both, as organic law until the adoption of a permanent constitution. The majority of those documents did not address the civil and political rights of citizens (e.g. Germany, Ireland) or did so very briefly (e.g. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, Latvia). Estonia stood out by having a whole chapter dedicated to civil rights in its preliminary constitution. The Preliminary Constitution of Estonia (valitsemise ajutine kord) was adopted by the Constituent Assembly (Asutav Kogu) on 4 June 1919, only six weeks after the Assembly first convened on 23 April 1919. The Constituent Assembly was elected and worked on the Preliminary Constitution at the time of the War of Independence between Estonia and Soviet Russia. Strong left-wing sentiment in the country’s society was reflected in the composition of the Assembly: social democrats held 41 seats, the Labour Party (tööerakond) held 30 seats, and Socialist-Revolutionaries (esseerid) held seven seats, together accounting for 65 per cent of the total 120 seats. The centrist People’s Party (rahvaerakond) led by the journalist and renowned politician Jaan Tõnisson had 25 seats, the centre-right Rural League (maaliit) led by another prominent politician and lawyer Konstantin Päts had only seven seats, the Christian People’s Party had five seats, three seats belonged to representatives of the German minority, and one seat went to the Russian minority. Similar proportions were reflected in the 15-member Constitution Committee that was elected on 24 April 1919. The first draft of the Preliminary Constitution, and of the Civil Rights Chapter as part of it, was allegedly prepared by a young legal scholar named Jüri Uluots. Uluots was a member of the Special Committee that was already convened by the Provisional Government in March of 1919 before the election of the Constituent Assembly. The Special Committee was composed of eight lawyers, each of whom was appointed by one of the major political parties. It was assigned the task to provide first drafts of the provisional and permanent constitutions. The Committee fulfilled only the first task. Due to disagreements in the Special Committee, the draft Preliminary Constitution was submitted to the Assembly without the Civil Rights Chapter. The Constituent Assembly processed the Preliminary Constitution Bill very quickly. The Assembly and its committees worked six days a week. It took about three weeks for the Constitution Committee to modify the Bill and submit it to the plenary session of the Assembly on 18 May 1919. The plenary session read the Bill three times and adopted it on 4 June 1919. The Preliminary Constitution entered into force on 9 July 1919 and was in force until 21 December 1920, when Estonia’s first Constitution entered into full force. The Committee spent considerable time on discussing the Civil Rights Chapter. Although concerns were expressed that the Committee was losing time with such discussions and suggestions were made to develop the chapter later as part of the permanent Constitution, the majority of the Committee deemed it important to also address civil rights in the Bill. Uluots, who had been elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the Rural League and was also a member of the Committee, submitted his draft Civil Rights Chapter to the Committee. Four out of eight sections in the Uluots draft found their way into the Chapter. These included equality before the law, civil and political rights and freedoms, and extraordinary restrictions. Sections regarding the right to participate in politics and the duty to obey the law (including military duty and the duty to pay taxes) were rejected at the plenary session, and the section regarding the right to private property was already omitted by the Committee. Also, the Committee preferred the social security provision proposed by the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the schoolmaster Hans Kruus, to the one included in the Uluots draft. The Committee added a new provision concerning education and rejected the right to choose occupations and engage in business proposed by a People’s Party member, the military officer Karl Einbund, and a provision entitling citizens to bring criminal charges against corrupt officials proposed by the social democrat, lawyer and journalist Johan Jans. The first section of the Uluots draft declared all citizens equal before the law. Disputes arouse over the second sentence of the provision. Uluots had proposed that all property and other rights relating to social ranks (the privileges of the nobility) should be abolished. The social democrats (Jans, the writer Karl Ast and others) demanded that privileges and titles should be abolished immediately. Their more moderate opponents (Uluots, Tõnisson, Westholm and others) feared that this would create a legal vacuum in property, inheritance and matrimonial rights. The majority of the Assembly supported the more radical approach and declared that there are no privileges and titles relating to ranks in Estonia. The law implementing the abolition was adopted a year later, in June of 1920. The school headmaster Jakob Westholm, a member of the People’s Party, and Villem Ernits, a social democrat, proposed that the Committee should include a provision concerning education. Their original proposal was scaled back by omitting the duration of mandatory elementary education and by deleting the right to free secondary and university education for talented students. The Preliminary Constitution eventually stipulated (§ 5) that education is compulsory for school age children and is free in elementary schools, and that every citizen is entitled to education in his/her mother tongue. The Committee combined civil and political rights, which were originally in two separate provisions in the Uluots draft, into one section (§ 6) stipulating that the inviolability of the person and home, secrecy of correspondence, freedom of conscience, religion, expression, language, press, assembly, association, and movement can only be restricted in accordance with the law. There were no disputes over the provision in the Committee or at the plenary session. The Committee preferred the proposal made by Kruus as the basis for further discussions on social security: “Every citizen will be guaranteed a decent standard of living according to which every citizen will have the right to receive the goods and support necessary for the satisfaction of his/her basic needs before less urgent needs of other citizens are satisfied. For that purpose, citizens must be guaranteed the obtaining of employment, the protection of motherhood and work safety, and necessary state support in the case of youth, old age, work disability and accidents.” While the last part of Kruus’ proposal was similar to Uluots’ draft and the term “decent standard of living” resembled the German menschenwürdiges Dasein (later adopted in Article 151 of the Weimar Constitution), the origin of the middle part of the provision remains unclear. The social security provision was by far the most extensively debated provision of the Chapter. The main issue was the state’s ability to fulfil its promises and whether social security should take the form of direct allowances or mandatory insurance.Views diverged even within the same parliamentary groups. The Committee replaced “will be guaranteed” with the less imperative “must be guaranteed in accordance with the law”. As a compromise, it deleted the middle part guaranteeing satisfaction of basic needs since it was deemed ‘too communist’ for many members. The plenary session supported adding the right to acquire land for cultivation and dwelling in the second sentence of the provision (§ 7) just before the adoption of the Bill. The last section in the Chapter (§ 8) provided that extraordinary restrictions of the rights and freedoms of citizens and the imposition of burdens come into force in the event of the proclamation of a state of emergency on the basis and within the limits of the corresponding laws. In the course of the discussions led by the lawyer and member of the Labour Party, Lui Olesk, the Committee turned the original general limitations clause into an emergency powers clause resembling similar provisions in the Russian Constitution of 1906 (Article 83) and the Austrian Basic Law on the General Rights of Nationals of 1867 (Article 20). Uluots urged the Committee to include protection of private property in the Bill as a safeguard against tyranny. The provision caused long and heated debates on the limits to nationalisation of private property, especially the principle of fair compensation. The provision was rejected by the majority of both the Committee and the plenary session. In anticipation of land reform, the deputies did not want to narrow down legal options for the expropriation of large estates owned mostly by the German nobility. After their defeat on the protection of private property, the right-wing members wished to protect freedom to choose an occupation and engage in business, trade, industry and agriculture. The majority refused again, arguing that during the war, there had been too much profiteering, and speculators do not deserve protection, and also that the government should have free hands to regulate industry. Without any long deliberations, the Committee also rejected the proposal to allow citizens to sue civil servants in criminal courts. Jans defended his proposal by pointing out the high level of corruption among officials and the need to provide the people with a means for self-defence. His opponents argued that Estonia had already set up administrative courts in February of 1919, providing citizens with an avenue for challenging the corrupt practices of officials. Committee and Assembly members also discussed the legal nature of the fundamental rights and freedoms included in the Bill. Some social democrats deemed it important to craft the provisions as guarantees that citizens can enforce against the state (Jans), but the majority deemed the provisions as political guidance for the legislator. Supporters of the latter view were afraid that direct enforceability of the Civil Rights Chapter would saddle the government with an unsurmountable economic burden. The state’s only directly binding obligation was probably the right to free elementary education.

Life writing by disabled people in Ireland during the post-independence period constitutes a culturally specific narrative emphasizing the relationship between disability and class and the shaping forces of social and geographical insularity. Because of the often contentious history of activist blind workers in Ireland, as well as the ongoing association between ocular impairments and Ireland's political and economic history, memoirs of sight loss provide a particularly rich field of inquiry into the relationship among disability, class, and the impact of colonialism. Key to this investigation are Sean O'Casey's I Knock at the Door (1939) and Joe Bollard's memoir of mid-century Ireland Out of Sight (1998).

Abstract A founding member of the Irish Literary Society, an early member of the Gaelic League, and a leading figure in the Irish Co-operative Movement, Thomas William Rolleston was one of the most notable figures in movements for Irish cultural and economic revival during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Rolleston also had a keen interest in German literature and culture, developed originally from the four years that he lived in Wiesbaden and Dresden between 1879 and 1883. This experience granted him some appreciation of conditions that obtained in Germany prior to the outbreak of the First World War, including Prussian-Polish relations. In 1917, Rolleston published a significant pamphlet assessing Irish-British relations during the decades preceding the 1916 Rising in Ireland as compared with relations between Prussia and Poland over the same period. Rolleston rejects a widespread view in Ireland that the moral authority, which the British Government had accorded to itself as a defender of the rights of small nations in the war against Germany, had been fatally compromised by its willingness to countenance Polish independence while continuing to oppose Irish independence. This essay considers the contrasts that Rolleston draws between Ireland and Poland in 1917 in the light of his general views on the Irish language question and Irish politics during the 1900s.

AbstractWhile scholars have rightly recognised that the First World War transformed twentieth-century Ireland, this article queries assumptions regarding the scope and scale of public support for hostilities during 1917 and 1918. Eleven elite boys’ schools are used as case studies to assess civilian reactions to the ongoing war effort, food shortages, and the 1918 conscription crisis within specific institutional communities, illuminating the importance of socio-religious affiliations and political aspirations in determining late-war behaviour. Drawing on school magazines and newspaper coverage of college events, it is argued that alternative visions of statehood underpinned divergent reactions to the conflict; Protestant schools clung to fundraising and militaristic activities seen to support continued union with Britain but Catholic establishments rejected such endeavours in the wake of increased separatist sentiment. This research also casts new light on the interplay between conflict, educational socialisation and politicisation in revolutionary Ireland. Constitutional nationalist reputation aside, wartime mobilisation in elite Catholic schools proved extremely lacklustre, while the unionist expectations their Protestant counterparts had for the post-war world ultimately went unfulfilled. Prestigious colleges across the denominational spectrum demonstrably navigated late-war pressures on their own terms, shaping Ireland's political landscape both throughout and beyond the conflict's most contentious years.