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Established towards the end of the Great War, the Irish Recruiting Council was responsible for one of the largest military recruitment campaigns ever waged on Irish soil. Tasked with raising 50,000 volunteers, it produced a wide array of promotional material which included posters, newspaper advertisements and a fortnightly magazine entitled The Irish Soldier. Its work has attracted a measure of scholarly attention, but little is known about its origins, its dealings with authorities in Westminster and Dublin Castle, and the operational difficulties it encountered when attempting to mobilise the public. Even less is known about its newspaper campaign and the reasons behind the continuation of the body in peacetime, when the need for recruits had apparently subsided. This paper addresses these shortcomings by examining the IRC in more detail than has hitherto been achieved in the historiography. In so doing, it calls for a revision of existing understandings of the Council, suggesting that it was not just a recruiting body per se , but a major propaganda agency which portrayed enlistment as a means of uniting a divided country and encouraged Irishmen to mobilise to help resolve long-standing tensions between nationalists and unionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Irish Catholic middle class became more powerful in both political and economic terms. It was this group that became the backbone of Irish nationalism as it emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But how did the Catholic middle classes respond to what was the greatest disaster in Irish history, Ireland's Great Famine of the 1840s? This article offers an account, based on a wide range of evidence, of the responses to the events of the Famine years, focusing especially on the role of the rural middle classes and the Catholic clergy, two of the most powerful elements within Irish political and social life. The overall argument is that, while it suited later nationalists to underline the universal nature of the catastrophe, suffering during the Great Irish Famine was concentrated in the ranks of the Catholic rural underclass, which was decimated by death and emigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Great Famine (1845–51) hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees fled to Britain, escaping the hunger and disease afflicting their homeland. Many made new lives there, but others were subsequently shipped back to Ireland by poor law authorities under the laws of Settlement and Removal. This article explores the coping strategies of the Famine Irish in Britain, and the responses of poor law authorities to the inflow of refugees with a particular focus on their use of removal. We argue that British poor law unions in areas heavily affected by the refugee crisis adopted rigorous removal policies, and that the non-settled Irish were consequently deeply reluctant to apply for poor relief, doing so only when alternative sources of support were unavailable. Thus, the true scale of Irish hardship was hidden from the official record. The article also explores, for the first time, the experiences of those sent back to Ireland, a country suffering from the devastating effects of Famine. The combination of heavy Irish immigration to Britain and large-scale removals back to Ireland created distrust between the authorities at British and Irish port towns, as both sides felt aggrieved by the inflow of destitute Irish arriving on their shores. At the centre of all this were the Irish poor themselves. Uncertainty, dislocation and hardship were often their experience, and we argue that this endured long after the Famine had ended; that the events of the late 1840s, indeed, created a new reality for the Irish in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the significance of private charity, local organisation and government policy have all been evaluated with respect to Irish famine relief, the role of the Royal Navy in distributing food and assisting ashore has been overlooked within the existing historical literature. Operating from its base at Cork and receiving provisions from Plymouth and Portsmouth, the navy battled against Atlantic storms throughout the winter of 1846–7, and for months thereafter, to supply coastal food depots. It had also to confront a growing lawlessness which placed merchant craft at sea and the movement of aid on shore in peril. Yet the navy was not only a vital means of transport. To assist with medical care, the Admiralty sent surgeons to Ireland who reported at length on the extent of starvation and the worst effects of disease—an initiative which brought the Admiralty into conflict with the authorities in Dublin. Furthermore, naval activities had always to be co-ordinated with the Treasury in London, which had overall responsibility for Irish relief yet often far less understanding of the practicalities of distribution along the south and west coasts of Ireland. The unexplored archival material used allows an original perspective on the efforts made to alleviate the worst effects of Black '47 and the calamity which overwhelmed so much of Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the history of the culture of popular protests and taxation riots in Ireland during the period from 1714 to 1740. Topics covered include analysis of revenue administration from the perspective of the fiscal-military state, the impact of the revenue collection on the people of Ireland, the findings that popular violent protests and other types of resistance to taxation were widespread, and part of social relations during this period.