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This essay will analyse the ways in which definitions of race in nineteenth-century Ireland were not only, nor simply set by British colonizers, but rather were produced and determined by Irish people themselves. This long history of Irish engagement with concepts of race shaped how the Young Ireland movement understood how the Irish nation was (racially) constituted. Additionally, the multi-racial history of the Irish nation inflected Young Ireland's understanding of how history structured the construction of an Irish nationality. This paper then will show how the Young Irelanders understood race and, more particularly, how they recognized themselves as racialized subjects. Their own adoption of a racialized Irishness was important to their vision for Ireland's revolutionary future. Placing race centrally within the writings of Young Ireland, highlighting its essential role in a historical account of Irish nationality, this essay will thereby cast new light on the difficulties inherent in Young Ireland's nationalist project. In particular, it will underscore the anxieties experienced by Young Ireland about the potential impossibility of the nationalist project with reference to its production and experience of racialized but ambiguous subject positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of religion in the production of nationalism has been subjected to uneven forms of scrutiny, most of these approaches rely on an implicit or explicit identification between sectarian affiliation and the dominant social group articulating a particular form of nationalism. This article will create a more nuanced picture by demonstrating the influence of a rhetoric of religiosity originating from a social group that generally resisted incorporation into a nationalist movement. It will do this by locating nineteenth century Irish nationalist John Mitchel firmly within a tradition of Presbyterianism at a time that his co-religionists were dominated by unionism and nationalism was taking on an increasingly Catholic orientation. This will show the difficulties of applying classic accounts of religion and nationalism to the Irish context. The ability of John Mitchel to intervene within the discursive space of nineteenth century Ireland is provocative in this context because of the implication that Mitchel's intervention would imply the existence of a non-sectarian social space through which confessional motifs could be exchanged and circulate with a regularity that is not often granted to Ireland due to the dominant tendency to view political and social conflict through a sectarian lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]