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The discussion in this essay clarifies three neglected aspects of the comparative destinies of the Irish in America and Great Britain. First, it explores an apparent if generally unrecognised discrepancy between theories of nationalism and those of ethnicity, attempting to close a loophole in the literature. Secondly, it assesses what being Irish meant to the networks bridging the diasporic experience in the old country and adopted lands. Thirdly, it looks at tours overseas, mainly to the United States, by nationalist figures from the vantage point of the formation of an imagined community or network. It is suggested that the disjunction and a degree of misunderstanding about the networking process arises because the literature presumes an already existing or nearly formed Irish Catholic identity among the immigrants on arrival in new lands. Charles Stewart Parnell's trip in early 1880 also allows elucidation of theoretical paradigms. This linkage of theory and a specific form of ethnic networking yields ...

(1999). Irish Diaspora politics in perspective: The United Irish leagues of Great Britain and America, 1900–14. Immigrants & Minorities: Vol. 18, The Great Famine and Beyond Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 214-239.

Politics in the era of Parnell and his contemporaries continues to exert immense fascination. The five biographical (in the instance of Philip Bull’s book semi-biographical) studies surveyed add ample texture to understanding this much-ploughed field. At the same time these works demonstrate the importance of biography as a tool for interpreting the past. Doubt about the value of biography as a form of academic historical inquiry has recently been revived by the director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, Patrick O’Brien. O’Brien insists that ‘unless the outcomes of a policy or set of policies are recognised by historians as significant and until those policies can be attributed in large measure to the ideas and leadership exercised by prominent politicians, then their lives, however deeply researched and readable, contribute very little to an understanding of the history of government and politics’. None of these studies were written with his strictures in mind, but they may well serve as a collective refutation, at least as far as the Irish past is concerned. They are also a testimony to the impress of F. S. L. Lyons on modern scholarship, if only in the sense that several challenge his verdicts.

The period from the fall of Parnell through to the Edwardian era was once described as a ‘long gestation’. William Butler Yeats’ pithy phrase referred to the vacuum left by the fall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a romantic view certainly, and one that has not stood the test of historical scrutiny.1 William Ewart Gladstone’s legacy during this period, it is suggested here, is also worth re-examining. His legislative attempts at establishing Home Rule, of course, ended in failure, in the House of Commons in 1886, and in the House of Lords in 1893. But the motives behind Gladstone’s strenuous efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ and thereby reconcile Irish Nationalists to the Union with Great Britain and to unite the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland in common endeavour did not die with his Home Rule bills. And although subsequent efforts ultimately met the same fate, they did so for different reasons. Historians have considered at length Gladstone’s efforts to pacify Ireland, and his attempt to reconcile its Catholic majority to the Union, as part of a tradition in British high politics, initiated by Sir Robert Peel and carried on after Gladstone in the guise of ‘constructive unionism’. Most scholars have treated Gladstone’s belief that Protestants and Catholics could unite to make Home Rule work with circumspection and have not linked the emergence in Ireland of ‘cooperation politics’ (as distinct from ‘co-operative politics’) at the turn of the twentieth century to his legacy.

This wide-ranging collection brings together multiple perspectives on a key period in Irish history, from the Fenian Rising in 1867 to the creation of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1921, with a focus on the formation of Irish identity. The chapters, written by team of experts, focus on key individuals or ideological groups and consider how they perceived Ireland's future, what their sense of Irish identity was, and who they saw as the enemy. Providing a new angle on Ireland during the period from 1867 to 1921, this book will be important reading for all those with an interest in Irish history.

Defenders of the Union is a concise and readable overview of the history and contentious politics of Unionism and the affect it has had on Anglo-Irish relations over the last two hundred years. It is an essential guide to this confusing topic and covers key areas such as: * definition of unionism * establishment of the union * Unionist literature * loyalists since 1972.