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The term "Southern Irish Protestant" encompasses a three-dimensional notion of geography, national consciousness—and religion. Southern Protestants were often reviled as having "an alien creed, an alien culture and alien aspirations." While only 7 percent of the population of the Irish Free State at independence in 1922, they were economically prominent and educationally privileged. As such, this elite generated an extensive literature of memoir, novels, autobiography, plays, and poetry out of proportion to their numbers. This essay explores the Southern Irish Protestant experience and identity in this new, but still old, Ireland through literary representation, hearing hostile voices as well as empathetic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, food is a sensory embodiment of the punishment and powerlessness they experienced while contained within the institutions. As part of the Irish Free State's architecture of containment, the relationship between the Laundries and the state is unique: the Catholic‐run institutions operated outside of state bureaucracy, yet they were central to its attempts to consolidate sovereignty as a fledgling nation. For historians, the sensing body is one of the few avenues to understanding the Magdalene institutions and their place in twentieth‐century Irish history. This article uses memories of food as a point of access to the subjectivities of survivors, and in doing so reveals the affective imprint of institutional power on embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War is often regarded through the prism of commemoration and remembrance of the dead and missing of that conflict, a lost generation. The men and women that returned, especially those who were disabled by their wartime service can be considered a Forgotten Generation. Literature about casualties of the war tend to focus on shell-shock also known as neurasthenia. The physically injured tend to be overlooked, despite numbers that far outnumber neurasthenic cases. The British Ministry of Pensions established clinics and hospitals in Ireland to care for both physical and psychological casualties. After the war, and the later establishment of the Irish Free State, these facilities were retained for the continuing treatment of veterans who had been awarded a disability pension for wounds, injuries or illnesses that were directly attributable to their war-time service. Internal British government correspondence described the services as an Imperial Obligation to be maintained until the last surviving disabled veteran had passed away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922 did not immediately change this position and natural law was limited to a peripheral position during the drafting of the first Irish Constitution. This article examines how and why the use of natural law by the Irish courts became increasingly acceptable by the middle of the twentieth century. It will also examine the connection between the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State and the 1934 judgment of the Supreme Court in State (Ryan) v Lennon. This provides a new perspective on the judgments delivered in this case and on the origins of the use of natural law in interpreting Irish constitutional law. The article will also examine the legacy of State (Ryan) v Lennon, the position of natural law in the 1937 Irish Constitution and the evolving position of natural law in the decades that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of the Protestant minority in Ireland during the years of the Irish revolution has been the subject of much academic and popular debate in recent years. At issue is the extent to which the decline by one-third of the Protestant population of the Irish Free State between 1911 and 1926 was a result either of intimidation, sectarianism or ethnic cleansing during the revolution itself, or of more mundane factors such as long-term patterns of migration and low marriage and birth rates. Drawing upon digitised census returns and the rich detail contained in the records of the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches in County Longford, this article will show that the causes of depopulation are better understood when precise chronological, local, denominational and gender perspectives are brought to bear. It will argue for greater engagement with sociological literature to define more effectively the meaning of sectarianism in revolutionary Ireland. It will also invert the principal question of why the Protestants left and seek to explain why those who remained chose to do so. County Longford is chosen as a suitable case-study because it was affected by both long-term socio-economic factors and revolutionary violence, and the three Protestant denominations in the county have extensive archives which help to fill the gap in civil data occasioned by the absence of a census of population for fifteen years between 1911 and 1926. The article identifies dynamics present in Longford that can be explored in other regional contexts to achieve a wider national understanding of this demographic shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covering the 1924 Tailteann Games, a 2-week sporting and cultural celebration held in the Irish Free State, the following article explores the broader sociocultural significance of the Tailteann's opening ceremony. Said to be the restoration of an ancient Irish festival, the Tailteann Games were envisioned as an Irish 'race Olympiad' open to those born in Ireland and those of Irish descent. Welcoming visitors from several nations, the festival marked an ambitious effort on the part of its organisers to formally announce the newly independent state onto the world stage. While previous studies on the Tailteann Games of 1924 have depicted it as an attempt to project a certain kind of Irish identity, the present article seeks to specify the meaning of this identity in much greater detail. Surveying the use of ancient folklore, mass gymnastic displays and modern technologies during the opening ceremony, it is argued that the 1924 Games sought to depict the Irish Free State as a young, modern and culturally vibrant state. The article thus highlights efforts to project a specific and definitive form of Irish identity during the Free State's opening years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ultimate test of whether an association is voluntary or not is if you can leave it. It is difficult, at this remove, to appreciate how live an issue secession from the British commonwealth of nations was in the 1920s and 1930s. It occupied an inordinate amount of time and negotiation for a doctrine that had been ostensibly conceded in 1920. Yet, much as with the case of the appeal to the judicial committee of the privy council, once the dominions sought to take advantage of the freedom which had been guaranteed by official statements, they found a formidable amount of diplomatic pressure and legal opinion brought to bear to indicate that no such right could be officially declared. This article traces the evolution of the arguments about the right to secede in the 1930s, and examines how the right came eventually to be exercised in the case of the new commonwealth countries in the 1940s. It concludes by examining how the doctrine of secession as developed in the 1930s was abandoned in order to retain Indian membership in the commonwealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past forty years, the historiography of British Army ex-serviceman in Ireland has undergone a veritable 'historical revolution'. Like its British and international counterparts, the historiography on Ireland has focused on the lives and care of these men after the war within the Irish Free State; Irish government policy towards them; and ex-servicemen's relationships with the Irish and British governments, British agencies and their own often hostile communities. Researchers continue to document the existence, organisation and activities of two British government agencies: the Land Trust and Ministry of Pensions, with brief analyses being undertaken on the British Legion and more especially the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association's vital role in relieving impoverished ex-servicemen and their families. Yet far more can still be said about 'British' military charity in Ireland after 1922. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, to discuss two court cases that were fought by the Irish, British and Northern Irish governments and several other Irish interests between 1923 and 1929 over the legacies of two then redundant pre-war Irish military charities. Second, to analyse the place of two court cases within the broader contexts of Irish post-war state-building and the history of the British ex-serviceman, but more especially his family in Ireland. What would their fate be in an independent Ireland? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Irish cooperative movement in the dairy industry was driven from above, first by the philanthropic Irish Agricultural Organisation Society and then by the Irish Free State. Although the early cooperative movement has been linked with constructive unionism, this article highlights important continuities in the approach taken to cooperative creameries by the Irish Free State government in the 1920s. Using the problem of creamery management as a focus, it argues that the movement was unable to deliver on its stated goal of democratic empowerment of farmers. Instead, it was the means through which power was renegotiated between farmers, landlords and the state in the context of two crucial transitional moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled Irish Great War veterans who lived in the Irish Free State. To do so, it utilises the records of the Ministry of Pensions, the British governmental department, that was charged with assisting these men. This research argues that the Irish Free State was a particularly challenging society for disabled ex-servicemen to reside. Yet, whilst the social and governmental reception on offer to disabled Great War veterans was less favourable in the Free State than their similarly afflicted former comrades in Britain, they were better able to benefit from substantial assistance from the Ministry of Pensions. The department lived up to its billing as an “imperial obligation” in the newly formed state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Statute Law Revision Act of Ireland. Topics discussed include enactment of Statute Law Revision Act of 2005 for examining primary legislation on the statute book passed prior to independence; accessing the private acts and the local and personal acts; and details of the Statute Law Revision acts of 2005-2015. It also mentions Irish Free State Act of 1922.

A second Irish Grants Committee met for the first time in October 1926 to deal with claims for compensation from distressed southern Irish loyalists. By the time it had ceased its work, the committee had dealt with over 4,000 applications and recommended 2,237 ex-gratia grants. The surviving files constitute over 200 boxes of near-contemporary witness testimony and supplementary material making them an incomparable, if problematic, source for the study of the southern loyalist experience of the Irish Revolution – a topic of much current historiographical interest. Applicants had to prove that they had suffered loss on account of their ‘allegiance to the government of the United Kingdom’, and by applying labelled themselves as both ‘loyalist’ and ‘victim’. A study of the claim files from one district, Arva in County Cavan, offers unique perspectives on the loyalist experience of revolution in a southern Irish community, personal definitions of loyalty, and the relationship between behaviour and allegiance during war. The Arva applicants often struggled to present their financial losses as resulting directly from their ‘loyalty to the Crown’. Their statements, and the way they were treated by the committee, serve to complicate an often over-simplified understanding of civilian behaviour and popular support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent historical treatment of Anglo-Irish relations in the 1930s has overlooked the complex nature of the legal disagreements between the two countries during that period. This article provides an account of some of the fundamental points of legal disagreement between the countries. It explains how differences of opinion as to the structure of intra-commonwealth constitutional relations led to conflict between the British government and that of the Irish Free State, with particular reference to the oath of allegiance crisis. It considers how other commonwealth countries saw these points of conflict. It concludes with a re-appraisal of the roles of Lord Hailsham and de Valera in Anglo-Irish relations, as examples of differing attitudes towards the commonwealth relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the participation of Irishmen in the Great War has prompted much scholarship, the commemoration of their involvement—and in particular how Irish journalism reported and interpreted such commemorations—has been less examined. This article argues that the journalism surrounding the annual Armistice Day commemoration was a central factor in the battle for power in independent Ireland. It finds that the annual commemoration played a major part in the identity politics of the Irish Free State and that this was greatly intensified by journalistic argument about the motives of those who had fought in the Great War, what that war meant in relation to the freedom of small nations, and how best to commemorate those who had died. It also finds that while such journalistic argument helped engender an air of stigma about Irish involvement in the Great War, later journalistic arguments played a key role in removing that stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The value of the Irish Free State's contribution to the development of dominion sovereignty is a source of debate amongst historians. This article contends that the Irish Free State was at the forefront of the dominions' pursuit of sovereignty between 1922 and 1932. It looks at the state's acquisition of a uniquely Irish Great Seal and the right of direct access to the king, and seeks to explain why, in early 1931, the Irish Free State government decided to break with the procedures for seeking to advise the king that had operated up to that point. The article also analyses the motivations behind the British government's desire to retain the procedures as they existed prior to March 1931. It shows how Irish Free State officials used the state's constitutional relationship with the king to increase Irish independence from the British government, and to enhance the Free State's external sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 provided monetary independence to the newly established Irish Free State. The existing historiography views Irish monetary and banking policy post-independence as following British precedent in terms of the structure and design of state monetary institutions. However, this article considers how Professor Henry Parker-Willis's experience of establishing the United States (US) Federal Reserve system in 1913 had a direct impact on his work as chair of the Irish banking commission in 1926. This research highlights that Parker-Willis played a significantly more important role in formulating the Irish Currency Act 1927 than is currently recognized. It further identifies that Parker-Willis's design for a wholly independent, non-political Irish currency commission was primarily based on his disillusionment with the political interference then evident in the management of the Federal Reserve system. This article, therefore, challenges the dominant view that Irish monetary institution building in the 1920s automatically followed British precedent, but rather identifies the direct influence of US monetary structures on the development of Irish institutions. This is an internationalist dimension not recognized in the existing historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the 21st Eucharistic Congress that was held on June 20, 1932. It states that the congress introduced the Irish Free State and Irish nation under Catholicism. Topics include use of music as community-building process, Catholic music-reform movement, and the spread of Irish nationalism.

The article focuses on the history of censorship within the Catholic church in Ireland. The author discusses the relationship between the Irish government and the Catholic church after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, explores the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, and examines the opposition of the bill by the Irish newspaper the "Irish Statesman."

The first ever Labour government in Britain took office in February 1924. Its prime concern during its brief 10-month period in office was to stress its legitimacy and political credibility. In the Irish Free State the fledgling Cumann na nGaedheal government of W. T. Cosgrave had emerged victorious from civil war and was likewise determined to stress its legitimacy. An inordinate amount of time and energy during 1924 was spent attempting to wrestle with the final unfinished element of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty – the permanent establishment of the boundary between north and south to be determined by a Boundary Commission set up under Article 12 of the Treaty. The Labour government, determined not allow the Irish issue to re-emerge in British politics, employed a legalistic approach, which was bedeviled by Northern Ireland's obduracy in refusing to appoint a representative to the Boundary Commission. Labour referred the matter to adjudication by the Privy Council, seeking guidance on whether the British government could appoint for Ulster, whether the Commission would be valid without a northern representative and whether decisions were required to be a majority or unanimous. When the Privy Council ruled that the Commission would not be legal without a northern representative, amending legislation had to be passed in both the House of Commons and Dáil Eireann allowing Britain to appoint for Northern Ireland, after which a majority rather than unanimity would suffice. All of this, considered by many in nationalist Ireland to demonstrate prevarication, delay and bad faith on behalf of the British Labour government, caused considerable political embarrassment to Cosgrave not only from anti-Treaty republicans but also from Irish Labour and government TDs in Dáil Eireann. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ulster Bank faced a unique set of circumstances following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Although headquartered in Belfast with a strongly Unionist ethos, Ulster Bank continued to operate its considerable branch network in Southern Ireland notwithstanding partition, civil war and significant economic dislocation. This historical analysis considers Ulster Bank's operations in the context of both the realities of operating in a Catholic-dominated Irish Free State and the relationship with its owner, London County & Westminster Bank. This research challenges the dominant opinion that the Belfast Boycott of 1920–22 had a significant impact on Ulster Bank's southern business. It also identifies that Ulster Bank was subject to a previously unidentified level of external oversight from Westminster Bank from the mid-1920s on. This oversight, on occasion, resulted in direct confrontation and compromised Ulster Bank's ability to operate independently in Southern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about Blueshirt movement that posed a threat to Irish democracy in the 1930s focusing on illegal displays, campaigns, and public processions that increased post civil war and anti treaty sentiments among communities. The activities of the Army Comrades Association (ACA) against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the republican party, Fianna Fáil is noted. The political movement of the Blueshirts under the leadership of Eoin O'Duffy is mentioned.

The article talks about the Irish Free State that resulted from the War of Independence between 1919 to 1921. It is noted that the revival of Irish language was the core aspect of the country's nation building project. Topics include publishing of the book "An Cliathán Clé" by Tadhg Ó Murchadha in 1932 and Rugby in Ireland that provided international sporting stage to the country.

The article talks about the importance of Irish leaders who engaged people to participate in sports during the initial years of Irish Free State. It examines the variety of sports activities of the armed police forces Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) in the Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. It also discusses the responses from Irish public on sporting policemen, which helps in understanding the interaction between police and general public.

An essay concerning the reform of public health administration in the Irish Free State and the role of political organisation Cumann na nGaedheal in public health legislation is presented.