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Thesis advisor: James Cronin / The Northern Ireland conflict has often been viewed as parochial, closed off from the currents of international opinion and foreign influence. Yet nationalists, unionists, and pacifists consistently recruited supporters and confronted their adversaries on an international stage. The relative success or failure of these groups within the Northern Ireland political system was based in large part on their ability to navigate the changing global context. This dissertation demonstrates that to understand the development of the conflict and that of the peace process, it is necessary to take a comprehensive look at the role of the international community. The conflict in Northern Ireland was fundamentally international from its inception in the late 1960s and grew increasingly so over the next thirty years. Many of the ideas that motivated the groups involved in the Northern Ireland conflict were global in nature and origin, as were the institutions and organizations that became important players in the conflict and its resolution. Given that international ideas, institutions, and organizations were so central in forming the contours of the conflict, the conflict must be analyzed within a framework of international history. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Kevin O'Neill / This is a study of mna caointe, Irish keening women. Ranging from the semi-professional to the more occasional, mna caointe performed the caoineadh (Irish women's lament) at wakes and funerals and led their communities in the public expression of grief. Their performances included extemporaneously composed, sung, oral elegiac poetry, interspersed with choruses of wailing cries. In addition to praising the deceased, mourning his/her passing, and aggressively criticizing his/her enemies, mna caointe articulated their own concerns and assorted social tensions. Mna caointe grieved incidents of domestic violence and social slights and cursed those who offended them. The practice of the caoineadh originated prior to the Christian period in Ireland and ceased in the early twentieth century. Employing a multitude of diverse source material, this study relies most heavily upon folklore manuscripts held by the Department of Irish Folklore at the National University of Ireland, Dublin in Belfield. Unlike the works of scholars of folklore, music, and literature that have preceded, this study examines mna caointe to better understand the dynamics of colonialism and community and to elucidate moments of innovation involving women and understandings of identity, death, and power. This work chronicles the religious and historical significance of mna caointe, from the medieval period through the twentieth century Irish Diaspora, by contextualizing the practice and performers, in various cultural settings. Throughout these periods, keening and mna caointe were central to both positive and pejorative definitions of "Irish" identity. In medieval mythology, keening was one of the ways otherworldly women demonstrated the intimate connection between the land and those who resided upon it. In the colonial era, British colonists and travel writers cited the caoineadh and mna caointe among the elements that made Irish culture inferior. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aware of colonizers' disdain, agrarian agitators, Eileen O'Connell (the most famous keening woman), and Daniel O'Connell resorted to folk traditions centered on allegorical women and keening to protest British ascendancy, as well as political and economic injustice. Through their performances, nineteenth century mna caointe managed grief for their communities, mediated between the living and the dead, effected the transfer of the deceased to the afterlife by impersonating supernatural females, and provided women and colonized Irish with tools to rhetorically resist domination. Though economically marginal, for much of the nineteenth century, skilled mna caointe were compensated in ways that demonstrated their value and importance to rural communities. Demographic changes that began before the mid-nineteenth century Irish Potato Famine and accelerated after, especially the rise of strong farmers and the decimation of the laboring poor, resulted in the slow and uneven decline in hiring mna caointe. While Catholic priests and Roman devotions usurped many of their functions, and religious and cultural underpinnings of the caoineadh deteriorated, folk traditions regarding the mediatory role of longhaired mourning women persisted into the twentieth century Irish Diaspora. The legacy of mna caointe can be found in how the Irish ritualized emigration, conceived transatlantic identity, redefined community, and understood the bean si (banshee, i.e. the Irish supernatural death messenger). In sum, Irish history and culture are more fully understood through an examination of mna caointe. Their mythological heritage, religious significance, and legacy demonstrate ways that largely disenfranchised Irish women employed understandings of the transcendent to shape, protest, and change their lives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-63).

This thesis surveys musical culture's relationship with Irish nationalism after the Irish confederacy's rebellion in 1848 until the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles in 1972. It is the first such study to engage with a wide range of source material, including not only songs but also sources generated by political actors and organisations. It thus asks how far music and dance contributed to political movements and identities. It demonstrates that music provided propaganda, while performances created spectacles that attracted attention and asserted the strength, territorial claims, and military credentials of particular movements. Nationalists and unionists appropriated music and musical rituals from history, Britain, and one another. Appropriated British army rituals represented paramilitaries as legitimate national armies. Recycling songs made compositions easier to learn and suggested that new organisations acted as part of a continuous, historical movement. Appropriating songs and rituals from opponents asserted superiority over those opponents. Songs marked national allegiance and were therefore fought over extensively. For theorists and revivalists, defining Irish music and dance constructed notions of Irish nationhood. However, this thesis is as much about qualifying the claims often made for musical culture. One result of the failure to engage comprehensively with extra-musical source material is that studies often crudely credit music with having inspired unity among Irishmen and resistance against the colonial ruler. Music's relationship with resistance was more nuanced, and could cultivate disunity as much as the opposite. This study also problematises distinctions between British, unionist, and nationalist culture. These were not discrete categories, but overlapping soundscapes that interacted with and penetrated one another. Nor is 'traditional' music neatly distinguished from 'modern', 'commercial' music. As this study explains, traditional music's advocates demonstrated a consistent willingness to adapt and engage with modern methods. Overall, this thesis provides unprecedented insight into music's impact on nationalist politics.

After the English-led invasion of Ireland, between 1169 and 1172, the country was run by Anglo-Irish lords—English and Welsh men gifted with Irish land and titles for their service to the English King. Of these families, the Butlers were one of the three most powerful in the country. The 3rd and 4th Earls of Ormond, both named James Butler, each held the highest title in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant, multiple times as well as being successful military leaders. Add to this a large income from all the wine revenues of the country, and the Butlers were a force to be reckoned with. This thesis examines the Butlers in their seat of power, Kilkenny, to determine the connection between the two. It is apparent, by examining not only their policies but their surroundings, that the Butlers and Kilkenny had a mutually beneficial relationship. The Butlers profited from the extensive land they owned, the feudal nature of Ireland, and the trade in the city, and similarly helped the town prosper by building defensive fortifications, strengthening and expanding the city, and running the government efficiently. The actions of the Butlers and the town of Kilkenny prove that the Butlers were caught between the cultures of both England and Gaelic Ireland, as was typical of most of the Anglo-Irish ruling class.

In search of an Irish women's literary tradition, this dissertation examines the fiction of Irish women writers from Maria Edgeworth in 1800 to Jennifer Johnston in 1984. Contemporary anthropological, psychoanalytical, and literary theory suggests that women, even those of different cultures, excluded from public life and limited to the domestic sphere, would develop similar interests. When these interests ran counter to those of the dominant group, the women would have had to develop a technique to simultaneously express and encode these interests and concerns. This technique in literature, and specifically in the writers considered, often results in a muted plot. On the overt level the plot reifies the values and tenets of the establishment, but, at the muted level, the plot often expresses contradictory and subversive values. In 1800, Maria Edgeworth employs a "naive" narrator who both expresses male disinterest in the awful situations of the women he depicts and also distances the author from any implied criticism of this male perspective. Edgeworth combines her subtle expose with a critique of the desires encoded as "human," but actually merely "male," in canonical literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross again use an arguably deceptive narratorial device, as does Molly Keane in 1981. Elizabeth Bowen employs a more subtle narratorial device in The Last September, but one which still distances the author from her text. The re-vision of texts, literary and historical, indeed the re-visioning of history, recurs in Bowen, Keane, Kate O'Brien, Julia O'Faolain and Jennifer Johnston. Finally, one can trace similarities of both theme and technique over the whole period, despite the modifications of time and social change. We can also point to the major thematic and structural change which occurs when, in the past ten to fifteen years, writers have reversed the placement of muted and overt plot.

“Slowly Rushing Absent Mind” explores themes of origin and nature through poems about family history and the natural world. This collection explains poetry through poetry by using different forms—the ghazal, the prose poem, the sonnet and the lyric, to convey an awareness of a deeper consciousness. These poems seek to fill the space in the air above your shoulder at which the retail clerk stares as he hands you your change and wishes you good day. “The world we know,” Foucault explains, “is a profusion of entangled events;” these poems are meant to hint at a true beginning, one at which only the most exhaustive of genealogical research could possibly arrive, yet one that is intrinsic in the details of everyday life. / University of New Brunswick, Theses, Master of Arts

This thesis examines Irish and Jewish mothers' experience of maternity provision and infant care services in East London in the years 1870-1939. As newcomers these immigrants not only had to cope with poverty but also the barriers of language and different cultural customs. Leaving their family and kinship networks behind them, Irish and Jewish mothers had to find new sources of support when incapacitated through pregnancy or childbirth. Living in one of the poorest areas of London and unfamiliar with the local medical and welfare services, these immigrants might be expected to have suffered very poor health. On closer examination, however, Irish and Jewish immigrants appear to have had remarkably low rates of infant and maternal mortality. Despite the difficulties they faced as newcomers, Irish and Jewish mothers had certain advantages over the local population in East London. They were not only able to rely on the prolific and diverse services already present in East London, but could also call upon their own communal organisations. This provision offered a wide range of care and was a vital support to the newcomers. After examining the social and economic background to Irish and Jewish emigration and settlement the thesis examines what impact this had on their health patterns, particularly infant and maternal mortality. The following chapters explore what forms of support were available to married Irish and Jewish mothers through their own family and local neighbourhood and communal agencies. Chapter five concerns the unmarried mother and what provision was made specifically for her. The care offered by the host society to immigrant mothers and their infants is explored in chapters 6 to 8. Institutions covered by these chapters include voluntary hospitals, Poor Law infirmaries, and charitable organisations such as district nursing associations and medical missions. The thesis examines not only the services available to Irish and Jewish mothers, but also the attitudes of health professionals and philanthropists towards immigrants and how these affected the accessibility and acceptability of maternity and infant welfare services to Irish and East European Jewish mothers.

Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 is widely recognized as an example of an intersection between nationalism and religion due to its use of the Christian symbolism of redemption via sacrifice. The religious aura, surrounding its leader and main ideologue, Patrick Pearse, was both a source of his posthumous "triumph" - the Irish independence shaped to a large extent by his legacy, and his "black legend" of the spiritual father of the sectarian violence in the twentieth century Irish politics. Due to the high degree of politicization of the debate over Pearse's role in Irish history, his intellectual legacy was rarely treated sine ira et studio. After a delineation of the problematic legacy of Pearse in the context of Irish Studies and the general introduction to the theme of the relations between nationalism and religion, this work proceeds to the re-examination of the place of religion in Pearse's thought. Pearse's conceptualization of Irish nationalism should be perceived as a synthesis emerging from the interplay between his deep indebtedness to the religious mind-frame and the Romantic and modernist influences that shaped the atmosphere of the pre-1914 Europe. It is based on a structural analogy between the Church and the nation. The analogy is created by means of a mechanism of the transposition of...