No description available.

In April 1919, the Trades and Labour Council of Limerick County, Ireland, declared a general strike in response to the increasingly militarised policing of the region by the British authorities. A Strike Committee, consisting of local activists, assumed governance of Limerick for two weeks. While various attempts have been made to uncover this largely forgotten chapter of Irish history, the voices and perspectives of workers who initiated and sustained the general strike remain largely absent from the historical record. Therefore, this thesis utilises newspapers and documents produced by local activists in order to assess workers’ motivations for embracing direct action and participating in this radical act of protest. Firstly, I will discuss how the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) capitalised on the perceived shortcomings of craft unions and parliamentary strategies by offering a more self-sufficient model of labour activism. Additionally, I will challenge the notion that direct action in Limerick was a fundamentally ‘pragmatic’ endeavour by exploring various ideological currents which inspired workers to participate in the general strike. The Limerick Soviet was not only conceived as a response to specific grievances but was framed by some participants as an act of defiance against both capitalism and British colonialism. Consequently, this thesis will examine how global anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist ideologies and movements influenced the political climate of Limerick between 1916 and 1920. This thesis will also demonstrate the capacity of local activists to adapt and amend ideologies they encountered in order to suit the particularities of the local economic and political climate.

No description available.

One of the foremost reasons for the success of the Northern Irish Peace Process has been the ability of the national leadership of the Provisional Republican Movement to bring the majority of their membership away from the armed campaign and towards the acceptance of peaceful politics. This dissertation analyses how they were able to achieve this. This is carried out by considering the processes of the four major splits in modern day Irish republicanism from 1969 to 1997. Each split was analysed so as to derive why the split took place and why one side was more successful than the other in the aftermath. The cases were used to test a stage-based process model of split designed by the author. The data from thirty-eight semi-structured interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This analysis treated the three Provisional splits as three micro-processes within the macro-process of Provisional Republican involvement in the ‘Troubles', as it did the two Official splits with respect to the Official macro-process of involvement. The results of the analysis showed that the success of the later Provisional leadership was significantly tied to their method of changing strategies, tactics and policies one step at a time rather than by attempting to implement a variety of substantial changes within a short space of time as the leadership of the 1960s endeavoured to. This research outlines how the acceptance of peaceful politics for a terrorist organisation is a gradual stage-based process and that in order to be successful the significant changes must be implemented in a patient manner.

This thesis examines the ideological nexus of nationalism and heritage under the social conditions of neoliberalism. The investigation aims to demonstrate how neoliberal economics stimulate the irrationalism manifest in nationalist idealisation of the past. The institutionalisation of national heritage was originally a rational function of the modern state, symbolic of its political and cultural authority. With neoliberal erosion of the productive economy and public institutions, heritage and nostalgia proliferate today in all areas of social life. It is argued that this represents a social pathology linked to the neoliberal state's inability to construct a future-orientated national project. These conditions enhance the appeal of irrational nationalist and regionalist ideologies idealising the past as a source of cultural purity. Unable to achieve social cohesion, the neoliberal state promotes multiculturalism, encouraging minorities to embrace essentialist identity politics that parallel the nativism of right-wing nationalists and regionalists. This phenomenon is contextualised within the general crisis of progressive modernisation in Western societies that has accompanied neoliberalisation and globalisation. A new theory of activist heritage is advanced to describe autonomous, politicised heritage that appropriates forms and practices from the state heritage sector. Using this concept, the politics of irrational nationalism and regionalism are explored through fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews and photography. The interaction of state and activist heritage is considered at the Wewelsburg 1933-1945 Memorial Museum in Germany wherein neofascists have re-signified Nazi material culture, reactivating it within contemporary political narratives. The activist heritage of Israeli Zionism, Irish Republicanism and Ulster Loyalism is analysed through studies of museums, heritage centres, archaeological sites, exhibitions, monuments and historical re-enactments. These illustrate how activist heritage represents a political strategy within irrational ideologies that interpret the past as the ethical model for the future. This work contends that irrational nationalism fundamentally challenges the Enlightenment's assertion of reason over faith, and culture over nature, by superimposing pre-modern ideas upon the structure of modernity. An ideological product of the Enlightenment, the nation state remains the only political unit within which a rational command of time and space is possible, and thus the only viable basis for progressive modernity.