Violence was a central feature of Anglo-Irish relations in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Besides the devastation brought about by organized warfare there were many incidents of violence of an extraordinary nature—violence employed in times of truce.as well as war, exercised against, non-combatants of all ages, and often carried out with extreme cruelty. Such destruction evoked extensive response from many English gentry serving as officials and administrators in Ireland. Their private and official accounts of the Irish people and the Irish problem serve as the basis of my study. This thesis will be an analysis of how these Elizabethan gentry attempted to justify their violence, to legitimate it in the face of external opposition, and to rationalize it within their own minds. I will attempt to discover why Elizabethans found it necessary to justify their actions in the intricate manner in which they did, and what this may tell us about the intellectual development of the English gentry throughout the sixteenth century. An examination of the attitudes and policies of sixteenth-century Englishmen towards Ireland reveals that a great change took place over a relatively short period of time. Accounts and policies dating from the reign of Henry VIII were both lenient and sympathetic towards the Irish whereas those from the reign of Elizabeth were, by and large, brutal. This change was to occur mainly during the period of the Protectorate in England at a time when military force and religious persecution became the primary tools by which Ireland could be brought to 'civility'. The works dating from the reign of Elizabeth were, in large part, a response to.the extraordinary violence which began at the mid-century and to the psychological tensions that such destruction created. For this reason, I have relied, to a limited extent, upon modern psychological theories to help explain some aspects of the Elizabethan justifications. Finally, I am stating, as propositions, two conclusions. First, I propose that in the latter half of the sixteenth century the English and the Irish thought out and formulated ideas on two distinct intellectual planes and, as a consequence, were unable to fully comprehend the motives and aspirations of each other. This, I suggest, negated the possibility of a lasting peace in the sixteenth century and seriously hampered future attempts at reconciliation. Secondly, I submit that in their attempts to analyse and describe Ireland and to justify the violence perpetrated in that land, Englishmen were forced to re-examine their own society and to re-evaluate their role within it. It is possible, therefore, that their experience in Ireland was one of the numerous factors which helped many Englishmen break with the intellectual bonds of the past and to think in new and distinctive ways. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

The years i 920-22 constituted a period of unprecedented conflct and political change in Ireland. It began with the onset of the most brutal phase of the War ofIndependence and culminated in the effective miltary defeat of the Republican IRA in the Civil War. Occurring alongside these dramatic changes in the south and west of Ireland was a far more fundamental conflict in the north-east; a period of brutal sectarian violence which marked the early years of partition and the establishment of Northern Ireland. Almost uniquely the IRA in the six counties were involved in every one of these conflcts and yet it can be argued was on the fringes of all of them. The period i 920-22 saw the evolution of the organisation from a peripheral curiosity during the War of independence to an idealistic symbol for those wishing to resolve the fundamental divisions within the Sinn Fein movement which developed in the first six months of i 922. The story of the Northern IRA's collapse in the autumn of that year demonstrated dramatically the true nature of the organisation and how it was their relationship to the various protagonists in these conflcts, rather than their unceasing but fruitless war against partition, that defined its contribution to the Irish revolution.

Examining representations of gender from a postcolonial feminist perspective, Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Masculinity in Irish Film analyzes select works of three popular filmmakers whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present.1 I argue that these three artists--John Ford, Jim Sheridan, and Paul Greengrass--explore fundamental questions about patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and that, in the process, they upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Investigating alternative conceptions of manhood presented in these films, as well as these filmmakers’ complex engagement with Hollywood film genres, I offer a fuller understanding of their subtle critiques of patriarchy. I contend that their illustrations of socially sanctioned male dominance in the lives of women, as well as their portrayals of male and female resistance to patriarchy, constitute a subversive challenge to traditional order. In the process, I address gendered archetypes that are prevalent in Irish and American cinemas and analyze the ways in which Ford, Sheridan, and Greengrass employ and critique these masculine types through their portrayals of fathers, sons, boxers and pacifists. Ultimately, I argue that the recent Irish films of Sheridan and Greengrass gesture toward future modes of manhood that completely disavow patriarchy and violence. In sum, this project plots a trajectory of Irish cinema during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, charting a progression from ambivalent critique of patriarchy (in the films of John Ford) to outright rejection of patriarchal masculinity (in Jim Sheridan’s work) to reconceptualization of manhood and the family (in the Irish films of Sheridan and Paul Greengrass). / text