A report by Sean Donnelly:

On 22-23 March 2019, my colleague, Tim Ellis and I ran a conference entitled ‘New Directions in Irish History’ at Teesside University in Middlesbrough. The eventaimed to foreground papers by early career researchers (ECRs)seeking to introduce fresh theoretical perspectives and innovative interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies to the study of Irish history and culture.

In addition to obtaining significant financial support from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law (SSSHL)at Teesside University, we received a generous £250 event funding grantfrom the British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS). This money proved crucial in enabling us to cover the travel and accommodation expenses of the first of our two keynote speakers, Dr Erika Hanna from the University of Bristol. The BAIS further provided us with invaluable guidance and support throughout the process of organising the conference and played a significant role in promoting the event through the organisation’s mailing list and social media channels. Tim and I wish, therefore, to take this opportunity to again thank the BAIS for their generous support which played a key role in making the event detailed below possible.

Friday 22 February:

Following an amiable registration period fuelled by much-needed teas and coffees, the conference kicked-off with a fascinating two-person panel exploring ‘New Directions in Transnational History’. Our first speaker, Steven Egan, a second-year PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Belfast, delivered a fascinating (and very timely) paper examiningthe Canadian dimension to the partition of Ireland, highlighting how the 1920 Government of Ireland Act can only be understood fully in a broader transnational and imperial perspective. Challenging the narrow geographical range of conventional accounts of the partition process focused on political elites in Dublin, Belfast and London, Eagan emphasised the remarkable extent to which Canadians engaged with the issue, focusing on nationalist and loyalist organisations such as the National Self-Determination League of Ireland for Canada and the Orange Order. Though Eagan was hesitant to frame Canadian engagement with partition as an unambiguous expression of a nascent, diasporic Irish or British imperial identity, he demonstrated clearly that the partition of Ireland needs to be assessed in a global perspective as an imperial solution to an imperial problem.

Eagan’s argument was echoed in Anna Lively’s(University of Edinburgh) paper examining Irish-Bolshevik Connections between 1916-1919. Drawing from a diverse range of Irish and Russian-language source materials, Lively examined Irish socialist responses to the October Revolution and Russian-language articles on Ireland in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, emphasising that there was more significant Russian interest in revolutionary Ireland than has been recognised traditionally. Challenging the conventional view that the Russian and Irish Revolutions are too different to be connected or compared meaningfully, Lively demonstrated that many Bolshevist and Republican activists conceived of themselves as part of a shared revolutionary moment in which old empires and old certainties were tumbling down. Russian and Irish revolutionaries paid close attention to events in one another’s countries, and although both sides tended to downplay the extent of their ideological divergences (with Irish newspapers de-emphasising Bolshevist social radicalism, just as Russian sources exaggerated Sinn Féin’s Marxist credentials), Lively’s paper made clear that the both movements drew from a shared anti-imperial imaginary.

Following our first panel, it was then time to introduce the first of our keynote speakers, Dr Erika Hanna. When we were planning the conference, Hanna stood out immediately as an ideal keynote. Her research interests are both diverse and innovative, incorporating a range of subject-matter such as the history of Irish architecture, the history of cycling, and the history of photography. The latter of these interests formed the basis of Hanna’s keynote address which questioned the platitudinous convention that Ireland is simply not a visual society. Rather, in Hanna’s one words, the history of seeing is indeed fundamental to understandings of modern Ireland. Her paper adopted a holistic understanding of ‘visual culture.’ Rather than just exploring visual artefacts (which, she, nonetheless, did much of in the paper), Hanna set out to think about the wider history of ‘looking, staring and seeing’ in Ireland. In an interesting observation, she remarked that metaphors of sight, visibility and hiding are key to our understanding of Irish history. Indeed, we speak of the ‘invisible women’ of the Irish Revolution, and their ‘disappeared’ and ‘hidden’ histories. As Hanna argued, the visual is indeed eminently political. This may be seen in the history of documentary photography in Ireland. Documentary photography emerged out of the interwar period, out of the context of New Deal programmes in the USA, which sought to document (and thus tackle) the poverty which emerged out of the Great Depression. As Hanna reminded us, in both its origins and orientation, documentary photography is implicitly politically left-leaning and is an agent of social change.

Through a case study of a series of Irish documentary photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, Hanna showed how the composition of photographs can be deliberately provocative. Scenes of discarded televisions in the backstreets of Dublin (a symbol of affluence and modernity) for instance, were clearly positioned and chosen as symbols of failed promises of modernity, globalisation and affluence. A seemingly innocuous image of a young woman sleeping on a Dublin bus, could also be read as an image of failed social mobility amidst the diverse urban culture of Dublin. The fact that the woman was asleep attests to long hours spent at work, and thus further to the failures of neoliberalism. In one further image, the audience were treated to a smartly dressed, affluent and ‘respectable’ older woman looking down upon two scruffily-dressed young boys. Here, the audience was reminded that they were looking at people looking. In the question and answer session which followed, a stimulating discussion emerged about how ‘respectability’ (very much a central theme in social histories in modern Ireland) is, in many ways, linked to sight, looking and the visual. Further questions discussed our position as researchers and how we can look at and see our research, and what this means for our position of ‘historical objectivity.’

After this most stimulating keynote, the conference then decamped to the Bistrot Pierre restaurant, where a wide variety of rich conversations continued late into the night.

Saturday 23 February

Bright and early on Saturday morning, the conference then continued in good spirits. Due to the enthusiastic response to the Call for Papers, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of having more high-quality papers than we had initially anticipated. Thus, we decided to go with the decision to divide our conference on the Saturday into three sessions of two parallel panels each. Although we had initially been reluctant to do this, this, in fact, worked out particularly well, as it allowed us the flexibility to put papers into panels which had a good sense of overall coherence.

Thus, on the Saturday morning, attendees had a choice between attending a panel on Gender History, and a panel on Political Cultures. The gender history panel incorporated a very wide range of perspectives on gender indeed. The history of women’s experiences, masculinities and wider societal discourses on gender in Ireland were all indeed represented in this panel. First up, came Conor Heffernanwho spoke on the physical culture of masculinity in the revolutionary era in Ireland. This paper was, perhaps, the most interactive of all the papers, as Heffernan’s paper invited the audience to partake in some of the physical training techniques that early Irish bodybuilders would have utilised! Ireland was by no means isolated from a global craze in physical culture in the early twentieth century. Thanks to a common English language press, Irish men and women could read popular British and American journals of bodybuilding. Such journals were important in promoting physical culture, as they gave devotees a space to compare their physical achievements with those of their peers. Readers could write in, for instance, and send in their muscle measurements. As Heffernan argued, the discourses of masculine physical culture in Ireland had strong links to broader societal discourses- such as work ethic, discipline and one’s utility to society. Key cultural figures, such as Francis Sheehy Skeffington and W. B. Yeats were themselves interested in the theories and work of body-building celebrities such as Eugene Sandow. Irish nationalist ideologies about the virtuous, manly Gael, who was disciplined in mind and body, and who abstained from meat and alcohol, readily recommended themselves to physical culture. Far, from being a superficial social movement concerned solely with the aesthetics of the body, Heffernan argued that masculine physical culture in Ireland had strong links to quasi-religious doctrines of self-transformation and self-discipline.

Becca Myttonalso gave a paper on the subject of masculinity. Mytton’s paper offered a rather innovative exploration of the lived, interior experiences of Irish republican masculinity during the Revolution. This paper offered a rather original approach to the history of masculinity, as it focussed not so much on the typical subject matter of historians of masculinity (that is to say, studies of gender norms and stereotypes), but rather on the history of emotions through a gendered lens. Mytton’s paper focussed on the tensions between the outer performance of republican masculinity and the realities of the lived experience beneath it. In the rhetoric of Irish republicanism, there had long been an injuncture on Irish republican volunteers to put aside notions of ‘self-absorption and selfishness’ and instead (in the words of Ernie O’Malley) ‘to grin and bear it.’ And yet, as Mytton’s research reveals, if one considers the private accounts of Irish republicans during the revolution, we can come face to face with a wide variety of differing emotions. Strong bonds of homosocial friendship were keenly felt, men felt pride in their struggle, fear for their lives and future, and sadness at the death of comrades. News of deaths of comrades in both the War of Independence, and the Civil War both keenly affected prison life. As one account keenly put it “there is little knowing what sorrow is hidden beneath the surface of that smile.”

 

Alexandra Tierney’spaper offered yet another original interpretative lens for Irish history: that of the transnational. Tierney’s paper challenged notions of exceptionalism in relation to gendered social policy in twentieth century Ireland. Policies towards unmarried women, were not merely the result of an exceptionally fervent Catholic social policy, but rather, in fact, reflected broader social policies across the British Empire. Interestingly, as Tierney showed, both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State maintained similar policies towards unmarried mothers- despite the clear denominational differences between the two polities. Similar acts in 1924 (Northern Ireland) and 1930 (Irish Free State), for instance, meant that unmarried mothers could not sue for child support. Moreover, the ‘containment culture’ which was apparently pronounced in the Free State was not particularly unique. Protestant Magdalene asylums also existed in Northern Ireland. As Tierney argued, the Irish Free State’s social policies arose not necessarily out of a uniquely Catholic political culture, but indeed out of wider international trends of inter-war conservatism, Common Law legal commonalities, and a wider, transnational religious culture.

The other panel at this time dealt with ‘political culture.’ Political history has certainly attracted plenty of attention from Irish historians over time. This panel, however, had many innovative approaches to Ireland’s political history. Rather than a ‘top-down,’ high-politics narrative of political elites, the three papers presented gave insights into political cultures: exploring diverse themes such as ideologies and networks. James Bright’spaper set out to take Ulster Loyalists, between 1977-87 seriously. As Bright argued, not only has the complexity and nuances of Ulster Loyalism itself been overshadowed by the complexities of republicanism, but also the decade between 1977-87 has been under-explored. The significance of this period lies in the failures and stagnation of mainstream Unionism. Whilst opposition to Sunningdale in 1973-4 had been robust and effective, the 1977 UUAC Strike and opposition to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement were much less effective in achieving Unionist political goals. Instead, during this decade, the political wings of the UVF and UDA worked to fill the ideological vacuum that had been created. As Bright argued, the new ‘civic unionism’ that emerged from the 1990s onwards, was in some ways due to proposals and discussions which came from Paramilitary loyalism, such as the 1987 Unionist Task Force Report. At the same time, Ulster Loyalists were not a homogenous movement- and violent protests revealed gaps between the Loyalist movement’s leadership and its ordinary members.

 

Josie Richardson’spaper on ‘street’ politics’ during the Hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, between 1975-81 explored a different subject matter, but, interestingly, with a similar time frame and similar angle: that of restoring an under-explored/unappreciated political movement to historical significance. Whilst the protests and marches of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s into the early 1970s has received both historiographical and popular interest, less significance has been attached to ‘street protests’ after 1972. The emergence of British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland, and consequent events, such as Bloody Sunday, which followed, did not, as Richardson argued, in fact, drive protestors off the streets, but instead continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Nor was ‘street politics’ politically inert or homogenous. Richardson demonstrated that a series of complex, heterogenous protests in the early 1980s in fact had much potential to change, dictate and transform the political agenda in Northern Ireland.

Building on the work of the two previous papers, Emma Dewhirstsimilarly sought to present her chosen political movement, as complex and heterogenous. Rather than examining the Northern Ireland Troubles, Dewhirst, instead, explored the complexities of the networks which emerged in the transformative period 1913-9. All of the organisations which participated in the Easter Rising had distinctive identities, and aims, and yet there were many over-lapping memberships, and connections between these bodies. In turn, Dewhirst explored how these networks tell us something about political actors motivations for becoming involved in wider Irish revolutionary movement. Encouragingly, Dewhirst did not shy away from the potential of inter-disciplinarity, and it was good to see Dewhirst apply insights gained from sociology and political science on ‘social movement theory.’

Panel 3A was organised around the theme of‘Text, Book and Print’ and encompassed three fascinating, interdisciplinary papers by Erin Scheopner(Goldsmiths University), Cathrine Wignall (University of Central Lancashire, Preston) and Jessica Warwick(Liverpool Hope University). Erin opened the session with an insightful, broad-ranging examination of British newspaper coverage of the Irish question in the period following the passage of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920.Examining press reporting, editorials, and the use of cartoons in eleven major British news publications, Scheopner shed crucial light on the diverse tenor of British press characterisations of Irish politics after the Great War. At the core of Erin’s paper was a fundamental contention that, despite known shortcomings with the Act and differences in opinion on whatthe Irish question was and who was responsible for its resolution, for the British press, the goal of seeing settlement achieved via British constitutional politics was paramount.

In ‘The Munster Whiteboy movements, 1761 to 1776: A cultural reconsideration of the historiography’, Cathrine Wignall provided an innovative examination of literacy levels amongst the Catholic Munster peasantry in the late eighteenth-century. Challenging traditional representations of the Munster Whiteboys as poorly educated and illiterate, Wignall argued that scholars have failed to account for the orality of the sociolinguistic context in which the group operated, and that, when writing in English, nearly all Whiteboys were communicating in a secondary language. In Wignall’s analysis, the Munster Whiteboys’ use of English to issue threatening proclamations was an ambitious attempt to communicate their objectives to a bilingual audience and may be understood productively to symbolise a conflicted cultural representation in a quasi-colonial setting. In this respect Wignall’s paper marked a clear development from traditional historiographical engagement with the Whiteboy movement which has focused principally on the various economic and political factors that motivated the agrarian protest of an illiterate peasantry in the mid-to-late eighteenth-century.

Finally, Jessica Warwick delivered a detailed and nuanced examination of the complex cultural and political evolution of Literary Fenianism in the period preceding the Parnellite split, focusing on James Murphy’s seminal 1883publication, Convict No. 25. Complicating conventional representations of the Gaelic Revival as a literary and artistic tradition originating in the political crisis of the 1890s, Warwick showed how Murphy’s work incorporates and engages with many of the themes and tropes typically held to distinguish the Revival from the preceding literary tradition, thereby challenging the distinctiveness of the Long Gestation in Irish political and cultural history.

Whilst Panel 3A explored the written word, Panel 3B instead focussed on the words of mouth. All three presenters on this panel gave papers on the oral history of the Northern Ireland Troubles, and it was good to see three Early Career Researchers tackle a subject area where the methodology of oral history has had something of a difficult history. First up, Jack Hepworth, who travelled all the way over from Newcastle, gave a paper on the oral history of Irish republicanism since 1969. Hepworth presented his research as a not-to-be missed opportunity. Often, radical movements tend to be left out of oral histories, and yet this methodology can reveal much about the internal dynamics of these movements both then, and now, in the present day. In his PhD research, Hepworth has set out to interview republican ex-combatants of the Northern Irish Troubles. This, quite understandably, generated much anxiety from his university and funding bodies, though less, quite surprisingly, from the actual republicans themselves. The reason for this was that the interviews presented a vital opportunity for combatants to get their point of view across. As it later emerged, differing memberships and engagements with Sinn Féin among these ex-combatants lead to distinct understandings of republicanism since 1969. For those who had remained aligned with the mainstream leadership of Sinn Féin, the programme of ‘electoralism’ (that is to say, shifting away from the use of violence to the use of a political strategy, through the ballot box) was seen as a gradual piecemeal series of opportunities which were gradually grasped, by visionary ideologues. Conversely, for those who had been unreconciled with the Good Friday Agreement, ‘Electoralism’ represented a Machiavellian plot to sell-out the republican ideal, thus complexifying the narrative of republicanism further.

Annemarie Maljund Jensen, who travelled all the way from Aarhus University (Denmark) then gave an interesting paper on a particularly innovative way of ‘doing’ oral history. In her paper, Jensen argued, that oral historians need to think very about not just the content of the interview (i.e. the questions and answers that constitute it), but rather, coming from a more holistic point of view, the entire interview experience itself. Drawing on Sarah Pink’s ideas about the possibilities of the ‘urban tour,’ Jensen, gives the example of a car ride, which she experienced, driven by an ex-soldier in Belfast. The chief advantage of the car ride as a stimulus for an oral history interview lies in the way in which memories can easily emerge from informal conversations which are stimulated by places. The route of the car ride becomes something of mnemomic for the interviewee, who may suddenly recall details about one’s life experiences which are related to places. An off the cuff remark like “I used to hate this intersection” can indeed be most revealing. The car, being a ‘safe’ enclosed space, where eye contact may be avoided, facilitates a greater sense of honesty. In the particular circumstance of Jensen’s interview, the car-ride ‘mapped’ particularly well onto her interviewee’s experiences as an ex-soldier. Yet, the car-ride also offers a number of ethical difficulties. For one, the car-ride would usually be an ‘off the record’ interview. This, from the point of view of oral historians, is certainly controversial. As Jensen, argued, this is not necessarily a problem, but it does mean that the interviewer needs to think carefully and creatively about how the ‘car-ride’ interview can be used.

 

Eimear Rosato’spaper, the next up on the panel, focussed more on post-memorythan memories in the traditional sense of the word. ‘Post-memory’ refers to the memories of experiences which have been transmitted so effectively and vividly from generation to generation, that the receiving generation is in a position that they feel that they experienced the memory themselves. Rosato’s paper focussed on the post-memory of community conflict in the Ardoyne area of Belfast, a community in which Rosato, herself, grew up in. One of the great issues of doing oral history can be a reluctance to open up about one’s experiences. Fortunately, Eimear’s position in community made having these difficult conversations through interview much easier. Memories of inter-communal disputes, such as the 2001 Holy Cross dispute continue to be keenly felt and bitterly felt, even by those who had no part in these experiences. Most interestingly, as Rosato noted, Hirsch’s categories of post-memory of ‘silence,’ ‘storytelling’ and ‘emotional transmission’ can all be found in the post-memory of the conflict within the Ardoyne area. Perhaps one of Rosato’s most interesting experiences in doing the oral history for this project (which formed part of her MLitt degree at Newcastle), was the sense that whilst interviewees felt that their experiences were not important, often these experiences mattered, and that the interviewer had to reinforce that the interviewee did, in fact, have something worthwhile to say.

After lunch, Panel 4A focused on ‘Historiographical Debates’. Damian Shiels, a PhD candidate at Northumbria University, opened the session with an impassioned plea for a meaningful transnational turn in Irish history scholarship, one accounting more fully for the experiences of the diaspora. Meditating on the difference between an ‘Irish History’ and ‘Ireland’s History’, Shiels noted that fewer than eleven per cent of the historians employed in Ireland’s major third-level institutions list the diaspora as their primary research interest, a circumstance that has had a profound deleterious impact on our understanding of the diverse experiences of the millions of Irishmen and women who left the island for Europe and the North Atlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. The extraordinarily under-researched extent of Irish involvement in the American Civil Warprovides a striking illustration of this circumstance; for although as many Irishmen fought for Union and Confederate forces between 1861-65 as took-up arms for the Allies during the Great War (c.200,000), the later group receive far more academic, media and political attention. Such glaring historiographical inequities lend weight to Dr Sophie Cooper’s contention, one cited by Shiels, that the future of Irish history is ‘in and of the diaspora’.

 

Next, Caitlin Whiteprovided a fascinating, comprehensive overview of the contemporary evolution of Public History in Irish academia. Noting that three of the four Public History MA programmes presently offered in Irish universities have been established within the last four years, White stressed that Public History will play an increasingly prominent role in Irish academia in the twenty-first-century as the discipline seeks to adapt its pedagogical offering in response to a rapidly evolving jobs-market, as well as to shifts in the character of historical research. The panel concluded with Robin Adams’remarkably detailed and incisive analysis of Republican fund-raising during the Irish War of Independence. Breaking with conventional analyses of the period 1919-21, which tend to focus solely on the military and political aspects of the conflict, Adams drew from range of quantitative sources to analyse how the Republican counter-state solicited money through the sale of bonds, as well as identifying who the donors were and what influenced their donations.Crucially, by using the donation of money as a proxy, his paper shed fresh light on the kinds of people who supported Irish independence in the period following Sinn Féin’s seminal electoral victory in 1918. By presenting a more nuanced picture of the IRA’s support base than current historiography allows, Adams’ paper succeeded in complicating conventional narratives of the Irish War of Independence and broadened the narrative to include women, and men outside fighting age.

Panel 4B focussed on ‘visual histories.’ Nina White’spaper explored the complex ways in which the visual culture of conflict could be used to both support and challenge state-building in their respective. This was done through a comparative methodology, which juxtaposed the visual imagery of the Irish Civil War of 1922-3 with the Spanish Civil War more than a decade later. Looking at the photography of Robert Capa (Spain) and the Desmond FitzGerald (Irish Free State) similar themes both emerge which can both challenge and support the needs of state-building. On the one hand, images of soldiers resting, eating and laughing positively support state-building projects, as the images of male bodies become synechdochal for the health of the nation. At the same time, difficult images of the dead and wounded can become difficult for the nation-state, and images of the bandaged and wounded work, almost to neutralise the horrors of warfare. Modern art, as well could both simultaneously challenge and support the state-building project. Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (a famous depiction of the Spanish Civil War) is a difficult work of art to say the least. Yet by the inclusion of the visual symbolism of the bull, it still engages with the visual iconography of Spanish identity. Mainie Jellet’s paintings such as Decoration(1923), which was exhibited towards the end of the war offered one of the first instances of abstract art in Ireland. Whilst it offered a new, experimental way of defining Irish identity, it was not universally well-received and reactions towards it tended towards confusion, with the Irish Times dubbing it a ‘freak picture.’

Whilst White looked at visual images as a source base for her practice of history, Marianne Keating offered an imaginative paper which used visual images (specifically film) to present her historical research. Like White’s paper, Keating offered a transnational account of Jamaican-Irish connections. Several prominent Jamaican politicians, such as Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, for instance, had Irish ancestry. In the aftermath of the Irish Famine, Irish labourers migrated to Jamaica to serve as indentured labourer, and as result, there is a strong, though still largely, underexplored trajectory of Irish migrants to Jamaica. Keating sought to reconstruct this trajectory using a audiovisual means storytelling. The second half od Keating’s paper thus consisted of a film, which included included read-outs of archival documents by actors, scenes of the Jamaican landscape, and footage of the Jamaican people in the present day. As Keating argued, the utility of using film, as a visual way of presenting historical research is that it allows the researcher to present information which may, indeed, be vast and overwhelming.

The conference concluded on a fitting note with the second of our two keynote addresses from Dr Caoimhe Nic Dhábhéid. Caoimhe is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield and is the author of two monographs: Sean MacBride: A Republican Life, which was published by Liverpool University Press in 2011, and Terrorist Histories: Individuals and Political Violence since the Nineteenth Century which was published by Routledge in 2016. Caoimhe is presently engaged a study of the children of the executed men of the Easter Rising of 1916, exploring issues of memory, state commemorative practices, the forging of personal identities in the shadow of national foundational myths, as well as the legacies of political violence. It is precisely this attempt to put emotions at the centre of historiographical practice and to understand the interior lives of historical actors that rendered Caoimhe an ideal keynote at our conference; her work embodies the kind of methodological and theoretical origninality and boldness that the event was conceived to foreground, and her paper marked an ideal culmination. Drawing from the work of leading historians of emotion such as William M. Reddy and Barbara H. Rosenwein, as well as the cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Nic Dhábhéid issued a compelling call for historians to penetrate deeper into the interior lives of historical actors in an attempt to understand, not just ‘what’ happened in the past, but ‘why’ actors took the decisions they did and to account more fully for the emotional forces that conditioned their behaviour. Just as Dr Hanna’s address stressed the need for historians to advance the discipline beyond the mere ‘uncovering’ of past persons and events in order to better contextualise and explore their significances, so, too, did Nic Dhábhéid’s. Such imaginative, scholarly explorations provided an insightful and thought provoking conclusion to an enormously stimulating two days.