The Irish Republican Congress Revisited

This collection explores how the British left has interacted with the ‘Irish question’ throughout the twentieth century, the left’s expression of solidarity with Irish republicanism and relationships built with Irish political movements. Throughout the twentieth century, the British left expressed, to varying degrees, solidarity with Irish republicanism and fostered links with republican, nationalist, socialist and labour groups in Ireland. Although this peaked with the Irish Revolution from 1916 to 1923 and during the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s–80s, this collection shows that the British left sought to build relationships with their Irish counterparts (in both the North and South) from the Edwardian to Thatcherite period. However these relationships were much more fraught and often reflected an imperial dynamic, which hindered political action at different stages during the century. This collection explores various stages in Irish political history where the British left attempted to engage with what was happening across the Irish Sea. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Contemporary British History.

The history of the Irish republican movement is dominated by the story of the men who took up arms in Ireland's fight for freedom against the British. The names of men like Pearse, Connolly, Collins and Barry still resonate today as heroes who won independence for Ireland. However, the critical role of women in this fight for freedom has often been overlooked. Renegades examines the part played by women in the major political and social revolutions that took place from 1900– 1922. It explores the growing separation of republican women into two distinct groups, those active on the military side in Cumann na mBan and those involved on the political side, particularly with Sinn Féin. It also looks at the often ignored 'war on women', which manifested itself in the form of physical and sexual assaults by both sides during the War of Independence, and the fury of female republicans as the political establishment accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In this evocative account, Renegades restores the women of the republican movement to the prominent place they deserve in Irish history.

This original study focusing on four Irish writers – Leslie Daiken, Charles Donnelly, Ewart Milne and Michael Sayers – retrieves a hitherto neglected episode of Thirties literary history which highlights the local and global aspects of Popular Front cultural movements. From interwar London to the Spanish Civil War and the USSR, the book examines the lives and work of Irish writers through their writings, their witness texts and their political activism. The relationships of these writers to George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, William Carlos Williams and other figures of cultural significance within the interwar period sheds new light on the internationalist aspects of a Leftist cultural history. The book also explores how Irish literary women on the Left defied marginalization. The impetus of the book is not merely to perform an act of literary salvage but to find new ways of re-imagining what might be said to constitute Irish literature mid-twentieth century; and to illustrate how Irish writers played a role in a transforming political moment of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural history and literature, Irish diaspora studies, Jewish studies, and the social and literary history of the Thirties.

This book explores the experiences and activities of students across the twentieth century and throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. The daily experiences of students, their involvement in local communities, national political organisations and widespread cultural changes, are the main focus of this ground-breaking book. It takes students themselves as the subject of inquiry, exploring the fundamental importance of student activities within wider social and political changes and also how some of the key changes across the twentieth century have shaped and changed the make-up, experiences, and lives of students. This book charts the experiences of students throughout a period of unprecedented change as being a student in Britain and Ireland has gone from the endeavour of a small number of elite, mainly wealthy white men, to an important phase of life undertaken by the majority of young people.