The use of force alone is but temporary.  It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

--Edmund Burke (1729-97)--

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

--William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98)--

[In Ireland] history has a peculiar doom.  It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale—the good man (English) who prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end.

---Alice Stopford Green (1849-1927)--

“It has been announced that the much vaunted Robert Schuman, one of the founders of the European Union, is on his way to Roman Catholic Sainthood. . . From European serfdom we pray ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’

--Ian Paisley (1926- )--

Thomas A. Brady, Jr. / Grahame Foreman

DESCRIPTION

Hist 152A examines the course of Irish history from the Union with Great Britain to the present.  Its central theme is the struggle to shape the Irish future—assimilation, association, or independence—among four major forces:  the British State; the French tradition of revolutionary republicanism; the Roman Catholic Church; Gaelic Ireland as a virtual nationality; and Unionism as a alternative nationality.  The decisive moments of this story include:  the Ascendancy and the penal laws; the Union; Catholic emancipation; the Great Famine; the Irish Party, the Land League, and Unionism; World War I and the Irish Revolution; partition; and the radical changes in both Irelands since the 1960s.  The changes wrought and symbolized by these events, it is argued, transformed the Irish into European peoples.  They also created the Other Irelands which make up the largest diaspora, in relative terms, in modern history.  And they have brought the 200-year-old Union to its end.

ARGUMENT

Recent Irish history needs to be understood according to four main patterns established before or by 1850:  the Nationalist/Republican tradition of revolutionism (“physical force”); the transformations of Irish religion; and the British political tradition of the Union and Parliamentary government.  Ireland is a country that divided between two national religions, Catholic and Protestant, and two political traditions, Unionism and Republicanism.  Its great peculiarity is not the country is divided but how it is divided:  the templates of the two main sense of community, religion and nation, are divided in binary, coterminous ways:  Catholic Republicanism and Protestant Unionism.  Two further factors have enhanced the sense of difference:  Ireland’s colonial past and the late-to-extremely late modernization of the economies.  The patterns of Irish political and cultural life mainly come, therefore, not from the Middle Ages (the Anglo-Norman conquest) or from the era of the second conquest (16^th and 17^th centuries)—though they use symbols from these eras—but from the history of Ireland since the Union of 1800.  They were only partially disrupted by the Great War (W. W. I), the Irish Revolution, and the country’s partition into two Irelands in 1921.  Today the two Irelands are undergoing a series of changes which cannot be understood only from the past.  The new era that began in the 1960s brought constitutional changes in the Republic and the Northern Troubles, peace between the Republic and Great Britain, the passage of the peoples of the British Isles into the European Union, and the leveling of the historic north-south socio-economic gradient.