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Kilmainham Gaol (1796-1924) became the de facto holding center for political prisoners in Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century. Officially closing in 1910, it reopened a number of times for 'emergencies' before its final closure after the Irish Civil War (1922-23). After 1924 it lay abandoned until reopening as a heritage attraction in the early 1960s. It was taken into state protection in 1986. Using a range of graffiti assemblages predominantly dating from 1910 onwards this paper will explore the 'imperial debris' of contested narratives of meaning, ownership, and identity that the prison walls continue to materialize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on parliamentary debates and official reports to trace the changing conceptions of the child in need of protection which shaped Irish legislative developments at key points of reform. There have been significant shifts in constructions of childhood and children's needs in Irish political discourse over the course of the twentieth century. Nonetheless it is argued that a certain degree of continuity over time is apparent in representations of the child in need of protection. Whether viewed through the lens of morality/spirituality, psychology, or more recently children's rights, within twentieth-century Irish parliamentary discourse, the "problem" of the child in need of protection has for the most part been construed in somewhat narrow terms, impeding examination of the intersection between generational inequalities and those related to social divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Scholars from diverse ideological backgrounds have up to now addressed Robert Briscoe's relationship with Eamon De Valera superficially. Dermot Keogh, in Jews in twentieth-century Ireland, depicted it as almost paternalistic, while Shulamit Eliash, in The harp and the shield of David, took a simplistic approach, which essentially depicted de Valera as a weak, self-serving politician who was verging on anti-Semitism in his reactions toward Briscoe and the Jewish community. Research on which the present paper is based, however, indicates that both the political and personal relationship between the two men was complex and multi-faceted, and it was characterised by many nuanced phases. Examination of rarely used and hard-to-access archives in Ireland, Great Britain and Israel has revealed that when the potential partition of Palestine arose in 1937 and de Valera saw the opportunity to highlight in the international sphere the existing partition of Ireland, the issue bound de Valera to Briscoe in a unique way. De Valera saw Briscoe's involvement with the New Zionist Organisation as a perfect opportunity to highlight his opposition to partition in every manifestation. Briscoe supported de Valera's position without reservation, and was rewarded when de Valera facilitated his Zionist engagement, even when it became clear that it was politically disadvantageous to do so. The two men clearly enjoyed a relationship that went far beyond the boundaries of political leader and subordinate. This article will reveal some of the many strands of that relationship, which differentiate it from most of de Valera's Fianna Fail commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the formation of a women's patrol force in Ireland in 1914, the Irish Women Patrol (IWP), focusing on the role these patrols played in Irish society during and after World War I. Other topics include the support of the IWP by Irish feminist and social reform groups, the social and political circumstances in Ireland that led to the formation of the IWP, and how the IWP was able to outlast its British counterparts by balancing social purity causes and feminist ideas.

The article explores the history of anti-communism in Ireland. The author reflects on the role of the Catholic church and the Cold War in stoking public fears about communism. Topics discussed include the influence of Soviet persecution of Catholics, the role of anti-modernism in Irish clericalism, and the impact of secularism and the conflict in Northern Ireland.

An essay is presented about the role of policemen and journalists in the 19th century focusing on their references as seekers of the truth and the relationship between police officers and journalists. It talks about rules under which policemen and journalists operate. The socioeconomic backgrounds of policemen and journalists are discussed along with the progression of both these careers in the 20th century in Ireland. The author also talks about Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC).

The article discusses the social reform agenda and social policies of the National Coalition government of the Fine Gael and Labour political parties in Ireland from 1973 to 1977. It examines a fourteen-point programme outlined by the coalition, which encompassed housing policy, education policy, and taxation policy. The author particularly comments on the introduction of a wealth tax in 1975 and efforts to end discrimination against women and provide for the sale of contraception. Politicians discussed include Liam Cosgrave and Declan Costello.

Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, the most important fascist party to arise in Ireland, reached its electoral peak in 1945 when it won nine seats in the local government elections of that year. Much of its success was due to the unusually high level of support it gained from women, who made up a greater proportion of its membership than did their counterparts in the mainstream parties or in fascist movements overseas. Though the party's policies were often surprisingly accommodating of women's participation in public life, Aiséirghe's true distinctiveness lay in its assertion of the compatibility of totalitarian politics and Christian social principles. This ideological syncretism – giving a literal interpretation to the expression ‘political religion’ – proved especially attractive to those young Irishwomen who were disturbed by what they perceived as the indifference of liberal-democratic political and economic systems to women's material and spiritual interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates anticommunism in Ireland during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It focuses in particular on the campaigns waged by the right-wing Catholic organisations, Maria Duce and the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association, opposing the influence of American cinema, which it was alleged was dominated by Communists. The central argument is that Ireland's ‘red scare’ was an ephemeral phenomenon, fuelled by American anticommunism, which was then at its height, and the cultural Cold War in Europe. Combined with these broader fears it reveal how anticommunism was shaped by domestic political and cultural contexts, especially concerns about the impact of external influences on Irish minds, in the omnipresent form of American cinema. Hollywood films offered visions of modernity that undermined traditional Irish nationalist values of simple living, an innate distaste of materialism, and an unflinching moral code, informed by Catholic teachings. In independent Ireland, far from the front line of confrontation with the red menace, the ideological dimensions made themselves felt, but were not perceived to be a sufficient threat as to dominate public life, as was the case in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As many unused sources in the Service Historique de la Defense in Vincennes and the Quai d'Orsay in Paris reveal the French Deuxieme Bureau, and also naval intelligence, monitored events during the home rule crisis, the Easter Rising, the First World War, the Peace Conference in Paris and the Civil War. Also worthy of note are the elaboration of Franco-Irish invasion plans during the Boer War and the secret mission of an Irish general in Paris shortly after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921. The aims of this article will be to give an overview of French military intelligence activities regarding Ireland and to give an assessment of its interest in the country during the period under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of the Irish defence forces in 1969-70 as the Irish state reacted to the emergence of the Northern troubles. Ireland had never envisaged using its army to take by force what Britain would not concede through negotiation. In the absence of an obvious external threat, and because of the legacy of the 1924 army mutiny, the state maintained only very small and ill-equipped forces, trained exclusively for conventional warfare and actively discouraged from any strategic or tactical study of Northern Ireland. The gun-running plans and other clandestine schemes promoted by an army intelligence officer and disclosed in the 1970 arms crisis were correctly interpreted in London as a conspiracy led by two ambitious ministers impatient at the relative restraint of government policy, rather than as the secret element of a two-pronged Irish policy of overt reasonableness and covert destabilisation of Northern Ireland. The article also maintains that there was no possibility at any point of a military coup against the Lynch government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Georgian domestic architecture of Dublin was represented across a period of major conflicts and political change in the city. By 1900 most of these Georgian houses had effectively become proletarianized and Catholicized through their conversion into tenements. ‘Georgianism’ arose in reaction to this transformation, partly out of a desire to record and conserve the houses and partly through panic about the tenements' inversion of social spaces and their consequent threat to the image of an ascendancy past and an imperial order in the present. Encompassing representations in visual art, in town planning and government reports, and, most extensively, in the volumes produced by Dublin's Georgian Society, the article argues that Georgianism involved a highly selective account of past glories but also one that projected a future in which the fantasy image of the eighteenth century would be reasserted. Whereas the approach to recording Georgian architecture either denied its present tenement-dwellers or used the decayed state of these houses as a symptom of their condition, in Sean O'Casey's plays this same architecture was seen as a formative agent in subaltern identity, a location whose contrasts created a form of tragic-comedy, engaging recursively with both present and past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]