Tag Archives: United Ireland

United Ireland in 2024? Fiction and fact

Happy New Year! The arrival of 2024 means it is time for the reunification of Ireland, at least according to a 1990 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Declan McVeigh described the television fiction and its historical context in The National UAE:

During the brief discussion, Data gives Cpt Picard a list of successful armed rebellions in ages past, including “the Irish unification of 2024”. This prospect – debated between an entirely fictitious robot and a spaceship captain – was deemed by the BBC to be so objectionable that the episode was not broadcast unedited on U.K. television until September 2007, nearly a decade after the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement that largely ended the 30-year conflict known as the Northern Ireland Troubles.

This 1937 map shows the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland 16 years after partition.

The 34-year-old episode has been reported before but seems to be getting fresh attention now that the designated year has arrived. In fact, future documentaries about Irish politics are unlikely to cite 2024 as the year of the island’s reunification. Just over half – 51 percent – of northern voters would reject a unity referendum, according to an Irish Times/ARINS poll published in early December, while 64 percent of the Republic of Ireland electorate favors eliminating the 103-year-old partition.

Nevertheless, talk of a (re)united Ireland has grown since the 2016 Brexit vote removed Northern Ireland from the European Union. The Republic remains part of the E.U. The economic advantages of that membership have become as much of a driving force toward Irish reunification as the north’s shift to a Catholic majority, or the island’s geographic and historical integrity. Such economic factors were foreseen in a 1923 U.S. press dispatch from Belfast:

The war will continue until Ulster (Northern Ireland) joins the Irish Free State (now the Republic), or until the Free State relinquishes its insistence on a united Ireland. … Ulstermen declare they are not ready to give up their connection to England and never will be, unless it is shown that a united Ireland would be of benefit to them. … There is much speculation but little information in Ireland as to whether and when there will be a united Ireland. … Continued peace in the south, combined with loss of business or reduction of profits to Ulster industry, might shorten the separation.[1]United Press correspondent Charles McCann in a story widely published in U.S. newspapers two years after partition.

Talk of a united Ireland continued in 1924 as the Irish Boundary Commission began its deliberations through 1925. Ultimately, the 1921 partition lines remained unchanged. Newly released Irish state papers show officials discussed the possibility of redrawing the border in 1975 as a way of reducing Troubles-related violence. It didn’t happen.

The reunification issue has ebbed from time to time, but it has never ceased.

Below the Sinn Féin t-shirt logo are two quotes from Irish politicians that caught my attention late last year. They are followed by a passage from a New York Times op-ed about partition. We’ll have to see what really happens with Irish reunification in 2024 … and beyond.

Logo on the front of t-shirts being sold in Sinn Féin’s online gift shop. The marketing chatter says, “In every phase of struggle Irish America has stood with the cause of Irish Independence and Unity. Lets celebrate the link between Ireland and ‘our exiled children’,” a reference to language in the 1916 proclamation.  .

“Irish Unity is the very best opportunity for the future. In the words of Rita O’Hare, ‘We must keep going. A United Ireland lies ahead.’ ”

—Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald, Nov. 11, 2023. O’Hare died in March 2023. She was the party’s general secretary and representative to the United States.

“They (Sinn Féin) think in their minds that they would get the United States behind a united Ireland. They wouldn’t. They would actually turn our friends into enemies.”

–Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Nov. 18, 2023. In September, Varadkar said, “I believe we are on the path to unification. I believe that there will be a united Ireland in my lifetime.”

“It’s the unionists — the largely Protestant faction clinging fiercely to British citizenship and Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom — who question the terms of the peace they live under and struggle to articulate their future. And it’s the Irish nationalists — those, largely Catholic, who regard the partition of Ireland as an untenable injustice — who are brimming with confidence.”

–Contributing writer Megan K. Stack, “A United Ireland May Be More Than a Dream“, in The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2023.

References

References
↑1 United Press correspondent Charles McCann in a story widely published in U.S. newspapers two years after partition.

Catching up with modern Ireland: March

Two of the blog’s sharp-eyed email subscribers, both journalists, tipped me on two of the stories in this month’s roundup, which includes news about an old building in New York City, and a new building in Cork city. Enjoy. MH

  • For the second year, St. Patrick’s Day parades and related events were either cancelled, downsized, or made virtual due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. About 6,800 people have died in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland since the pandemic began a year ago.
  • New York Attorney General Letitia James has agreed to review the proposed sale of the American Irish Historical Society building in Manhattan. The 1901 Gilded Age mansion has been the society’s home for 80 years. The Irish government, which has given nearly $1 million to the society since 2008, has decried the proposed sale, and dozens of prominent artists and business leaders have joined nearly 30,000 others in petitioning James to step in. (Thanks Gary S.)

American Irish Historical Society at 991 Fifth Avenue. Photo: Tony Hisgett, Birmingham, UK.

  • Marty Walsh, the Irish-American mayor of Boston since 2014, was confirmed as U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Biden administration. His parents were 1950s emigrants of County Galway.
  • Vicki Kennedy, widow of the late U.S. Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy (D-Mass.), is said to be on President Joe Biden’s short list for U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. Others include Chicago lawyer John Cooney, New York civil rights lawyer Brian O’Dwyer, former Ireland Fund Chairman John FitzPatrick,  Massachusetts state rep Clare Cronin, and former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Tommy O’Neill, son of former House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill, according to IrishCentral.
  • Former U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd, a Biden ally earlier believed to be in line for the ambassador’s post, instead joined the Irish executive consultancy and lobbying firm Teneo as a senior adviser.
  • Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace agreement is under threat and a “Pandora’s box” of protest and political crisis will be opened unless the European Union agrees to significant changes in the Brexit deal with the United Kingdom, Reuters reported. At issue is a dispute over the implementation of the so-called Northern Ireland protocol in the Irish Sea, which is designed to prevent a hard land border with the Irish Republic. Militant unionists in the north complain the arrangement segregates them from the rest of the U.K..
  • The Journal.ie attempted to answer, “How would a united Ireland do economically?“
  • The Republic announced “Our Rural Future, 2021-2025” plan, which calls for 20 percent of government employees to work remotely  or mixed city center and rural locations by December, with further decentralization in following years.
  • Old Ireland in Colour, a collection of 170 black and white photos colorized through a combination of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology and old fashioned historical research, has been enjoying huge sales since its 2020 release. CNN and the Daily Mail published the latest features. (Thanks Bill T.)
  • Pope Francis elevated to International Marian and Eucharistic Shrine status the church and grounds at Knock, County Mayo, site of an 1879 apparition.
  • Technology firm Intel announced it will create 1,600 permanent high-tech jobs at its Leixlip campus in County Kildare.
  • Cork city officials and business leaders have applauded the decision by An Bord Pleanála, Ireland’s national planning review board, to grant permission for a 34-story hotel and commercial tower on the site of the former Port of Cork. It would become Ireland’s tallest building. An Taisce, Ireland’s national historic trust, complained it will create “enormous change in the character of the city’s skyline.”

Artist rending of Cork city tower.

Irish Americans back united Ireland with ad buy

I don’t usually pay much attention to advertisements as I scan the headlines and top paragraphs of The Washington Post, the day’s first pot of coffee percolating near the left edge of the newspaper spread on my kitchen counter. The half-page ad on A5–my second page turn–caught my attention: A United Ireland: Let The People Have Their Say.

Friends of Sinn Féin USA and five other Irish-American groups paid for the black and white ads in the March 10 issues of the Post and The New York Times a week before St. Patrick’s Day focuses on relations between the two countries. Full-page with spot color versions of the ads appear in the Irish Voice and Irish Echo newspapers. The ad says, in part:

A new Ireland is emerging, and more and more people are looking beyond the divisions of the past. A new Ireland is seeking to undo the damage of the undemocratic partition of Ireland 100 years ago and the recent British government imposed Brexit.

“Britain’s exit”, or Brexit, was decided by a 2016 referendum. Voters in the six counties of Northern Ireland opposed leaving the European Union. The British and E.U. governments, including the Republic of Ireland, spent years hammering out the details of the departure.

Earlier this month, the Post published a Bloomberg business analysis that said while a united Ireland is “unlikely anytime soon … the fact that the possibility is being openly discussed again is testament to the forces unleashed by Brexit.”

We’ve been hearing this since 2016. Nearly two years ago to the day, Times columnist Timothy Egan, also citing Brexit, wrote: “From the depths of British bungling, hubris and incompetence is emerging a St. Patrick’s Day miracle: the real chance of a united Ireland.”

Let’s see what happens by St. Patrick’s Day, 2022.

Ongoing analysis of Ireland’s 2020 elections

An overgrown canal bridge along the Boyne River, County Meath, July 2019

The ballots in Ireland’s Feb. 8 national election have been cast and counted. We’ve learned of Sinn Féin’s historic showing. Now, “tortuous coalition negotiations in the coming weeks will determine who, if anyone, can command enough support to lead the next government,” The New York Times reports. A new election might be needed. … The analysis below is mostly from outside of Ireland. I’ll refresh with newer articles at top until developments date these pieces. Email subscribers should visit the website to see the updates. MH

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What Happens Next in Ireland, Time, Feb. 14

For nearly a century, the center-right parties of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have had their way when it comes to forming governments, and both have refused to work with Sinn Féin in the past given their historic links to violence. That made sense when Sinn Féin was polling in the single digits and politically toxic, but a lot harder when they are the single-most popular party in the country.

Like many other advanced democracies of late, Ireland is now forced to confront the reality that its old political system—dominated by two main parties—is finished. That has serious implications for Ireland going forward, while at the same time adding yet another data point for the continued momentum of anti-establishment politics across Western democracies. Another reason Irish elections matter is that compared to other European countries seeing an upsurge of anti-establishment sentiment, Ireland’s economy was actually doing quite well.

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What do Ireland’s election results mean for the North?, Esquire, Feb. 14

The looming question, of course, is what will happen to the status of Northern Ireland, which has been in flux since the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. … I remain convinced that it would be god’s own craic if the British government manages to bungle its way into creating a 32-county Irish Republic.

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Did Ireland Go Populist-Nationalist? (In its own way, yes.), National Review, Feb. 14

Some Irish commentators … have been overanxious to deny the “populist” label that outsiders have attached to Sinn Féin. For many in Ireland, populist is not a synonym for a “bad guy” who is against the EU, doesn’t like immigration, or is generally right-wing.

Ireland has often flattered itself as immune to continental populism because it has, in the living memory of older voters, experienced the reign of a conservative, nationalist, and deeply Catholic government that sought to protect rural ways of life and make the economy a tool of foreign policy and statecraft.

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Irish Voters Cast Off Relic of Entrenched 2-Party System, The New York Times, Feb. 12

In recent years, successive public votes in Ireland to legalize same-sex marriage and repeal an abortion ban have pulled many young and dissatisfied people into politics, giving voters a chance to shake up traditions that were once rigidly enforced by the Roman Catholic Church. Their next target was Ireland’s ossified political hierarchy.

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum conceded that the vote for Sinn Féin reflected the desire of a huge cohort of voters — young and old, urban and rural, working-class and middle-class — for new alternatives in a system that had long stamped them out.

Catching up with modern Ireland: October

Brexit was supposed to happen by Oct. 31. It hasn’t. The departure deadline is now Jan. 31, 2020, but could happen sooner, depending on the outcome of a Dec. 12 election in the U.K., including 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland of 650 seats in the Commons. In the Republic, there are divergent opinions whether to call elections this month, or wait until May 2020.

More news and views:

  • Abortion was decriminalized and same-sex marriage legalized in Northern Ireland on Oct. 21 as the London parliament passed legislation while the Northern Ireland Assembly remains dormant.
  • It is hard to overstate how remarkable it is that the end of partition on the island of Ireland is being seriously considered, yet it is difficult to understate how ill-prepared everyone is for it to actually happen, Ed O’Loughlin wrote in the Atlantic: The ‘Messy and Angry’ Prospect of Ireland Reunifying
  • As if Brexit wasn’t confusing enough, an E.U. plan to eliminate daylight savings time in 2021 could put post-departure Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in different time zones, creating a new form of partition on the island.
  • Veteran IRA man Ivor Bell was acquitted of any involvement in the 1972 abduction, murder, and disappearance of mother-of-10 Jean McConville. The event is at the core of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2019 book, Say Nothing.
  •  John Henry Newman, the founding rector/president of Ireland’s only Catholic university, precursor of University College Dublin (UCD), was canonized as a saint. UCD was criticized for originally saying it would not send a representative to Rome, citing its modern secular nature, a move some interpreted as anti-Catholic.
  • ” … few Irish Americans know any Irish history at all. … Ireland’s War of Independence need not be celebrated, but it should at least be remembered, above all by the Irish-American community,” John Rodden and John P. Rossi wrote in Commonweal: Why the Irish War of Independence Still Matters

Old buildings on a farm at Fairhead, County Antrim, August 2019.

Catching up with modern Ireland: April

The monthly round up follows below. Thanks for supporting my ongoing series about American Reporting of Irish Independence, 1919. MH

  • U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, invited to address Dáil Éireann (Ireland’s lower house) on its 100th anniversary, said “there will be no chance of a U.S.-U.K. trade agreement if the Brexit deal undermines the Good Friday accord.”  Her trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland was overshadowed by the murder of Derry journalist Lyra McKee.
  • Over 122,000 people from 181 countries have become Irish citizens since 2011, including a group of 2,400 at the end of April, TheJournal.ie reported.
  • Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin made headlines in his interview with The Irish Times. “So many people have been damaged and the church has been damaged. It isn’t that this was an invention of anti or people to get at the church. It was a problem of the church.” Now 75, the prelate will be required to step down next year.
  • Aidan Regan, assistant professor at University College Dublin, wrote a piece in The Washington Post about how  Irish tax policies to attract foreign investment are being questioned at home.
  • “Ireland’s challenge is to continue to build relationships in a volatile political climate,” Washington-based Irish journalist Colm Quinn wrote in The Irish Times. “If family ties are what is keeping the US-Ireland bond strong the question is whether there enough Irish-Americans coming through the ranks to sustain interest in the relationship?”
  • And two more views about contemporary Ireland:

“Illustrating what could be termed the First Great Law of History, namely the Law of Unintended Consequences, the specifics of the Brexit agreement may drive two uneasy political bedfellows—the Catholic majority of the Republic of Ireland in the south and the Protestant majority of Northern Ireland—into each other’s arms. As it reaches the centenary of its first historic declaration of independence from Britain, Ireland may be headed for unification—that is, full independence for all 32 Irish counties, including the six in Northern Ireland.” — From Could Brexit Unite Ireland At Last? in The American Conservative.

“Rather than promoting moderation and reconciliation, the Good Friday Agreement instead pushed Northern Ireland’s voters on both sides of the sectarian divide away from the center, and toward the extremes. … The Northern Ireland Assembly, a body created out of the Good Friday Agreement, which should be speaking out for its people’s interests, has not held a sitting for more than two years, its two biggest parties refusing to cooperate with each other. … An understandable frustration exists among Northern Ireland’s moderate unionists and nationalists at seeing their hard-won institutions taken over, and ultimately paralyzed, by hard-liners who questioned or opposed their creation.” From The Center Isn’t Holding in Northern Ireland in The Atlantic.

  • Oh, yea … the Brexit deadline was extended to Oct. 31 from April 12.

Nancy Pelosi addressing the Dáil. Photograph: Maxwell/The Irish Times.

Catching up with modern Ireland: January

The unresolved Brexit deal remains the top story on the island of Ireland and leads the monthly roundup below. … More posts coming soon in my exploration of how mainstream American newspapers and the ethnic Irish-American press reported the historic events of 1919.  Visit the project landing page. … Thanks for supporting the blog, which in January set a record high for average daily visits and total monthly traffic. MH

  • “There has been increasing speculation that the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 29 March could eventually lead to the unification of the Republic and Northern Ireland,” TheJournal.ie said in reporting a national poll showing a narrow plurality of Irish people favor holding a referendum on the issue.
  • A car bomb in Derry , Northern Ireland, was attributed to an attack by the New IRA, said to be “just one of a number of dissident republican groupings,” according to The Irish Times. Four people have been arrested.
  • Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Ireland has “closed down” tax loopholes and is bringing in more corporation tax as a result, TheJournal.ie reported.
  • Salesforce announced the expansion of 1,500 staff over the next five years; and Facebook said it would add 1,000 jobs this year, the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland announced.
  • “My job in this country as I see it is to tell Ireland’s story – and to listen to America’s story – and to connect the two stories,” Irish Ambassador to the United States Dan Muhall said in a USA Today profile.
  • Israel warned Ireland that a boycott of imported West Bank settlement products would have “severe ramifications” on mutual relations if the proposed Dáil legislation is adopted. The administration has opposed the legislation and warned that it contravenes E.U. law and puts U.S. investment in Ireland at risk.
  • The New York Times reported “Irish women are now discovering the mere passage of a law [last May, repealing national abortion restrictions] cannot wipe away deeply held beliefs” and that pro-life activists are using “United States-style tactics like fake abortion clinics and protests outside legitimate ones” to thwart the now-legal procedure.
  • An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, published a first-ever list of the country’s Top 10 Most-at-Risk Buildings. (The buildings-at-risk project is not new.) “These are all buildings of national importance, buildings that lie vacant and are in such a state of disrepair that they may be dangerous or have no identifiable new use,” the agency says.

Atkins Hall, Cork, is an historic building at risk. PHOTO: Alison Killilea (flickr.com)

Catching up with modern Ireland: July

I’m publishing this month’s roundup a little early due to travel. Upcoming posts will remain minimal through early September as I work on other projects. Thanks for supporting the blog. MH

  • Northern Ireland would be better off financially as part of a united Ireland, according to the “Northern Ireland’s Income and Expenditure in a Reunification Scenario” report by Gunther Thurmann, who worked on the German desk at the International Monteary Fund during German reunification, and Fianna Fail Senator Mark Daly. The new report includes the December 2016 analysis by the U.S. House of Representatives Congressional Research Office, requested by Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), in the wake of the Brexit vote.
  • “There’s no such thing as Irish science; there’s only global science.” — Mark Ferguson, director general of Science Foundation Ireland, at a 25 July, Irish Network-DC event at the Embassy of Ireland, Washington, D.C. SFI was created by a 1998 government initiative and has put Ireland at the forefront of scientific research and development. Ferguson said he sees new opportunities for Ireland resulting from Brexit.
  • In a reflection of the diversity of modern Ireland, a new graveyard for all denominations – and for none – opened in Killarney, County Kerry, The Irish Times reported.
  • A previously undiscovered henge, or circular enclosure, close to the neolithic passage tomb Newgrange, was spotted by an historian flying a drone over the Boyne Valley, County Meath. Unusually dry weather caused the outlines of the site to emerge like subterranean shadows.
  • Friday, 27 July, offered a night of stargazing in Ireland, with a total lunar eclipse, a “blood moon,” and rare looks at Mars, Jupiter and the International Space Station.
  • “We used to blame everything on the British. Now we blame the church.” — Archbishop Eamon Martin, leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, in America magazine story, “What is Ireland’s future after repealing its ban on abortion?“
  • The touring “Coming Home: Art & The Great Hunger” exhibit from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., opened this month in Skibbereen, County Cork, where it will remain through 13 October. The exhibit opened in Dublin earlier this year. It will show in Derry, Northern Ireland, the first quarter of 2019.

“Derrynane,” a 1927 oil on canvas by Jack B. Yeats, is part of the “Coming Home” exhibit.

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Hurlbert reviewed

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“Although barely a month has elapsed since the publication of these volumes, events of more or less general notoriety have so far confirmed the views taken in them of the actual state and outlook of affairs in Ireland, that I gladly comply with the request of my publisher for a Preface to this Second Edition.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

The first edition of Ireland Under Coercion was published in August 1888. The Preface of the second edition, quoted above, was dated 21 September 1888. Mixed reviews of the book appeared that autumn in Irish, English and American newspapers and literary journals.

The Times of London devoted nearly a full page to the book, with “no apology for placing before our readers copious extracts.” It described IUC as “entertaining as well as instructive.” More importantly, the organ of Britain’s ruling Tory party “attached still greater value to the book as a collection of evidence on the present phase of the Irish difficulty, the genuineness of which it would be idle to impeach.”

This was ironic. The review appeared weeks before a special judicial commission began investigating alleged crimes by Charles Stewart Parnell and other Irish nationalists, driven primarily by an 1887 Times series. Once the commission exposed those reports as false, included the newspaper’s use of forged letters, the Times had to pay damages to Parnell. 

The pro-Parnell United Ireland, which Hurlbert described in IUC as “that dumb organ of a downtrodden people,” weighed in a week after the Times‘ review. It labeled Hurlbert “a clever politico-journalist hack, his ambitions, throughout a somewhat extended career, have ever outrun the appreciation of his countrymen … a slighted genius.” It condemned IUC as a “libelous book on Ireland … fit to take its place amongst other grotesque foreign commentaries.”

The same day, The Kerry Evening Post wrote that Hurlbert’ “ruthlessly dethrones many of the ‘pure-souled patriots’, who have been held up to the admiring gaze of the Irish peasants.” The Tralee paper circulated in the region of the Lixnaw murder and Glenbeigh eviction reported by Hurlbert. It generally represented “Protestant interests and conservative politics.” The Post concluded: “The opinions of an intelligent and instructed foreigner may well be commended to Mr. [William] Gladstone’s study, as an answer to his boast that the ‘civilized world’ is on his side in the great controversy of the day.” [The former and future PM supported Home Rule for Ireland.]

Hurlbert

The Saturday Review, a London newsweekly, described Hurlbert as “an American gentleman to whom the condition of Ireland is gravely interesting, because to a certain extent his own country is responsible for it. … He is evidently possessed of a keen sense of humor, and he writes like a well-educated Englishman, while he views men, morals and manners with all the disinterestedness to be expected from a foreigner.”

The Review also criticized Hurlbert for not attempting “any process of solution, short and summary, or tedious and expensive, by which the Irish difficulty might be solved … he has no pet plan to suggest.”

In America, cloth-bound, gilt top editions of Hurlbert’s book were sold for $1.25 by S.A. Maxwell & Co. The Brooklyn (New York) Daily Eagle described the book as “… a sort of high class piece of newspaper reporting … [with] a map claiming to show the most disorderly and the most distressed districts, and that the latter are not the former.”

The Literary World, an American journal, explained to its readers: “The rule of the Land League is, in Mr. Hurlbert’s opinion, the only coercion to which Ireland is subjected; and the title of his volume has reference to this view.” The monthly praised IUC as a “keen and fair-minded report .. [that] may be commended as a practical and thoughtful treatise upon the Irish question.”

The Literary World also suggested that Hurlbert’s book could be read together with Philippe Daryl’s Ireland’s Disease, the English in Ireland, and George Pellew‘s In Castle and Cabin: or Talks in Ireland in 1887. “The three supplement each other well.”

“Hurlbert unmasked’

Hurlbert moved on to another political travel journal, this time about France. But his Ireland book got fresh attention in 1891 when Father Patrick White published a rebuttal pamphlet, Hurlbert unmasked : an exposure of the thumping English lies of William Henry Hurlbert in his ‘Ireland Under Coercion.’  

In his book, Hurlbert had accused the parish priest of organizing boycott activities  at Miltown Malbay, based on his February 1888 visit to County Clare. In Hurlbert unmasked, Father White disputed the charge, and criticized the American reporter on numerous other fronts.

The New York Sun noted that Father White ridiculed the former editor of the rival New York World “as a snob who made his tour of Ireland under the conduct and patronage of lords and others of social and Tory distinction, and who is scrupulous and persistent in advertising the fact.” Following the priest’s lead, the Sun also criticized Hurlbert’s use of unnamed sources.

In a review of Hurlbert’s book about France, The New York Times recalled the 1888 Ireland work as “superficial and tedious,” written “for no higher object and with no less ignoble a spirit than to please certain English nobles in the world of fashion.” At least, the Times suggested, Hurlbert did so “with very respectable success.”

Hurlbert’s book contained a map of his travels “claiming to show the most disorderly and the most distressed districts, and that the latter are not the former.”

NOTES: Top quote from Preface of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American.  Reviews from Times of London, Aug. 18, 1888, page 12; United Ireland, Aug. 25, 1888, page ??; The Kerry Evening Post , Aug. 25, 1888, page 2; The Saturday Review, Sept. 29, 1888, pages 386-387; IUC advertised in The Chicago Tribune, Dec. 1, 1888, page 13; The Brooklyn (New York) Daily Eagle, Nov. 25, 1888, page 7; The Literary World; a Monthly Review of Current Literature, Jan. 19, 1889; page 22; The New York Sun, Jan. 31, 1891, page 7; The New York Times, April 27, 1890, page 19.

“Protestant interests and conservative politics,” from page 196-97 of Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850-1892, by Marie-Louise Legg, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1999.

NEXT: Hurlbert researched

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Battling books

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“This sort of ostrich fury is common enough among the regular drumbeaters of the Irish agitation.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

An earlier post in this series mentioned Hurlbert’s reference to French journalist Paschal Grousset’s 1887 newspaper dispatches from Ireland, which were collected into the book Ireland’s Disease, the English in Ireland. It was among numerous books published during the 1880s by visitors to Ireland, including Hurlbert’s Ireland Under Coercion.

In a late February 1888 diary entry from Partumna, County Galway, Hurlbert discussed two other recently published books about Ireland, also both written in French: Chez Paddy (Paddy at Home), by Baron Edmond de Mandat-Grancey, and the rebuttal, Pour l’Irlande (For Ireland), by Emile Piché, a French-Canadian priest. The former book favored the conservative government in London, the latter title was sympathetic to Irish tenants.

Hurlbert’s view of Piché’s book is summarized by his quote at the top. He scoffed at Pour l’Irlande’s  frontispiece, which featured a three-headed Cerberus-type monster with three collars labeled, in French, “Flattery,” “Famine,” and “Coercion.” The creature stands atop a pedestal with the inscription: “1800 to 1887. Erected by the grateful Irish to the English Government.”

The year 1800 refers to the Act of Union, which dissolved the Irish parliament and created direct rule from London, which prompted the Home Rule efforts of the 1880s. The labeling of one of beast’s collars as “coercion” refers to government actions against the agrarian uprising. It is opposite of how Hurlbert used the word in his book’s title and throughout its text to refer to the tactics of the Land League and other agrarian activists against landlords and the government.

Hurlbert complained that Piché’s description of the 1887 Glenbeigh evictions wasn’t fair to the land agent or the police. Remember, he had just visited Glenbeigh a few weeks earlier to report about landlord-tenant relations. The American also wrote he was “quite certain” that de Mandat-Grancey came to Ireland “with no prejudice in favor of the English Government, or against Nationalists.”

In discussing other contemporary reporting about Irish issues, Hurlbert knew that his own book would face scrutiny when it was published later that year. The conservative Times of London would write that Ireland Under Coercion was “quite different in character” but “not less interesting” than Chez Paddy, largely because both opposed Home Rule and agrarian reforms. The pro-Nationalist United Ireland described Hurlbert’s “libelous book” as being “fit to take its place amongst other grotesque foreign commentaries [such as] Chez Paddy.” In his criticism of Pour l’Irlande, Hurlbert described United Ireland as “that dumb organ of a downtrodden people.”

More reviews and reactions to Hurlbert’s book in a future post.

NOTES: From pages 249-252 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. … Times of London, 18 August 1888, and United Ireland, 25 August, 1888.

NEXT: Pope’s decree

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan