Research Catalog

Title

A treatise on Northern Ireland / Brendan O'Leary.

Author

O'Leary, Brendan

Publication

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

3 volumes : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

• Volume 1 illuminates how British colonialism shaped the formation and political cultures of what became Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. It provides a comparative audit of the scale of recent conflict in Northern Ireland and explains its historical origins. Contrasting colonial and sectarianized accounts of modern Irish history, Brendan O'Leary shows that a judicious meld of these perspectives provides a properly political account of direct and indirect rule, and of administrative and settler colonialism. The British state incorporated Ulster and Ireland into a deeply unequal Union after four re-conquests over two centuries had successively defeated the Ulster Gaels, the Catholic Confederates, the Jacobites, and the United Irishmen-and their respective European allies. Founded as a union of Protestants in Great Britain and Ireland, rather than of the British and the Irish nations, the colonial and sectarian Union was infamously punctured in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. The subsequent mobilization of Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists, and two republican insurrections amid the cataclysm and aftermath of World War I, brought the now partly democratized Union to an unexpected end, aside from a shrunken rump of British authority, baptized as Northern Ireland. Home rule would be granted to those who had claimed not to want it, after having been refused to those who had ardently sought it.
• Volume 2 is a detailed study of antagonistic ethnic majoritarianism. Northern Ireland was coercively created through a contested partition in 1920. Subsequently Great Britain compelled Sinn Fein's leaders to rescind the declaration of an Irish Republic, remain within the British Empire, and grant the Belfast Parliament the right to secede. If it did so, a commission would consider modifying the new border. The outcome, however, was the formation of two insecure regimes, North and South, both of which experienced civil war, while the boundary commission was subverted. In the North a control system organized the new majority behind a dominant party that won all elections to the Belfast parliament until its abolition in 1972. The Ulster Unionist Party successfully disorganized Northern nationalists and Catholics. Bolstered by the 'Specials,' a militia created from the Ulster Volunteer Force, this system displayed a pathological version of the Westminster model of democracy, which may reproduce one-party dominance, and enforce national, ethnic, religious, and cultural discrimination. How the Unionist elite improvised this control regime, and why it collapsed under the impact of a civil rights movement in the 1960s, take center-stage in this volume. The North's trajectory is paired and compared with the Irish Free State's incremental decolonization and restoration of a Republic. Irish state-building, however, took place at the expense of the limited prospect of persuading Ulster Protestants that Irish reunification was in their interests, or consistent with their identities. Northern Ireland was placed under British direct rule in 1972 while counter-insurgency practices applied elsewhere in its diminishing empire were deployed from 1969 with disastrous consequences.
• Volume 3. After the ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in two referendums, for the first time in history political institutions throughout the island of Ireland rested upon the freely given assent of majorities of all the peoples on the island.0It marked, it was hoped, the full political decolonization of Ireland. Whether Ireland would reunify, or whether Northern Ireland remain in union with Great Britain now rested on the will of the people of Ireland, North and South respectively. This volume explains the making of this settlement, and the many failed initiatives that preceded it under British direct rule. Long-term structural and institutional changes and short-term political maneuvers are given their due in this lively but comprehensive assessment. The Anglo-Irish Agreement is identified as the political tipping point, itself partially the outcome of the hunger strikes of 1980-81 that had prevented the criminalization of republicanism. Until 2016 the prudent judgment seemed to be that the Good Friday Agreement had broadly worked, eventually enabling Sinn Fein and the DUP to share power, with intermittent attention from the sovereign governments. Cultural Catholics appeared content if not in love with the Union with Great Britain. But the decision to hold a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union has collaterally damaged and destabilized the Good Friday Agreement. That, in turn, has shaped the UK's tortured exit negotiations with the European Union.

Subjects

• Northern Ireland
• Great Britain
• Northern Ireland > History
• Politics and government
• Northern Ireland > Politics and government
• Northern Ireland > Relations > Great Britain
• 1968-1998
• International relations
• History
• Great Britain > Relations > Northern Ireland

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents

V. 1. Colonialism: the shackles of the state and hereditary animosities -- v. 2. Control: the Second Protestant Ascendancy and the Irish state -- v. 3. Consociation and confederation: from antagonism to accommodation?

Call Number

JFE 20-1361

ISBN

• 9780199243341
• 0199243344
• 9780198830573
• 0198830572
• 9780198830580
• 0198830580

LCCN

2018966372

OCLC

1102601652

Author

O'Leary, Brendan, author.

Title

A treatise on Northern Ireland / Brendan O'Leary.

Publisher

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Chronological Term

1968-1998

Research Call Number

JFE 20-1361