Ireland's Violent Frontier

Ireland's Violent Frontier
Author: H. Patterson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137314028

The IRA's ability to exploit the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was central to the organisation's capacity to wage its 'Long War' over a quarter of a century. This book is the first to look at the role of the border in sustaining the Provisionals and its central role in Anglo-Irish relations throughout the Troubles.

Ireland's Violent Frontier

Ireland's Violent Frontier
Author: H. Patterson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137314028

The IRA's ability to exploit the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was central to the organisation's capacity to wage its 'Long War' over a quarter of a century. This book is the first to look at the role of the border in sustaining the Provisionals and its central role in Anglo-Irish relations throughout the Troubles.

Bombs, Bullets and the Border

Bombs, Bullets and the Border
Author: Patrick Mulroe
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1911024523

Bombs, Bullets and the Border examines Irish Government Security Policy and the role played by the Gardaí and Irish Army along the Northern Irish border during some of the worst years of the Troubles. Mulroe knits together an impressive range of sources to delve into the murky world occupied by paramilitaries and those policing the border. The ways in which security forces under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments secretly cooperated with the British Army and the RUC, exacerbating tensions with republican groups in the border counties, are meticulously examined. Mulroe also reveals the devastating consequences of this approach, which left a loyalist threat unheeded and the 26 counties open to attack. The findings of the Smithwick Tribunal and the upheaval of Brexit have kept the issue of Irish border security within the public eye, but without a complete awareness of its consequences. Bombs, Bullets and the Border is vital reading in understanding what a secure border entails, and how it affects the lives of those living within its hinterland.

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Irish Border?

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Irish Border?
Author: Katy Hayward
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2021-06-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1529773482

The Irish border is a manifestation of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. When that relationship has been tense, we have seen the worst effects at the Irish border in the form of violence, controls and barriers. When the relationship has been good, the Irish border has become - to all intents and purposes - open, invisible and criss-crossed with connections. Throughout its short existence, the symbolism of the border has remained just as important as its practical impact. With the UK’s exit from the European Union, the challenge of managing the Irish border as a source and a symbol of British-Irish difference became an international concern. The solution found in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement gives the Irish border a globally unique status. A century after partition, and as we enter the post-Brexit era, this book considers what we should know and do about this highly complex and ever-contested boundary line.

Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier

Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier
Author: Patrick J. Mahoney
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1574418351

Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier is a bilingual compilation of stories by Eoin Ua Cathail, an Irish emigrant, based loosely on his experiences in the West and Midwest. The author draws on the popular American Dime Novel genre throughout to offer unique reflections on nineteenth-century American life. As a member of a government mule train accompanying the U.S. military during the Plains Indian Wars, Ua Cathail depicts fierce encounters with Native American tribes, while also subtly commenting on the hypocrisy of many famine-era Irish immigrants who failed to recognize the parallels between their own plight and that of dispossessed Native peoples. These views are further challenged by his stories set in the upper Midwest. His writings are marked by the eccentricities and bloated claims characteristic of much American Western literature of the time, while also offering valuable transnational insights into Irish myth, history, and the Gaelic Revival movement. This bilingual volume, with facing Irish-English pages, marks the first publication of Ua Cathail’s work in both the original Irish and in translation. It also includes a foreword from historian Richard White, a comprehensive introduction by Mahoney, and a host of previously unpublished historical images. “Ua Cathail’s Irish-language tales anticipate Twain and Hemingway in a multicultural world of settlers, shysters, and simple idealists still confronted by the challenge of Native Americans.”—Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation

Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes

Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes
Author: Roger D. McGrath
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520341732

From the Preface:On the frontier, says conventional wisdom, a structured society did not exist and social control was largely absent; law enforcement and the criminal justice system had limited, if any, influence; and danger--both from man and from the elements--was ever present. This view of the frontier is projected by motion pictures, television, popular literature, and most scholarly histories. But was the frontier really all that violent? What was the nature of the violence that did occur? Were frontier towns more violent that cities in the East? Has America inherited a violent way of life from the frontier? Was the frontier more violent than the United States is today? This book attempts to answer these questions and others about violence and lawlessness on the frontier and do so in a new way. Whereas most authors have drawn their conclusions about frontier violence from the exploits of a few notorious badmen and outlaws and from some of the more famous incidents and conflicts, I have chosen to focus on two towns that I think were typical of the frontier--the mining frontier specifically--and to investigate all forms of violence and lawlessness that occurred in and around those towns.

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands
Author: Catherine Nash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317083687

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands explores everyday life and senses of identity and belonging along a contested border whose official functions and local impacts have shifted across the twentieth century. It does so through the accounts of contemporary borderland residents in Ireland and Northern Ireland who shared with us their reflections on and experiences of the border from the 1950s to the present day. Since the border is the product of the partition of the island and the creation of Northern Ireland, its meaning has been deeply entangled with the radically and often violently opposed perspectives on the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and the political reunification of the island. Yet the intensely political symbolism of the border has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to the lived experience of the border, its material presence in the landscape and in people’s lives, and its materialisation through the practices and policies of the states on either side. Drawing on recent approaches within historical, political and cultural geography and the cross-disciplinary field of border studies, this book redresses this neglect by exploring the Irish border in terms of its meanings (from the political to the personal) but also, and importantly, through the objects (from tables of custom regulations and travel permits to road blocks and military watch towers) and practices (from official efforts to regulate the movement of people and objects across it to the strategies and experiences of those subject to those state policies) through which it was effectively constituted. The focus is on the Irish border as practised, experienced and materially present in the borderlands.

“Riotous and Lawless Proceedings”: Violence, Captivity, and Communication Along the Colonial Mid-Atlantic Frontier/“Great Meetings, in the Night”: an Atlantic Perspective of the Irish Whiteboys, 1761-1765

“Riotous and Lawless Proceedings”: Violence, Captivity, and Communication Along the Colonial Mid-Atlantic Frontier/“Great Meetings, in the Night”: an Atlantic Perspective of the Irish Whiteboys, 1761-1765
Author: Sarah Donovan
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN:

After the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1755, anti-Indian violence exploded across the colonial mid-Atlantic frontier. This violence coincided with an increase in Native American captivity as tribes in the Ohio River Valley sought to assert their sovereignty over the encroaching white settlers. The article entitled, “’Riotous and Lawless proceedings’: Violence, Captivity, and Communication along the Colonial mid-Atlantic Frontier,” examines the curious cultural dichotomy of frontier residents such as James Smith, whose captivity experiences provided intimate knowledge of Native American society and culture that was later used to support violent anti-Indian extralegal groups. The author seeks to challenge the assumption that violence signals a lack of cultural understanding and instead argues that the increased violence and cultural contact between European frontier communities and Native Americans during the Seven Years War fostered a system of understanding and communication through violence. In 1761, a group of largely illiterate Gaelic-speaking poor Catholic farmers formed the Whiteboys, an extralegal society that opposed the closure of common lands by the largely Protestant, British elite. These Whiteboys are often referenced by historians as a passing symptom of political change from Jacobite thought in the early eighteenth century to the growing revolutionary fervor that would inspire the Irish Rebellion of 1798. However, the article entitled, “’Great Meetings, in the Night’: An Atlantic Perspective of the Irish Whiteboys, 1761-1765,” seeks to examine the Whiteboys themselves and place them within the context of the transatlantic Seven Years War. Relying on newspaper accounts and descriptions of violence, the author argues that both British perceptions of Whiteboy violence as well as the Whiteboys themselves were embedded in transatlantic issues of trade, empire, and colonization.

The Rule of the Land

The Rule of the Land
Author: Garrett Carr
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2017-01-31
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0571313361

In the wake of the EU referendum, the United Kingdom's border with Ireland has gained greater significance: it is set to become the frontier with the European Union. Over the past year, Garrett Carr has travelled this border, on foot and by canoe, to uncover a landscape with a troubled past and an uncertain future. Across this thinly populated line, travelling down hidden pathways and among ancient monuments, Carr encounters a variety of characters who have made this liminal space their home. He reveals the turbulent history of this landscape and changes the way we look at nationhood, land and power. The book incorporates Carr's own maps and photographs.

The Border

The Border
Author: Diarmaid Ferriter
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782835113

Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2019 'Anyone who wishes to understand why Brexit is so intractable should read this book. I can think of several MPs who ought to.' The Times For the past two decades, you could cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic half a dozen times without noticing or, indeed, turning off the road you were travelling. It cuts through fields, winds back-and-forth across roads, and wends from Carlingford Lough to Lough Foyle. It is frictionless - a feat sealed by the Good Friday Agreement. Before that, watchtowers loomed over border communities, military checkpoints dotted the roads, and smugglers slipped between jurisdictions. This is a past that most are happy to have left behind but might it also be the future? The border has been a topic of dispute for over a century, first in Dublin, Belfast and Westminster and, post Brexit referendum, in Brussels. Yet, despite the passions of Nationalists and Unionists in the North, neither found deep wells of support in the countries they identified with politically. British political leaders were often ignorant of the conflict's complexities, rarely visited the border, and privately disliked their erstwhile unionist allies. Southern leaders' anti-partition statements masked relative indifference and unofficial cooperation with British security services. From the 1920 Government of Ireland Act that created the border, the Treaty and its aftermath, through the Civil Rights Movement, Thatcher, the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement up to the Brexit negotiations, Ferriter reveals the political, economic, social and cultural consequences of the border in Ireland. With the fate of the border uncertain, The Border is a timely intervention by a renowned historian into one of the most contentious and misunderstood political issues of our time.