Contested space: The revolutionary intersection of land hunger, memory and social justice impulse, within a rural west of Ireland community, 1793-1925 (a North Mayo case study)
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Date
2023-10-09Embargo Date
2025-10-10
Author
Heffron, Liam Alex
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Abstract
‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not
only of discontent, but of anger and revolt’, according to British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George writing in Spring 1919. This also manifested throughout Ireland in the
form of popular mobilisations, but which according to John Cunningham and Terry
Dunne, has been heretofore principally interpreted through the lens of the struggle for
Irish independence and graded against the militant republicanism of the Sinn Féin
movement.4 This aligns with Gavin Maxwell Foster survey that found most (but by no
means all) scholars saw the struggle for independence over 1916-23 as a narrow
political venture:
socially conservative in its outlook and aims […] pointing to the virtual
settlement of the volatile land question by the turn of the century; the social
safety valve of mass emigration; the nearly hegemonic social power of the
Catholic Church; the growth of the Irish middle classes; and the necessarily
cross-class basis of Sinn Fein's electoral support, among other factors, to
explain Ireland's ‘social revolution that never was’. 5
However, he notes that even the most ardent proposer of this view concedes that the
Civil War had noteworthy ‘socio-economic forces’ at play in a complex interaction of
social structures.6 John Borgonovo also sees the apparent contradiction of such a
‘narrow political venture’ relying on methods of agrarian resistance from the earlier
long nineteenth century without inheriting any of its social agendas.