Concatenation of conspiracies blurbs

Among the more fantastical claims of Fenian depredation, their supposed complicity in the nefarious activities of Jack the Ripper and the sinking of the Titanic are probably among the most outlandish.

Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1994

Jacobitism and Freemasonry are two subjects which have in the past been neglected or disregarded by professional historians. This paper considers Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry together in the period from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, and it will be seen that there were intimate and significant links between the two movements. Topics dealt with include the Scottish origins of Freemasonry, links with the Stuart dynasty and later Jacobitism, the early placement of Freemasonry in Trinity College Dublin and the prominence within eighteenth-century Irish Freemasonry of Catholic and Jacobite families such as the Nettervilles and Barnewalls.

The struggle of the "French Revolutionary Wars" is, at its base, often stereotypically viewed as a cataclysmic struggle between anarchic revolutionary France and the rock of moderation and liberalism that is England. As fascinating as the revolution in France is, this single-lens view often blinds one to the very real presence of not only discontent, but outright sedition and even revolution in France's opponents, including within Great Britain. What follows included the suppression of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, creating a public uproar as the dismantling of the people's defense, the suspension of Habeas Corpus Act, and the passing of the "Gagging Acts," formally titled The Treasonable and Seditious Practices and the Seditious Meetings Acts. 2 These outlawed written and spoken dissent or complaints of Government and the Constitution as well as the gathering of over fifty people without consent from magistrates. None of these acts, however, would result in nearly as much turmoil as the Gunpowder Act, allowing authorities to crack down on areas where they believed locals were storing arms, and the Militia Act, enacting partial conscription. Coupled with the unwillingness of Irish Parliament to either grant Catholics further rights or offer any opposition to these new oppressive acts, popular discontent flared in Ireland, as well as in Great Britain, and the people began looking towards various societies and political parties for extra-parliamentary solutions, primarily the nowradicalized United Irishmen.

Irish Studies Review, 2021

ABSTRACT Seán Hillen is Ireland’s most important photocollage artist and acutely aware of how aesthetic forms interact with public discourse. To understand the latter, this article first examines Hillen and Desmond Fitzgerald’s memorial for the Omagh Bombing, which aimed for community reconciliation, but whose reception absorbed the interpretative crisis produced by the bungled police investigation and surrounding conspiracy theories. Hillen’s photomontages, on the contrary, intently expose such interpretative crises. Having learned from Berlin Dada, Hillen’s early photomontages investigate the contradictions of Irish identity. After Omagh, Hillen turns explicitly to US conspiracy theory. He transports conspiracy’s subversion of state propaganda to interrogate post-recessionary Irish austerity and to ask whether British complicity in extrajudicial violence has been sufficiently exposed. Yet conspiracy is another false reconciliation, easily appropriated by illiberal politics, and central to authoritarian scapegoating and disregard. This doubled response, attraction to an aesthetic of suspicion and wariness that such technique has been politically appropriated, maps to a discussion of the aesthetic strategies of the writers Hillen’s collages invoke: W.B Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Comparative Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 59-75, 1997

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Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, 2008

Age of Revolutions, 2023

This article is part of a collaboration with the Commission internationale d’histoire de la Révolution française (CIHRF) following the August 2022 meeting of the International Committee of Historical Sciences at Poznań, Poland. The Commission convened a panel on “revolutionary nationalism in a global perspective” together with the Japanese and Korean National Committees and the Network of Global and World History Associations.

Historical Discourses, 2013

The links between literary rhetoric and political action play a part in any reform movement. Prominent strains of Irish nationalism, leading up to independence in the early twentieth century, are notable for their reliance on literature and popular culture to cement ideas in popular conception. The 1916 Easter Rising in which Dublin was held for a week by various groups of militant nationalists has been described as "a revolution led by poets." 1 Indeed, Irish literature and cultural discourse were central elements leading to the 1916 insurrection. Many Irish cultural conceptions in the lead-up to the Rising contained discussion of violence as a noble tradition, rooted in the past and intimately tied to masculinity. These cultural traditions can be witnessed in Irish rhetoric, a rhetoric which shaped the form the Rising would take in Irish memory. These cultural conceptions of violence had long been kept relatively at bay in the traditional overlap of constitutional and radical means. However, the situation changed in early twentieth-century Ireland as cultural depictions of violence gained greater political weight, acting as essential tools to the portrayal of the Rising in popular opinion. Political alienation and the Irish cultural revival brought about a resurgence of mysticism surrounding violence, allowing the Rising to be marked as the foundation of independence and its leaders as symbolic martyrs of Irish nationalism.