Land Questions in Modern Ireland

Fergus Campbell is Reader in Social and Cultural History in the School of History, Archaeology and Classics at Newcastle UniversityTony Varley is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology and Political Science at NUI Galway

The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. This book presents the current state of our understanding of the issue as well as detailing innovative new research and reflecting on how historians have approached the topic in various ways since the 1930s. In eleven essays, a group of authors including some of the most influential historians of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explores Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.This book surveys the current state of the literature on the land question in Ireland under the union (1801-1921) and during the under-researched post-independence period, with particular attention given to women's experiences of rural life and their active contributions to agrarian protest. It includes the most recent research in the fields of cultural history and history from below, locating these discussions in a wider consideration of historical writing and revisionism in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Ireland.The book makes a vital contribution to the study of historiography by including for the first time the reflections of a group of prominent historians on their earlier work.These essays will be of interest to historians of modern Ireland, sociologists and anthropologists interested in Ireland and in rural societies, and anyone interested in the revisionist debate in Ireland.

Introduction and acknowledgements - Fergus CampbellSECTION ONE: SURVEYS1. Irish land questions in the State of the Union - Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh2. Gaining ground, losing ground: The politics of land reform in twentieth-century Ireland - Tony VarleySECTION TWO: REFLECTIONS3. The Irish land question in a wider context - Barbara Solow4. Writing about Irish land against the backdrop of Northern Ireland - Philip Bull5. Strange bedfellows? The Land League Alliances - Samuel Clark6. The issue of land redistribution: Revisiting Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland - David Jones7. Land and Revolution revisited - Fergus CampbellSECTION THREE: NEW RESEARCH8. De-centering the Irish land war: Women, politics and the private sphere - Heather Laird9. The transcendent role of Catholic discourse in the Irish Land War - Anne Kane10. Matthew Harris, Fenianism and land agitation in the West of Ireland - Gerard Moran11. The politics of "holding the balance": Irish farmers' parties and land distribution in the twentieth century -Tony VarleyIndex