Victims of Ireland’s Great Famine: The Bioarchaeology of Mass Burials at Kilkenny Union Workhouse. Jonny Geber. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015, 312 pp. $84.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8130-6117-7.

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-604
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Brighton
Keyword(s):  
Great Famine ◽  
Union Workhouse

Home, the Asylum, and the Workhouse in The Shadow of the Glen

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Little
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
The Road ◽  
Institutional Space ◽  
Union Workhouse

This essay analyses J.M. Synge's construction of domestic and institutional space in his debut play The Shadow of the Glen. The Richmond Asylum and Rathdrum Union Workhouse, the two institutions of confinement which are mentioned in the play, are seen as playing important roles in constructing a threatening offstage space beyond the cottage walls. The essay reads Nora's departure from the home at the end of the play as an eviction into this hostile environment, thereby challenging the dominant interpretation of The Shadow as a woman's choice between her home and the road. By drawing on historical research and Synge's travel writing to delineate contemporary attitudes towards the asylum and the workhouse, the essay aims to provide a deeper understanding of the play's dynamics of place.

The Irish catholic clergy and emigration during the great famine

1947 ◽  
Vol 5 (20) ◽  
pp. 287-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver MacDonagh
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Single Voice ◽  
The Catholic Church

The catholic church in Ireland never, as a church, defined for itself an attitude towards emigration. Priests and bishops, when they spoke of emigration, usually spoke as individuals, not as members of their order. The relatively small number who have left any opinions on record were not necessarily the most influential. We cannot be certain that their views represented the feelings of the clergy as a whole. The day to day conversations and advice of ordinary priests, of which we can know little, mere far more influential in this matter than the pastorals or public letters which survive. In the place of a single voice speaking with authority or the steady murmur of unanimity, we can hear only the heterogeneous confusion of a score of voices, some perhaps seriously distorted by the public controversy in which they were raised.

IV. J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform, and the Integrity of the Empire, 1865–1870

1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. D. Steele
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Complete Agreement ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Harsh Criticism ◽  
Irish Question

The first part of this study of Mill sought to show how much less radical he was on the subject of Irish land reform than is often supposed. In the earlier editions of the Principles of Political Economy from 1848 to 1857 there were passages which constituted a terrible indictment of landlordism, and insisted on the need for legislation to convert the tenant farmers into joint owners of their holdings: but in another passage this harsh criticism was substantially withdrawn, and the demand for fixity of tenure effectively retracted. Although they continued to reproduce the criticism and the call for a drastic measure, the editions of 1862 and 1865 were more moderate still in their conclusions on Irish land. With the progress of the changes in the economy and society set in motion by the Great Famine, Mill became more strongly convinced that the country should be left to evolve slowly under the existing law of tenure, only slightly amended. One cannot imagine Mill saying, ‘tenant-right…is equivalent to landlords' wrong’: but he and Palmerston were none the less in nearly complete agreement by 1865 on the degree of laissez-faire that was desirable in Ireland. For all his strictures upon aristocratic misgovernment and middle-class prejudice, Mill was too warm an admirer of British institutions to want to undermine their social basis over a wide area of the United Kingdom. The second part of this study deals with his action and his motives, in briefly advocating, without any reservations this time, the revolutionary land legislation from which he had always previously shrunk, despite his brave words written for the earlier editions of the Principles.

John O’Connell and the Great Famine

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (98) ◽  
pp. 138-143
Author(s):  
Maurice R. O’Connell
Keyword(s):  
Read Aloud ◽  
Catholic Bishop ◽  
Great Famine

Michael Davitt in his book, The fall of feudalism in Ireland, published in 1904, told the story.it is related that Mr John O’Conneli, M.P., … son of the Liberator, read aloud in Conciliation Hall, Dublin [the meeting place of the Repeal Association], a letter he had received from a catholic bishop in west Cork, in 1847, in which this sentence occurred — ‘the famine is spreading with fearful rapidity and scores of persons are dying of starvation and fever, but the tenants are bravely paying their rents’ — whereupon John O'Connell exclaimed, in proud tones, ‘I thank God I live among a people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of the rent!’

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