Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Apocalyptic bloodlusts in expectation of the redrawing of the political map of Europe were two-a-penny at the turn of the twentieth century. As British politicians debated the best way to manage the empire – simultaneously near the peak of its territorial expansion and under pressure from ambitious European powers – the New Imperialists conceived of these rivalries as a pseudo-Darwinian struggle for the survival. Spurred on by the Boer War, Irish political debate was infected with this discourse, the moth-balled adage ‘England's difficulty, Ireland's opportunity’ emerging freshly laundered for the new century. ‘Clovis’, writing in the United Irishman, prophesied a struggle of magnificent proportions:
Her [Ireland's] people uneasy, dissatisfied, apathetic, despairing, agitated by conflicting counsels and impulses, face the coming century without a leader whom they can trust or a plan which they can confidently follow. … we await the coming of the chosen one … She [Ireland] bids us look to the East, beyond her once invincible but now failing enemy, to where the nations of Europe are girding their loins for the greatest struggle the human race has ever engaged in.
The Christological metaphors that became so characteristic of Pearse's later oratory are evident here, implicitly transfiguring Parnell, an earlier chosen one, into a sacrificed Christ. Packed with presentiment, this passage was also a call for clarity amid the confusion of turn of the century Irish politics. The Irish parliamentary party, although still divided, remained the dominant political force in Ireland.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 , pp. 130 - 178Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006