HIST 301 Essay List 2013
HIST 301
MODERN IRELAND 1850 – 2000
Essay List 2013
1. ‘Post-Famine Ireland entered upon a complex and rapid process of social
readjustment.’ Discuss.
2. ‘Fenians offered rhetoric … and recreation and status, and the prospect of
immediate patriotic glory.’ Discuss.
3. To what extent and to what effect did Paul Cullen bring about the
‘Cullenisation’ of Irish society?
4. ‘The land war proved a seminal event in altering landlord-tenant relations in
favour of a peasant proprietorship.’ Discuss.
5. ‘The career of Charles Stewart Parnell has been the subject of many different
interpretations.’ Discuss.
6. ‘Between 1868 and 1905 Conservative defence of the Union was repackaged
in Ireland as imaginative administration and economic improvement.’
Discuss.
7. ‘The cultural revival of the late 19th century was a struggle to recover national
identity but in this it proved uneven and only partially successful.’ Discuss.
8. ‘The 1913 lockout may well have fired the hearts and minds of the working
classes in Ireland but the weakness of the labour movement remained its
overriding characteristic.’ Discuss.
9. ‘For unionists the spectre of Irish self-government in period 1911-14
generated myriad fears: political, economic and religious.’ Discuss.
10. ‘The price of the First World War for the party of John Redmond was the
cause of Home Rule.’ Discuss.
11. ‘We will die but it will be a different Ireland after us’ (Tom Clarke). Discuss.
12. By matching its operations to its means, it [the IRA] could ensure its survival
for long enough to achieve psychological victory out of military stalemate.’
Discuss Charles Townshend’s assessment of the War of Independence.
13. ‘Those who repudiated the Treaty did so not because it failed to provide a
united Ireland but because it failed to deliver a Republic.’ Discuss.
HIST 301 Essay List 2013
14. ‘Despite manifold difficulties the successes of the Cumann na nGaedheal
administration outweighed its shortcomings and failures.’ Discuss.
15. ‘For de Valera the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 was the coping on a decade
of brilliant political manoeuvre which established him as the leader of a
reconstructed twenty-six county state.’ Discuss.
16. ‘Benevolent neutrality best served British as well as Irish interests.’ Discuss.
17. ‘Until the 1990s virtually every person growing up in independent Ireland
knew that the day might come when they had to emigrate.’ Discuss.
18. Seán Lemass was 60 when he was elected Taoiseach by Dáil Éireann, of which
he had been a member for more than thirty years, and where he had served
as a minister for more than twenty. Such a long wait in the wings has masked
the reality that, in other ways, he was an exceptionally lucky Taoiseach.’
Discuss.
19. What factors informed Irish foreign policy and how did these change
between 1958 and 1973?
20. ‘Advances in the rights of Irish women since the 1960s might best be
summed up as much done, more to do.’ Discuss.
21. ‘Northern Ireland was characterized by unionist dominance, Catholic
powerlessness and Westminster indifference.’ Discuss in relation to the
period 1920-69.
22. In what ways do the arrangements set out in the Good Friday Agreement
differ from earlier efforts at power-sharing?