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Public diplomacy enables private citizens to be involved in international relations either through initiatives sponsored by governments or through direct people-to-people contacts in areas such as culture, business, education, tourism and sport. Public Diplomacy in Ireland and Japan traces the evolution of this growing branch of diplomacy and examines the role it has played in the foreign policies of Ireland and Japan, and in their bilateral relationship. It concludes that public diplomacy has contributed significantly to strengthening the links between the two countries.

The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most ‘ardent’ that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.

Building on the narratives explored in volume one, this publication recovers the story of a further seven Black visitors to Ireland in the decades prior to the American Civil War.

This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676. This was a tumultuous period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power‐struggles of early modern Ireland. This study brings to light the ways in which women contributed; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways and engaging with native and new language‐traditions. The book investigates the genres in which women wrote: poetry, nuns' writing, petition‐letters, depositions, biography, and autobiography. It argues for a complex understanding of authorial agency that centres on the act of creating or composing a text, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. The Irish, English, and European contexts for women's production of texts are identified and assessed. The literary traditions and languages of the different communities living on the island are juxtaposed in order to show how identities were shaped and defined in relation to each other. The book elucidates the social, political, and economic imperatives for women's writing, examines the ways in which women characterized female composition, and describes an extensive range of cross‐cultural, multilingual activity.

The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923 During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These \"Big Houses\" were powerful symbols of conquest, plantation, and colonial oppression, and were caught up in the struggle for independence and the conflict between the aristocracy and those demanding access to more land. Stripped of their most important artifacts, most of the houses were never rebuilt and ruins such as Summerhill stood like ghostly figures for generations to come. Terence Dooley offers a unique perspective on the Irish Revolution, exploring the struggles over land, the impact of the Great War, and why the country mansions of the landed class became such a symbolic target for republicans throughout period. Dooley details the shockingly sudden acts of occupation and destruction-including soldiers using a Rembrandt as a dart board-and evokes the exhilaration felt by the revolutionaries at seizing these grand houses and visibly overturning the established order.

This article examines contemporary legal analyses of the document that is often called the “Anglo Irish Treaty”, “Articles of Agreement”, the “1921 Treaty” or most often simply “the Treaty”. It takes a comparative approach by presenting the legal arguments used by British and Irish supporters and opponents of the settlement in the early 1920s. The article explains how the relative brevity of the document signed on 6 December 1921 ensured that many aspects of the settlement were vague and ambiguous. It argues that many of the ambiguities within the Treaty were not accidental features created by poor drafting but were, in fact, essential aspects of the final settlement. The analysis suggests that the provisions of the Treaty were often as important for what they did not say as for what they did. This leads to the conclusion that much of the opposition to the settlement was not based on an obsession with symbols of sovereignty but on a desire for greater clarity in a settlement whose existence depended on deliberate opacity. Some of the ambiguities created by the Treaty settlement are largely of historical interest, for example the nature of the parliamentary oath, the meaning of Dominion status and the relationship between law and practice in Commonwealth relations. Other legal issues connected with the Treaty, for example those connected to the foundation of the Irish Free State and the position of Northern Ireland, continue to form the subject of debate in the twenty-first century. This article argues that these legal disputes are not capable of solution as the deliberate ambiguity of the Treaty was designed to ensure that they be insoluble so that both sides could interpret the settlement according to what they wanted to see.

Throughout the course of the Second World War, approximately 7,000 personnel serving with the defence forces of neutral southern Ireland abandoned their posts and absented themselves from duty. A large majority of these absentees successfully evaded capture by their authorities, crossing the border into Northern Ireland and arriving at British combined forces recruiting centres where they enlisted in the British army and the Royal Air Force. At the conclusion of the war, in August 1945, some 5,000 soldiers listed as ‘absent without leave’ were formally dismissed from the defence forces, deprived of all pension and gratuity rights, and legally prevented from obtaining any form of publicly remunerated employment for a 7-year period. This article investigates desertion from the Irish defence forces during the Second World War, producing fresh conclusions as to why it occurred on such a large scale.

Though Ireland is a relatively small island on the northeastern fringe of the Atlantic, 70 million people worldwide -- including some 45 million in the United States -- claim it as their ancestral home.In this wide-ranging, ambitious book, Cian T.McMahon explores the nineteenth-century roots of this transnational identity.

Leo Kohn’s 1932 publication, The Constitution of the Irish Free State, is widely recognised as the leading text on the Irish 1922 constitution. Many aspects of this constitution have been reproduced or have influenced the provisions of the current Irish constitution of 1937. This ensures that Kohn’s book continues to be cited in major Irish court cases and scholarly works on law and history. Yet the 1922 constitution also contained a large number of provisions that were not reproduced in the 1937 constitution. These provisions concerned important aspects of British Imperial law and reflected the demands of the 1921 Treaty that created a special constitutional link between the Irish Free State and Canada and a secondary link to the other Dominions of the British Commonwealth and Empire. Kohn’s analysis of these provisions constitutes one of the most radical and politicised aspects of his book. While this article focuses on Kohn’s book and other legal works produced by him, it does not purport to serve as a definitive biography of the man himself. Instead, this article challenges the accuracy of Kohn’s analyses relating to points of British Imperial law. In some instances, Kohn’s analyses were accurate in the context of 1932, when his book was published, but attempts to backdate these conclusions to the time of the birth of the Irish Free State constitution in 1922 are open to serious challenge. Despite these realities, Kohn’s conclusion, that aspects of British Imperial law were nothing more than “archaic symbols” whose “meaninglessness for Ireland was writ large on every page”, have had a profound impact on Irish law and historiography. This article also argues that Kohn’s attempts to minimise the significance of these aspects of British Imperial law may also have been influenced by his long-term ambition to draft a constitution for a Jewish state within the British Mandate of Palestine.

Modern Irish history was determined by the rise, expansion, and decline of the British Empire. British imperial history, from the age of Atlantic expansion to the age of decolonization, was moulded in part by Irish experience. But the nature of Ireland's position in the Empire has always been a matter of contentious dispute. Was Ireland a sister kingdom and equal partner in a larger British state? Or was it, because of its proximity and strategic importance, the Empire's most subjugated colony? Contemporaries disagreed strongly on these questions, and historians continue to do so. Questions of this sort can only be answered historically: Ireland's relationship with Britain and the Empire developed and changed over time, as did the Empire itself. This book offers the first comprehensive history of the subject from the early modern era through to the contemporary period. The contributors seek to specify the nature of Ireland's entanglement with empire over time: from the conquest and colonization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the consolidation of Ascendancy rule in the eighteenth, the Act of Union in the period 1801–1921, the emergence of an Irish Free State and Republic, and eventual withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1948. They also consider the participation of Irish people in the Empire overseas, as soldiers, administrators, merchants, migrants, and missionaries; the influence of Irish social, administrative, and constitutional precedents in other colonies; and the impact of Irish nationalism and independence on the Empire at large. The result is a new interpretation of Irish history in its wider imperial context which is also filled with insights on the origins, expansion, and decline of the British Empire.