School of History and Geography Research Seminar 2017-18

School of History and Geography
Research Seminar 2017-18

 II Semester

19 February

D308 12:00

 Matthew Stout

‘The Synod of Breemount and twelfth-century Church reform’

While recent publications have challenged the degree to which Church and State were committed to ecclesiastical reform (e.g. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, The Irish Church, its reform and the English invasion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), none has fully appreciated the extent to which the reform movement had unravelled prior to the Anglo-Norman invasion (1169). The decrees of the Synod of Breemount (1158) show how narrow political interests, and traditional forces within the Church, overturned earlier ‘progress’.

 5 March

D308 12:00

 Marnie Hay,

'Na Fianna Eireann's military contribution to the Irish revolution'

This paper examines and assesses the military contribution of Na Fianna Éireann to the Irish revolution during the period 1913-23. Countess Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson founded this youth group in 1909 as a nationalist antidote to Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting movement formed in the previous year. The Fianna provided its mainly male membership with a combination of military training, outdoor pursuits and Irish cultural activities. By 1913 the Fianna was in position to serve as a fertile training and recruiting ground for the newly established adult paramilitary organisations, the Irish Volunteers (later known as the Irish Republican Army; IRA) and the Irish Citizen Army. Members of the youth group later participated in the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), and the Irish Civil War (1922-23). This paper will discuss the Fianna’s performance of military functions or tasks, including provision of trained military personnel, gun-running, smuggling weapons and ammunition, raiding, scouting, dispatch carrying, courier and intelligence work.

  26 March

D308 12:00

Postgraduate students’ research

Seamus Cullen

British army withdraw from Ireland, 1922: The evacuation of the Curragh Camp

TBA

20 April

D308 16:00 (please not a change is time and day, i.e. Friday)

Susan Hegarty

Minerals, mining and some skulduggery: The changing fortunes of the Arigna Iron and Coal company in the early nineteenth century