Ciaran O'Neill

The ties that bound the Atlantic colonies of northeastern British North America with Ireland, Scotland and the islands of the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were intricate and extensive. They connected a range of people and professions, cut across boundaries meant to separate the citizens of the French, Spanish and British empires, and supported an ever-expanding collection of economic, kinship and social networks. Catholics navigated this world with impressive dexterity. They came from a range of backgrounds and their presence across every colony and territory enabled their church, perhaps the most influential pan-European institution, to play a pivotal role in colonial formation. One of the biggest hurdles for a holistic exploration of a Catholic Atlantic within the British World is developing a methodology that enables us to deal with the reality of a Catholic population that was ethnically diverse and comprised of disparate groups including white Europeans, enslaved people, free people of colour, and Indigenous people. The rich perspectives emerging from the 'spatial turn' can enable us to do so. 1 The literature on Catholics and empire is at something of a crossroads. Gabriel Glickman has noted the marked tendency to think solely in terms of a Franco-Iberian Catholic Atlantic in historical scholarship on the early modern period to the exclusion of Britain and Ireland. 2 There is a mixed, but voluminous, literature on Catholic missions to Asia and Africa in the modern period, but the Catholic role in settler colonial society remains understudied. Similarly, there has been an increasing tendency to consider the secular church as acting in an imperialist mode, particularly in the case of the Irish and English, but studies consistently omit consideration of the Catholic laity. 3 This is most obvious when taking a transnational or Atlantic view, though some new work is offering alternative perspectives. 4 Similarly, few publications consider the agency of migrant, free people of colour, and enslaved Catholics. 5 What is needed is a repositioning of the research to prioritize the laity to help us paint a more complete picture of the

Dublin does not associate itself with slavery. Despite its status as a major port city serving Britain and Ireland at the peak of the transatlantic slave economy the subject has little traction in the public history of the city. It is absent from our memory. There are solid reasons for this. If compared with the major port cities of Britain like Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow, it seems clear that Dublin never reaped the same direct economic dividends from Atlantic trade. Barred from direct trade to the colonies for generations, the city did not at any point develop a financial sector that could rival that of London or Edinburgh. The economic centrality of London and its credit lines to the empire project meant that Dublin always played second fiddle to it, and the removal of an active Irish political elite from the city following the Act of Union meant any dividend that descended from the eventual opening of free trade with the colonies in the 1780s – already very late in the day – never translated into compelling physical evidence of Irish profits from the slave economy. Thus Dublin has a very weak understanding of its own connection to the slave economy. And yet it certainly has a connection, and a more elaborate connection than one might think.

It took the Harvard professor and anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton almost twenty years to publish the results of a collaborative Irish research project he considered an abject failure. Released just after his death, The Physical Anthropology of Ireland (1955) was a limp end to a research career during which Hooton had chased both public and academic acclaim with his work on hereditary racial classification and degeneracy. With colorful book titles such as Apes, Men, and Morons (1937) and The American Criminal (1939), Hooton had wished to bridge the divide between his academic research and the general reader; however, his lasting influence lay within the walls of academia, where, as the leading anthropologist at Harvard University, he populated the field with generations of his own doctoral students. It was one of these students, Clarence Wesley Dupertuis, who carried out the bulk of the initial Irish fieldwork that Hooten would later consider relatively useless. In total, Dupertuis collected data from more than ten thousand Irish people in two extended visits between 1934 and 1936, recording over one hundred data points on each person measured, from cranial diameter to eye and hair color. By his own estimation he had racked up forty-five thousand miles by car traveling around Ireland, collecting data in 426 localities and with the help of local parish priests, the Irish police, and his own (doubtless very patient) wife, Helen Stimson.

This conversation with the Irish author Emma Donoghue is focused on her relationship with history and fiction. Topics discussed include the relationship between scholarly research and the writing of historical fiction, the author's sense of duty to the past. We talked about the process of writing historical fiction, and the importance (or lack of importance) of having an 'authen-tic' link to the moment, or the material that one works with. It is in this context that the author speaks of historical fiction as something that has helped her to open the 'cage of her moment'. The conversation took place in front of a large audience at Boston College on 1 December 2018. It was held at the end of a one-day symposium on History and Fiction at Connolly House, a renowned centre for Irish Studies in the United States, and for this reason the interview concludes with a wider consideration of the author's Irish identity and how living outside of Ireland has effected it in recent decades.

Since the nineteen-seventies public history has emerged as an increasingly coherent discipline in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and, latterly, in a wider European context. In all of these places it has had a connected but distinctly different gestation, and the nature of how history is applied, constructed, proffered or sold for public consumption is unique to each society. In Ireland, and within the history profession connected to it, its meaning is yet to be fully explored. Recent talks, symposia and conferences have established the term in the public imagination. As it is presently conceived public history in Ireland either relates specifically to commemorative events and the effect historians might have on official discourse relating to them, or to a series of controversial and contested historiographical debates. This article, by contrast, seeks a wider, more inclusive definition that includes the 'public' as an actor in it.

It seems that Ireland is lagging behind other nations in gender balance in promoting and exhibiting its history. This article seeks to interrogate current representations of women within what can be called ''public history'' in Ireland. It will also contextualize the integration of women as both creators and subjects of history over recent years. It will point to inadequacies, of course, but also examples of great practice that bodes well for the future.

From http://www.rhagallery.ie/exhibitions/the-foggy-dew/:

Mick O’Dea PRHA is known for his paintings of the War of Independence, images culled from found and researched photographs. The very act of painting and enlarging figures from the past redeems them from the chill of photographic documentation recalling them as living breathing subjects. The fact that he extended that exercise to both sides of that war points to the complications that history now holds as we move away from the ideology of the nation state. O’Dea was stimulated by his childhood experience of the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966, to have a life long interest in Irish history and spurring him on, as an adult artist, to re-imagine and re-create events from that era.

Mick O’Dea has decided to embrace the events of that Easter weekend in four monumental canvases sited in the vicinity of central Dublin – the GPO, Upper O’Connell Street, the RHA on Middle Abbey Street and College Green. His large writ images offer both details and approximations, accuracy and ambiguity. O’Dea, who also trained as a sculptor, for the first time in twenty years adds three dimensional elements to his exhibition. Funky and figurative, these objects have a potency that rises above the abject materials of their making and comments on matters of monumentality, history and humanity.

The artist is introducing a further risk to the exhibition by opting for a theatrical presentation of the work. The stark spots and dark shadows amplifying our oscillating comprehension of historic events as they are but through the alembic of recollection, recreation and revisionism. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Trinity historian Ciaran O’Neill, co-published with Ballina Arts Centre and Mayo County County Council. A version of the exhibition will be shown in Ballinglen Art Foundation, Ballycastle and Ballina Arts Centre in late July and August 2016.

Teaching Irish history in a transnational and global context poses
particular issues for scholars concerned with communicating the
complexities of the Irish past to undergraduate and graduate students.
The guest editors organized a roundtable to consider some
of these challenges and to map out potential ways in which students
can be successfully engaged in locating Irish history in a wider context.
Michael de Nie (MdeN), Mo Moulton (MM), and Ciaran O’Neill
(CON) participated in an online discussion between November 2015
and January 2016; they were later given the opportunity to review
their contributions. Enda Delaney (ED) moderated the roundtable.

This is a collaborative community history project between students of Trinity College Dublin and St Andrews Resource Centre. The ongoing objective is to digitize the school records of St Andrews Parish schools from 1895, and to provide the Resource Centre with a valuable online record of the detailed registers at their disposal. We want to create open-source history of high quality with tangible results for the residents and diaspora of this city-centre school in Dublin.