Happy St. Patrick’s Day: “Race” and the “True Celt”
March 17, 2014 § 2 Comments
I’m currently finishing off my Griffintown manuscript, and continuing the endless revisions of the PhD dissertation it was based on. By this point, “based on” is loose, like when movies claim to be based on a book, but you can’t really see the book in the movie. Anyway, right now I’m revising the sections on Irish nationalist sentiment amongst the Irish-Catholics of Griff in the early 20th century. And so, I’m reading Robert McLaughlin’s Irish Canadian Conflict and the Struggle for Irish Independence, 1912-1925. McLaughlin’s work, like mine, is part of a growing movement amongst historians to challenge a decades-old belief amongst Canadian historians that Irish Catholics in Canada couldn’t care less about what happened in Ireland. This is a refreshing change.
McLaughlin, unlike most of us who study the Irish in Canada, focuses on both sides of the divide, looking at both Catholics and Protestants. This is what makes his book so valuable. Off the top of my head, McLaughlin’s is the only book-length study to look at the Protestant Irish response to agitations for Home Rule and outright independence for Ireland in Canada.
As such, McLaughlin spends a fair amount of time discussing Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists in Ireland. I talked about Carson in class the other week in discussing Home Rule and Unionism. I had a picture of him up on the screen, blown up behind me. When I turned around, I kind of jumped, not really expecting Sir Edward to be so big and glaring at me. 
The picture, however, is beautiful. Sir Edward looks out contemptuously at his audience, his lips pursed into a sour look, as if he had just smelled some Catholics. His jawbone is fierce, and his hair slicked back. He looks for all the world like a hard man. But, of course, he wasn’t. He was a knighted politician. But he was also the perfect avenue into discussing the “manliness problem” of the late Victorian/Edwardian British Empire, and the response, created by Lord Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts, “muscular Christianity.” Sir Edward looks like he could tear you a new one as easily as argue the merits of Unionism versus Home Rule. And, in turn, this allowed me a direct entré into the Gaelic Athletic Association’s concept of “muscular Catholicism,” which turned muscular Christianity on its ear for Catholic Irish purposes.
At any rate, back to McLaughlin and his quoting of Sir Edward. Sir Edward wrote to his former Conservative Party colleague, Sir John Marriott in 1933, long after Irish independence and the partitioning of Ireland:
The Celts have done nothing in Ireland but create trouble and disorder. Irishmen who have turned out successful are not in any case that I know of true Celtic origin.
I find this humourous. See, by Sir Edward’s day, there was no such thing as a “true Celt” (not that Irish nationalists didn’t speak this same language). By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, were a wonderful mixture of Celtic Irish, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Spanish, English, Welsh, Scots, and so on that no one was a “pure Celt” or pure anything. But, of course, that myth persisted and still persists today.
I still have people come up to me today, in the early years of the 21st century, and want to discuss the “real Irish” or the “pure Irish” or the “real Celts” in Ireland. After disabusing them of the notion that there is such a thing (anywhere in the world, quite frankly, we’re all mutts, no matter our various ethnic heritages), I am left to just shake my head.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
The Making of the Historian
January 12, 2014 § Leave a comment
One of my favourite history books is Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. The book, published in 2001, tells the story of Bridget Cleary’s death at the hands of her husband, Michael, and a mixture of extended family, in Ballyvadlea, Co. Tipperary in Ireland in March 1895. As Bourke unravels the story, the murder of Bridget Cleary is an opportunity for the historian (or folklorist, in her case) to examine the collision between modern culture and folkways. Ballyvadlea in 1895 was essentially the boondocks of Ireland, far removed from the encroaching modern world, people there still lived according to old Irish ways, with beliefs in fairies, banshees, and the like. Whether or not Michael Cleary and his cohorts actually believed in this is neither here nor there, argues Bourke, what matters is that the belief system still existed and was still accessible to Cleary and his co-conspirators.
When I was in graduate school, I was fascinated by the collision between modernity and ancient folkways. In particular, I was interested in charivari, a means of community policing in pre-modern societies in Europe and amongst settler societies in North America. In fact, I was so interested in this, I set out to do my Master’s degree on this topic in Québec. What fascinated me then, and still does today, and why I enjoy Bourke’s book so much (I usually assign it when I teach Irish History) is the way in which modern legal culture intersects with traditional folkways.
Societies have traditionally been able to police themselves. Today, we live in a society where the state is omnipresent, whether in the form of of our driver’s licenses, or the regulation of education, and various other means. When someone breaks the law, we expect the police to make an arrest, the prosecutor to secure a conviction, and the jail to secure the lawbreaker until her debt to society is paid. But it hasn’t always been that way.
In October 1855, Robert Corrigan was beaten to death in Saint-Sylvestre, Québec, a remote agricultural community, some fifty miles south of Québec City, in the foothills of the Appalachians. He was beaten by a gang of his neighbours for stepping out of line. They did not mean to kill him, they meant to discipline him for his bullying, aggressive behaviour. That Corrigan was an Irish Protestant and his murderers Irish Catholics was secondary (at least in Saint-Sylvestre, for the rest of Canada, that was the most important detail in the highly sectarian mid-19th century). When the state attempted to arrest the accused men, they were easily able to elude the police forces sent in from Montréal and Québec, aided by their neighbours. When they did finally turn themselves in in January 1856, they did so on their own terms. They were also able to rig the jury when they went to trial in February so that they were acquitted.
The Corrigan Affair, in this light, was entirely about a local community maintaining its right to police itself in the face of the power of the state. The mid-19th century in Canada was a time of massive state formation and expansion. The same period in Québec saw a spate of construction projects around the province of courthouses and jails and other such buildings. The buildings were all the same down to the shade of paint used on them. Why? Because the state was attempting to establish its control across the province and it was attempting to do so with the message that the state was indifferent to local contingencies. Not surprisingly, the people of Québec rebelled against this. The mid-19th century in Canada offers endless examples of local communities rebelling against the state in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
The Wild West in the United States is another such example. The West has a reputation for violence that is only partly deserved. Much of the legends of the Wild West are just that: legends. But violence there was. Much of it was about the same thing as charivari in England or The Corrigan Affair in Québec: community policing. Disputes were settled between the belligerents for several reasons, most importantly, the state did not have the power yet to mediate between its citizens.
Historians have been studying this collision between folkways and the rise of modernity since the 1960s. During that era, that great generation of English historians (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Dorothy Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm) became fascinated by this collision. I always find it interesting when I see the influence of the historians I read in graduate school still on me today, all these years later.
Last semester, our favourite work study student, Alvaro, graduated. Alvaro had worked in our departmental office since we both (as in my wife and I) arrived here in the fall of 2012. For his graduation, we decided to buy him the books that had the greatest impact on us in our development as historians, as Alvaro is planning on going on to graduate school. I got him E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I first read this book in 1996, my first semester of graduate school. It was one of the few books I read in graduate school where I just couldn’t put it down. Meticulously research, and brilliantly insightful, Thompson crafted an historical study that could stand on its own on its literary merits. I re-read it a couple of years ago. It remains one of my favourite books of all time.
OMG! Seriously?: On Language and Swearing
October 21, 2013 § 2 Comments
In today’s Boston Globe, I read a column that I thought had been printed by mistake. Or maybe it was a leftover from 1976. Jennifer Graham, a columnist for the venerable (and quite good) Boston daily, is upset that OMG and it’s more offensive variety, “Oh my God!” are lingua franca in our culture today. She’s upset that blasphemy is everyday language. To which I say, where have you been for the past 40 years, lady?
I am from a culture where all the choice swear words are religious-based. French Canadians have a whole range of blasphemous and offensive words for all situations, the worst of which is “Tabarnak!” That literally means “tabernacle.” Other highlights are “câlisse!” and “osti!” (chalice and the holy host, respectively). If you really wanna set grandma’s wig on fire: “osti de tabarnak câlisse” will do the trick. Once more, in English, that’s “holy host of the tabernacle, chalice!” Sounds much better in québécois French, trust me. When I was a kid, these were very bad words (even Anglos in Québec swear in French, it’s much more fun), respectable people did not use them. But, by the time I was an adult, they were everywhere, even in polite company, including in newspapers, on TV, and even my dear great aunt once said “tabarnak!” (I nearly fell over).
It doesn’t take a linguist to figure out that the ramping up of swearing is due to the general breakdown of authority in western culture as a whole in the past 40 years. Sometimes even I am stunned by what I hear coming out of the mouths of my students in the hallways and around campus. Some of the names they call each other, even in jest, would flip the wig of my grandmothers, I can tell you that much.
But. Oh my god? Seriously? Graham is upset by this one because she thinks it insults people’s value systems. Oddly, I learned this particular gem within my Catholic family as a kid. For that matter, my memory of this gem of a swear is that I have tended to hear it from the mouths of Catholics, especially devout ones. Sacrilegious? Oh, heck yes. But spend an hour watching Irish TV and you’ll see what I mean.
It seems to me that Jennifer Graham is about a generation or two late in her hand-wringing over the use of oh my god in pop culture.
Immigration: The More Common North American Experience
September 6, 2013 § 4 Comments
The scenery as we drove across the United States and back was amazing. So were many of the place names. There is a town in Colorado named Rifle. Another town in Colorado is called Cahones. I kid you not. But perhaps my favourite highway road sign in all of the United States was this one we saw on the side of I-84 in Eastern Oregon.
The sign pretty much says it all. Canadian and American culture is full of stories of the successful immigrant, the ones who came to these shores with nothing and made lives for themselves, who made fortunes and found fame. And while certainly there were a few who experienced this good fortune on North American shores, the majority did not. Most settled somewhere in between fame and fortune and poverty and despair.
Certainly, pop culture contains references to the downside of emigration. In Canada, university students in Canadian history and literature are tortured with perhaps one of the worst books in Christendom, Susanna Moodie’s interminable Roughing It In the Bush, Or, Life in Canada, about the trials and tribulations of Moodie and her husband, John Weddiburn Dunbar Moodie, a down-at-the-heels member of the British gentry, in the wilds of Upper Canada in the 1830s and 40s. While Moodie was a horrible writer and her husband an even worse poet, the book is a key text on the struggles of even wealthy emigrants in the British colonies in the mid-nineteenth century (it worked out ok for the Moodies, they ended up moderately wealthy and living in the thriving town of Belleville, Ontario).
One of my favourite Pogues songs is “Thousands Are Sailing,” which is the story of downtrodden Irish emigrants in New York City in the 19th century. The song is actually kind of heartbreaking.
So this sign for an exit on I-70 in Eastern Oregon struck me as a remarkable site. Old Emigrant Hill Road is on the northern side of I-70, and it runs into Poverty Flat Road on the southern side of the highway. Obviously, these two roads have been there for a lot longer than the Interstate. And, as you can see from the terrain surrounding the sign for the exit on the highway, the landscape around Poverty Flat Road isn’t exactly all that welcoming. This was also a common experience for emigrants to the “New World” in the 19th and 20th centuries: they ended up farming lands that were not conducive to growing much of anything. Generations struggled to make a living on these farms until someone, whether out of optimism or desperation, decided to clear off the land and make his or her fortunes elsewhere.
Perhaps this is the more common story of the immigrant in North America than the one of fame and fortune.
Diaspora and Terrorism
April 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
Scholars studying diaspora and immigrant communities have noticed that there are some very general, very real trends amongst diasporic immigrant communities. The first generation, the immigrants, arrive in their new home, but find themselves caught between two worlds, struggling to fit into the new home, whilst still maintaining very real and very strong ties to the homeland. Their children, the second generation, are citizens of the new country by birth, and grow up in that host culture, and generally do not express a lot of interest in the culture of the homeland; they are fully integrated into the new homeland. It’s their children, the third generation, that begins to cast an eye back to the old homeland, curious about where their grandparents are from and the culture their grandparents carried with them in the new land until they died. These are trends that have existed in North America since the Irish began coming over here in the mid-19th century, and have been replicated time and again by pretty much every single group that has arrived in the United States and Canada in large numbers since.
Immigrants, their children, and grandchildren, of course, have greatly changed North American culture ever since the Irish. Take, for example, the city I live in now: Boston. Boston is the birthplace of the American independence movement in the 1770s, and was a tight-knit Anglo-Protestant city prior to the Irish arriving. Boston was never the same after the Irish arrived in huge numbers in the mid-19th century. And as the Irish infiltrated the city’s economy, culture, and politics, they left their mark. This can still be seen today: at present Stephen Lynch and Ed Markey are both attempting to gain the Democratic nomination for the special election to replace John Kerry in the US Senate. Both Lynch and Markey are currently Congressmen. Both are Irish Catholics, Markey’s from Malden and Lynch is from South Boston, aka: Southie. He grew up in the same housing projects as Whitey Bulger. The Irish still have their tentacles in the Democratic Party machinery in Boston today, 160-some odd years after they arrived.
Other cities are affected differently. Take, for example, my hometown of Montréal. Montréal has long been the recipient of immigrants, dating back to the Irish, who began arriving there in large numbers in the 1840s. The Irish completely changed the city, adding an Anglophone group that was Catholic to an already divided city. The Catholic Church was also massively changed in Montréal as the Irish muscled their way in. Indeed, they are largely to thank for the fact that there is an English-language Catholic Church in the city today. But Montréal is also being fundamentally changed by immigration from nations in the Francophonie in Africa and the Caribbean today. In the past decade or so, Montréal has undergone a fundamental cultural shift, as new French-speaking communities arrive. The consequences for French Canadian nationalism and separatism should be obvious.
But this process of acculturation may be now speeding up. Our cities have become faster, life is lived at a frenetic pace in our cities on this continent. Last week, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring over 200 more, some very seriously. The bombs were planted by Tamerlan Tsarneav, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, who is 19. The Tsarneav brothers are immigrants, they came to the United States from Dagestan just over a decade ago. Tamerlan was here on a green card, whilst Dzhokhar became a citizen last year. Their parents have both returned to Russia in recent years, leaving them here. But they’ve been here a long time, Tamerlan was 14 or 15 when he arrived here, Dzhokhar was 8 or 9. They were both Americanised, and their brand of terrorism, experts have concluded is of the ‘home-grown’ variety.
Yesterday in the Boston Globe, Farah Stockman commented on this growth in homegrown terrorism, citing forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, who in 2008 predicted that terrorism in the West would increasingly be of this variety. Of course, by 2008, we had already seen the writing on the walls. On 7 July 2005, four terrorists detonated bombs during the morning commute in London. All four were homegrown terrorists, two were the sons of immigrants, a third was an immigrant himself, but had grown up in England. The bombing of Madrid’s transportation system in March 2004 was also of the homegrown variety.
This new generation of terrorists, the so-called 3rd wave, are younger than the Al Qaeda terrorists of the previous decade. According to Stockman, the average Al Qaeda terrorist in the 90s and early 00s was in his 30s. Today, the average age of these 3rd wavers is in his early 20s. The 2nd wave were devoutly religious and had grown up in devoutly religious homes. The 3rd wave grew up secular, as the brothers Tsarneav had. So, why the turn to radicalism and terrorism, she asks:
For some, it was out of a warped romanticism for a homeland they barely knew; an act of rebellion against hardworking immigrant parents who brought them to the West for “a better life.” Others were US-born converts to Islam who found in terrorism a sense of camaraderie and purpose that had eluded them all their lives. A few became terrorists after years of gang-banging and drug dealing. It was an ideology that transformed their violent tendencies into something heroic. It made them feel they were on the side of the angels.
Sagemean concludes that for some of these young men, ‘terrorism is a fad.’ This is an interesting thought. But if these young men are attracted, in part, by this romantic attachment to their parents’ homeland, or the homeland of their families, or to the religion that sustained their family generations ago, I’m not so sure that this is a fad. Scholars looking at notions of diaspora note the attachment 3rd generation children and those beyond have to the mythical homeland. Looking at my own community and what I study (the Irish), I would note that men and women whose families emigrated to North America 160 years ago remain curious and interested in the mythical homeland of Ireland. Ireland draws them in, they’re curious about the history, the culture, and some even the language. This becomes a life-long interest.
Maybe Sagemen is correct in that the violence of radicalism and terrorism is a fad of youth and some of these young men will eventually mellow out and choose to focus on aspects of their culture that do not lead to violence. Certainly there are echoes of this in the Irish diaspora, where many young men (and some young women) have been attracted to the glory of the violence in the North. This was certainly true when I was younger, before the establishment of peace following the Good Friday Accords in 1998. Young Irish-American and Irish-Canadian men would hold romanticised images of the IRA and the resistance “back home”. Most have long since grown out of this fascination with the IRA, of course. (This did, however, inspire Bono to go on a legendary rant during a performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” during the 1987 Joshua Tree tour, which was released on the DVD of Rattle & Hum).
New Bloomsday Montreal 2012 website
February 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
I will have much more to say shortly, but for now, I just want to update my previous Bloomsday Montreal post with our new website. Everything is coming together nicely for our celebration of Joyce’s masterful Ulysses, 14-16 June. We’ll be updating the site soon. In the meantime, you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Bloomsday Montréal 2012
February 4, 2012 § 19 Comments
I am on a steering committee attempting to launch Bloomsday Montréal this year on 16 June.
For those who don’t know, Bloomsday is an annual celebration worldwide of James Joyce’s masterful novel, Ulysses, which was first published in 1922. Ulysses traces the travels of one Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner, across the city on 16 June 1904. That date was significant for Joyce as it was the date of his very first outing with his wife to be, Nora Barnacle. Many consider Ulysses the finest novel of the 20th century. The first Bloomsday was celebrated on 16 June 1954, the 50th anniversary of Bloom’s travels, in Dublin, where the Irish artist John Ryan and the novelist Flann O’Brien decided to re-trace Bloom’s route around the city.
From there, Bloomsday has grown to be a massive cultural phenomenon, celebrated in over 60 nations around the world. In 2004, the 100th anniversary of Bloom’s travels, a massive celebration was held in Dublin, with over 10,000 people in attendance. On 16 June 1958, the star-crossed Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married on Bloomsday. Why Montréal, a major city of the Irish diaspora has not had a Bloomsday until now is beyond my ken. But, it is time.
We are just getting organised, our webpage will be up soon, but in the meantime, follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates and news of our events on 16 June!
On Irish Historiography, Revisionism, and the Troubles
August 22, 2011 § 3 Comments
Last month, at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Irish Studies at my alma-mater, Concordia University, I was witness to an interesting discussion about revisionism in Irish historiography. The discussion centred around issues of identity in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In particular, the issue of binaries, in that one was either Protestant or Catholic and the twain never met.
I have long had problems with revisionist history (in the historiographical sense, let me be clear), in that it seeks to normalise, which means it plays down the unusual, the anachronisms, and so on. In some ways, this is a good thing. In the case of Ireland, there is some good which has come out of revisionism, most notably, we are free to focus less on the stereotypical tragic history of a “famished land, who fortune could not save” (to quote the Pogues). In short, Ireland is free to become (to borrow from revisionism in Québec historiography) “une nation comme les autres.” Revisionism also leads us to post-structuralism and allows us to get past the binaries in many ways: Catholic v. Protestant, man v. woman, city v. rural, North v. South, Ireland v. England, etc. We can see the greys now, a process begun with the muddying of the playing field by the great revisionists of the 20th century: T.W. Moody and Robert Dudley Edwards, as well as the great troubadour of revisionism of our era: Roy Foster.
But, this becomes problematic when taken too far. When we become too focussed on seeing past the binaries, to see all the ways Catholics and Protestants got along in Belfast, in Derry, and across the North, we run a new risk. And that is to trivialise the Troubles. The Troubles was, ultimately, a civil war between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland. For the most part, we have long used “nationalist” and “Catholic” and “Protestant” and “unionist” as synonyms. And it is good to see across the lines, to see the attempts at peace-building and community-making in the midst of the terror and devastation of the Troubles. But if we push this impulse too far, then we are blind to the Troubles (or any other conflict that relies on binaries). There is a reason that those two sets of words were/are seen synonymously. It remains that over 3,500 people are dead, countless lives were torn asunder, and the two cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry, still bear the scars of the Troubles on their landscapes.
We, as historians can try all we like to see past the binaries here, but the simple fact remains that this binary was a pretty fundamental one, it resonated with people, it caused them to fight, sometimes to the death, for what they believed in. It caused them to engage in terrorism. It tore families and communities apart. We cannot lose sight of that.
Globalised Montréal
May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment
In the past few years, there’s been a new trend in Montréal History and historiography that has seen us seek to place the city within a global context. This is a welcome change from our usual navel-gazing, as we sought to explain developments in Canada solely within a Canadian context. Certainly, the local context is important, but Canada did not develop in solitude. It was always a colony and nation tied into global political and economic currents, closely related to goings-on in Paris, London, and Washington. Indeed, scholars of Canadian foreign policy have long framed Canada within the North Atlantic Triangle, along with the UK and USA.
But, culturally and socially, while historians have noted the impact of British and/or American ideas in Canada, we have gone onto explain and analyse the Canadian context separate from the global. In Québec, though, perhaps due to political exigencies. Back in undergrad at UBC, Alan Greer’s masterful book, The Patriots and the People was the first study I ever read that attempted to internationalise Canadian history. In it, Greer re-cast the 1837 Patriote rebellions in Lower Canada within the revolutionary fervour that had swept Europe and the United States since the late 18th century. Seen in this light, the Parti Patriote wasn’t just a nationalist French Canadian political party, but part of an international of liberal revolutionaries that had corollaries in England, Ireland, France, the German territories, the Italian countries, the United States, and so on.
Greer’s book fit into the larger work of the revisionist Québec historians, who often sought to put Québec into a global context, both to explain the colony/province/nation’s development, as well as to give credence to Québec’s claims to nationhood. The goal was to present Québec as a nation commes les autres. Perhaps the book that had the greatest impact on me in this sense was Gérard Bouchard’s 2000 monograph, Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée, in which Bouchard examines the development of Québec in relation to other “new world” cultures in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Put this way, Québec’s (and Canada’s) development from the moment of European settlement is globalised and we realise that Canada (and Québec) is not really all that unique.
This tendency to internationalise Québec seems to be continuing with a younger generation of historians. My friend and colleague, Simon Jolivet, has just published his new book, Le vert et le bleu: Identité québécoise et identité irlandaise au tournant du XXe siècle. Simon and I did our PhDs together at Concordia, and in 2006, the School of Canadian Irish Studies there hosted a roundtable discussion that looked at connections between Ireland and Québec, in large part this grew out of the work our PhD supervisor, Ronald Rudin had done early in the decade. It was probably the most dynamic and informative conference I’ve been at, as ideas flew around the table. Both Simon and I gained a lot from that conference and it is clear in both of our work.
For my part, I am interested in the Irish in Griffintown, Montréal, over the course of the 20th century. What I look at is, of course, identity, but I’m interested in the shaping of a diasporic identity amongst the Montréal Irish, one that situates the Irish of the city within the global context of the Irish around the world, as well as the links (such as they were) with Ireland itself. To do so, I make use of post-colonial theory, which seems particularly à-propos for the Irish, descendents of a colonial culture in Ireland, living in Montréal, the largest city of the French diaspora and thus necessarily a post-colonial location.
And this is what Sean Mills picks up in his brilliant new book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal. Mills situates Montréal within that postcolonial framework, and examines the ideas of decolonisation and colonialism within activist circles in Montréal in the 60s. The activists were heavily influenced by what was going on in the world around them, in de-colonial movements in Algeria, Tunisia, and, especially, Cuba, as well as the Caribbean in the 50s and 60s. Certainly, they were well aware of their skin colour and Canada’s place as a first-world nation. But the ambivalence of Montréal (still the economic centre of Canada in the 60s) is something Mills excels at drawing out. As the decade went on, American activists, in particular African American activists like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, became influential in the de-colonial struggle of the French Canadian majority of the city. This was further complicated by Montréal’s own black population, which also identified itself with the ideas coming out of the United States and the Caribbean. And as Montréal became a more complicated city, ethnically-speaking, to say nothing of the actions of the FLQ in October 1970, ideas of decolonisation lost their appeal.
Nonetheless, what is clear is that Montréal is a global city, one that takes its cue from its global connections as much as its local ones. Indeed, this is the basis of my next project about layers of diaspora on the urban landscape of the city. In the meantime, it also gives me a way to situate my own work on the Irish of Montréal in a larger global context.
The Real IRA and the Royal Wedding
April 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
Oh, dear God. British security officials are apparently afraid that the “Real” IRA is going to try to attack the Royal Wedding this week, in part due to its proximity to Easter, a high point on the Irish commemorative calendar. The first real salvo of the wars in Ireland was fired over Easter 1916, as the Irish Republican Brotherhood seized the General Post Office in central Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. Indeed, today marks the 95th anniversary of The Rising, which was put down in brutal fashion by the British in less than a week. Nevertheless, 1916 has long held a special place in Irish memory. And 5 May marks the 30th anniversary of the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands inside the Maze Prison.
The Real IRA (RIRA) grew out of the Provisional IRA (Provos), which carried out much of the activities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in 1997. The leadership of the RIRA, which included Bobby Sands’ sister, was frustrated with the Provos’ co-operation with the peace process in Northern Ireland. It was the RIRA which carried out the Omagh bombing of 15 August 1998, the single most deadly attack of the Troubles, killing 29 and injuring over 200 others. Since then, the RIRA has been somewhat ambivalent. Due to the outcry over Omagh, the RIRA was forced to declare a ceasefire in September 1998. This lasted two years.
The RIRA was unwilling to cause further deaths in Northern Ireland, no doubt worried about the bad PR that would result from such incidents, and instead focused its attention on England. The most significant of these events was the shooting of a rocket grenade at MI6 headquarters in September 2000. After a brief fallow period, the RIRA has continued to carry out attacks in both Northern Ireland and England since, as recently as last autumn.
It’s in this context that news that British intelligence officials are telling reporters that they have information that the RIRA is seeking to expand its base of operations from Northern Ireland to England seem odd. Indeed, Ben O’Loughlin at the Duck of Minerva wonders, amongst other things, that if British intel had information that an attack by the RIRA (or anyone for that mater) on the Royal Wedding, would it be made public in the first place?
Matthew Barlow 