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Drawing on largely unexplored archival and published sources in Ireland, France, Britain, United States of America, Canada, Germany and Nigeria, this dissertation presents the first transnational survey of Irish missionary activity in Nigeria from 1885 to 1975. Four missionary orders – two females and two male – are used as a window on the varied aspects of Irish missionary work in Nigeria: The Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, the Medical Missionaries of Mary, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost Fathers/Spiritans) and the Society of African Missions (SMA). Five chapters contextualize the evangelical mission of the four Irish societies within the pre-existing African Traditional Religion, Protestantism, and Islam in Nigerian societies. The dissertation analyses how the missionaries’ Catholicism and Irishness influenced their colonial encounters with the Nigerian peoples and the British colonial administration. It explores how Irish missions used education, health and welfare provision as evangelisation strategies and assesses the Nigerian reception to them. This dissertation provides Nigerian perspectives on culture, indigenous knowledge systems, midwifery, community development, acculturation, ethnocentrism, inter-group relations, superficial absorption of foreign religions, and resistance. Finally, it investigates the influence and legacy of Irish missionary endeavour on the people of Nigeria and Ireland. This work argues that the intricate trajectory of Irish missionary endeavour in Nigeria has been characterized by triumphalism, racism, pecksniffianism, defensive spirituality, anti-colonial struggle, social power, and intellectual insecurity. It challenges a historiographical tradition that tends to neglect the contributions of the British colonial administration, Nigerians, and international organisations to the material progress of Irish missions in Nigeria. A study of this nature draws on and contributes to the histories of missions, religious identities, history of medicine and diseases, education in sub-Saharan Africa, welfarism, religious pluralism, ecumenism, gender and sexuality, Nigeria-Ireland relations, and church-state relations.

The experience of soldiers on the Irish Army Establishment has been largely ignored in the existing histories of eighteenth-century Ireland. Between its formal establishment as a distinct military body in 1699 to its absorption into the British army as part of the Act of Union of 1800, the army in Ireland functioned as a separately funded and commanded branch of the British army. It operated as an ancien régime force for an ancien régime kingdom and was committed to preserving the status quo of the Irish elite. Tens of thousands of men partook in Irish service and the exploration of their experience is the central research objective of this dissertation. The traditional perception of this military force is overwhelmingly negative, created by the application of selective case studies to a century of service. While the army in Ireland certainly had periods of poor performance, these must be located within the history of both eighteenth-century Ireland and the British army more broadly. This thesis provides a comprehensive account of the army in Ireland, examining the experience of the soldiers which filled its ranks in three parts. The first explores the army’s place in military history, its organisation, and structure. This is followed by a comprehensive examination of the life of a soldier, from recruitment and training to daily routine. It also details the living conditions of the soldier, as the barracks network in Ireland provided one of the most unique elements of the soldier’s experience. The final part considers the functioning of the military in Ireland and explores the army-societal relationship from the soldier’s perspective, offering a new insight into this complicated relationship. These parts offer a multi-faceted account of the soldier’s experience and present a novel, measured interpretation of the army in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

This PhD examines women and their lived experience in Irish country music. Through the use of case studies of Philomena Begley, Margo O’Donnell and Susan McCann, this thesis explores how these women have negotiated identity, meaningfulness, and legacy in Irish country music. By examining how these themes are evident in the lived experience of these three artists, this thesis critically discusses gender roles, identity formations, and cultural reflections in Irish country music. This thesis provides a comprehensive understanding of Irish country music from the female perspective through a critical and in-depth investigation of gender roles, identity formations and cultural expectations. Through an examination of how women in Irish country music negotiate their gender identity, this thesis demonstrates how this music reflects Irish culture and cultural expectations. It questions how women artists’ portrayal of gender reflect cultural expectations and norms, while it also explores how their actions contributed to a reimagination of gender norms in Irish country music. By engaging with scholarship on gender, this dissertation examines how women artists create and negotiate their gender roles within music, reinforcing cultural and community identity. It also provides a new discourse on how meaningfulness is created through song lyrics and performance, and finally explores how legacy is created in Irish country music.

This thesis is a historical investigation into the experience of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy run Irish industrial schools, from the introduction of the system in 1868 to the publication of the Cussen Report in 1936. It uses convent archive sources from five industrial schools to illuminate the lived experience of the system for both children and their families. In doing so, it explores the nature and impact of the powerful emotive relations and cultural expectations that existed within these institutions. The research relies heavily on personal correspondence and manager's school diaries, in conjunction with parliamentary records, newspapers, and other relevant public and private sources to explore the experiences of committal, life in the school and eventual release. It focuses in particular on the lived reality of the schools, looking at daily life, discipline, care, relationships, sickness, and death. The close analysis of the role of the family in the schools facilitates a greater understanding of the behaviours, responses and protocols that arose from poverty and dependency while revealing the complicated nature of familial relations and how bonds could be maintained and rekindled. The exploration of the lived experience of the children allows a unique window into the micro-processes, interactions, and emotions that made up the industrial school community. It reveals how children lived their lives within the framework and requirements of the institution, how they utilised the options that were available to them, and how they demonstrated their agency through both resistance and assent. The revelations of abuse towards children in Ireland’s industrial school system in the twentieth century means that the schools are frequently viewed through a negative lens of trauma and oppression. This thesis seeks to complicate that view by exploring the experience of both care and control within the cultural context of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century. In bringing these strands together, it scrutinises the renegotiation of the child self within the emotional regime of the schools and how their personal worth, belonging, and identity emerged, took shape, or failed in daily life. By evaluating the construction of care and control, and how this culture was experienced as a relationship between child, family, state, and the institutional community, this thesis contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the Irish industrial school system and its evolution. 2024-09-05

Introducing Strings is a large-scale performance music education programme established by Music Generation Louth in 2012 to widen access to musical participation and learning amongst children and young people in Louth. This study provides context for and presents a critical reflection of the development of the programme. It highlights key successes of the programme over its initial nine years and identifies a number of challenges that have emerged during that period. It determines the critical success factors that enable the programme to make a deeper impact beyond its function of being an economically effective model of performance music education. The research presented herein follows the model of a work-based project and, as a researcher, I provide both an emic perspective and an applied ethnomusicology approach. Throughout the project, this research informed and influenced the planning and programming choices for the MGL Introducing Strings programme, other whole class ensemble projects across Music Generation Louth. The learning has been disseminated across the Music Generation programme nationally and will continue to do so into the future. Themes that have emerged include musical enculturation and the development of communities of musical practice, partnership, performance, pathways for progression, pedagogy to include informal music teaching and learning, musical choices and continuing professional development for musician educators. This dissertation assesses the impact of one music performance education programme and its evolution towards achieving a community of musical practice in County Louth.

This dissertation presents a critical examination of the heritage and practice of Irish traditional music today in North County Dublin, a local government administrative county also known as Fingal. The area has experienced much population growth and demographic change in recent years. This research critically examines the practice of the music within local community settings with a focus on recreational musicians and how they engage with the music, including learning and performing. An ecosystem approach is adopted in the examination, involving the application of a five-domain analytical framework developed by Schippers and Grant (2016), to comprehend an array of actors, physical and social factors, wider community and commercial influences and, not least, official actions at national and local levels that impact now on the practice of Irish traditional music in Fingal. The research identifies an increase in interest in playing Irish traditional music in Fingal between circa 1980 and 2010. The increase was associated with particular locations within the county, while in many other areas the music continued to have limited visibility and that remains the position today. Engagement with the music has also weakened in some areas over the past decade. To understand why that should be so despite public investment and plans supporting traditional music being in place, the research examines national and local policies and actions to foster the music at county level. The methodology included undertaking interviews with 52 individuals drawn from across the community demographic. The dissertation presents detailed accounts of how ten individuals personally engage with traditional music and recognises a need for the development of a new vision and official measures to encourage and support recreational musicians engaging in participatory performance in their communities.

This project examines the benefits and the construction of ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ in Early Medieval Ireland. It does so by using the Uí Néill, a powerful Irish political group, as a case study for understanding the role of the ‘Dynastic Framework’ in Irish society and politics. Many contemporary sources are used in order to provide an accurate analysis of the contemporary function of ‘Dynastic Frameworks’. The relationship between literature and the formation of ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ is a major theme of this project, as a result texts from Armagh and Iona, major ecclesiastical institutions, are scrutinised in order to understand the degree of separation between ‘secular’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ politics, if any actually existed. The degree to which the construction of Irish ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ may have been informed by a wider literary trend of group identity formation literature on the continent is also examined, with some parallels being found among the origins legends of certain ‘Dynastic Frameworks’. In order to prove that these ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ provided tangible benefits and that their construction and their politics were, to some degree at least, informed by contemporary literature, this project provides an analysis of references to the Uí Néill within two separate Irish annals over the course of the Seventh century. By analysing references to the internal and external dynastic politics during this period this project hopes to prove the assertion that Irish ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ such as the Uí Néill were large political groups, that while not centralised, were very important to the establishment of long term political power. The politics of these ‘Dynastic Frameworks’ was informed by the intertwined nature of secular and ecclesiastical politics, as a result much of the literature from this period serves the purpose of constructing and solidifying these powerful Irish ‘Dynastic Frameworks’.

This work focuses on three late Greek epic poems: the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, The Sack of Troy by Triphiodorus and the Abduction of Helen by Colluthus (ca. 3rd-5th centuries CE). These are reworkings of the Trojan myth and relate the events which either follow or precede the narrative time of the Iliad. To examine them in terms of their interdependence with earlier texts, a close reading is performed on them, partially assisted by digital tools, and leads to the identification of instances of intertextuality. Stemming from them, selected test cases are discursively analysed in detail, in order to propose an assessment and understanding of intertextuality in Late Epic. Apart from the philological analysis, the work includes an electronic resource, conceived and built as a born-digital commentary, focusing on the visual representation of intertextuality.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Irish national school system catered for the educational needs of almost 800,000 children in 8,500 schools. Despite its manifest numerical success and its agency in the near elimination of illiteracy, issues such as clerical management, the payment by results system, inferior school conditions, the proliferation of small schools, the restricted curriculum, the teaching of Irish and the reorganisation of the inspectorate generated a confluence of challenging circumstances for all participants. This was the scenario presented to Dr William Starkie, academic and classical scholar, who was appointed Resident Commissioner of Education in 1899. This study charts the fortunes of the national school system from 1899 to 1922, a period roughly coinciding with the tenure of Dr W.J.M. Starkie as Resident Commissioner of National Education. This commenced with an active programme of curricular and administrative reform that served to modernise primary education in Ireland, which had lagged behind systems elsewhere. Parallel with this programme of change, there were strong intimations that the British government harboured plans to reform Irish education and its administration along the de facto lines recently pursued in England. As the primary education system in Ireland had evolved into a denominational one, financed by government but clerically managed, the various Churches were in the main generally satisfied. As a result, every suggestion that schools be financed by rates and under local control was stoutly resisted. Successive chief secretaries failed to progress this policy. Furthermore, Starkie’s energetic approach to administrative reform not only encountered opposition, it generated additional problems. The new system of pay, increments and promotion for teachers, introduced in tandem with the Revised Curriculum, and combined with a changed inspectoral remit proved problematic, with the result that although curricular reform was successfully introduced, progress was disrupted by financial and organisational issues. Two vice-regal inquiries, in 1913 and 1918, delved minutely into primary education provision under the National Board. These highlighted the scale of the deficiencies of the existing system and provided the impetus, had it been fully grasped, for further organisational and administrative change. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 ensured the matter was put on the back burner for the duration, and when it was taken up again, in its immediate aftermath, it was too late. A final attempt was made in 1918 20 to address the structural deficiencies of the Irish educational system. Had this been achieved, it would have resulted in the replacement of the National Board, which was no longer fit for purpose, by a state Department of Education in the manner of that already in place in Great Britain. This was not possible in Ireland because of political and ideological developments that heralded the breakup of the Union. The rise of cultural nationalism, and with it the Gaelic League, had brought increasingly exigent calls for the introduction of a bilingual programme of education. These were addressed at first by curricular accommodation, but the 1916 Rising raised nationalist aspirations. When it came to education provision, nationalists and the Catholic Church increasingly found common cause in the late 1910s and, as a new political disposition beckoned, the alliance forged was a hallmark f or the future in which the churches and the Catholic Church in particular were permitted to retain their ascendant position in the provision of education and the state acceded to an essentially subordinate, administrative position.

Nigerian postcolonial thought has emerged as an important resource in addressing the conflicts in Northern Nigeria. It offers perspectives on the cultural articulations of people who were ravaged and transformed by the accounts of the colonial legacy of domination and distortion, in addition to religion, education and language. The emergence of postcolonialism as a creative literature became a resistance discourse that challenged the views held or constructed by the colonisers about the colonised. Through postcolonial literature, theorists and practitioners began rereading some canonical Western works that had misrepresented facts about Africa and African literature. They drew attention to the way the colonial powers had constructed an African narrative and then acted as if that narrative existed. They questioned and challenged colonial discourses and, in the same vein, mounted a strong defence of African identity. The aim of post-colonialism is to fight the lingering effects of colonialism on cultures and identity. It is also concerned with how we can move beyond colonial judgement and move towards a platform of mutual respect. However, critics of post-colonialism know that many of the assumptions that reinforced the concept of colonialism are still alive today as the new crop of leaders that emerged from anti-colonialism are now oppressors. This thesis explores Nigerian postcolonial thought and the peace process in Northern Nigeria and argues that Nigerian postcolonial writers provide the opportunity to dissect the causes of the dilemmas and provide a way forward. Northern Nigeria has been at the centre of ethno-religious violence and has seen an upsurge in religious fanaticism. Given the threat posed by religious extremism and its capacity to carry out violence across the Northern region, this research employs an interdisciplinary, postcolonial methodology which predominantly draws upon Nigerian postcolonial thinkers.