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About the Author

Terence Dooley teaches in the History Department at Maynooth University, Where he is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates, His latest book is Monghan: the Irish revolution, 1912-23 (Dublin, 2017).

Includes the name: Terence A. M. Dooley

Obras por Terence Dooley

The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future (2011) — Editor — 7 exemplares

Associated Works

Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012) — Contribuidor — 71 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Críticas

At the start of the 1870s, the great landed families of Ireland sat prosperous and sovereign in their communities. A half-century later, however, theirs was a class in terminal decline, suffering from the effects of a succession of economic and political blows. In this book Terence Dooley charts the course of the fall of the Irish landed elite, detailing the steps in their collapse and analyzing the factors behind it. As he explains, there was no one circumstance or event behind it but instead a series of developments – some global, others local – which brought an end to the social class which had dominated life in Ireland for centuries.

Dooley begins by detailing “big house” life in high Victorian Ireland. Flourishing amidst the economic prosperity of the period, numerous families flaunted their wealth by refurbishing their homes and loading them with art and other acquisitions purchased from the continent, which they often financed through loans and mortgages. Few anticipated that the good times might come to an end, leaving them unprepared when the agricultural economy went into decline in the late 1870s. With indebtedness growing, many landowners sought to maintain their income by raising the rents they charged to tenant farmers. Unable to pay the higher rents the tenants went on strike instead, further crippling landowner finances and exacerbating their financial woes.

In response to the political pressure imposed by the poorer and more numerous tenant farmers, Parliament passed a series of acts designed to facilitate the transfer of the land from the large landowners to the tenant farmers. This initiated a process of land transference that accelerated in the early twentieth century with further increases in the financial incentives for landowners to sell. By then many landowners desperate for money had already curtailed their expenditures and sold off valuable furnishings in the hope of stabilizing their situation or at least delaying their decline.

Instead, their decline accelerated with the outbreak of war in 1914. Dooley describes the blows suffered by many families with the loss of sons and husbands who fell in battle. These individual setbacks were soon compounded by the newly-empowered independence movement, which by 1920 was waging war against the British state. The big houses were prime targets for the Irish Republican Army, both as sources of firearms and as hated symbols of British occupation. Many of the houses themselves were burned down to drive out the pro-Union landowners and to prevent the buildings from becoming barracks for British forces. By the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 the landowning class thus found themselves gutted and friendless, without even a semblance of their former status and power in Irish society.

In many respects the story Dooley tells echoes that of David Cannadine’s seminal work The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Like Cannadine, Dooley explains the various forces squeezing the Irish aristocracy as a class, to which he adds the unique circumstances facing them because of Irish nationalist politics. While their British counterparts suffered from the same economic crisis, they were spared the political assaults of the Land War and the independence movement that delivered the fatal blows that wiped them out for good. It’s an important aspect of Irish history that Dooley recounts well, making his book an important account of the transformations taking place in Irish society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
MacDad | Sep 13, 2020 |
This is an excellent book. Dooley, a Monaghan native, provides a thoroughly readable and entertaining account of the political and historical events in Monaghan during the revolutionary period of 1912-23. All of the main personalities are very well characterised and the events that shape their development internal and external are well explored. The changing political allegiances of several individuals is also explored. The events point out that the conflict in Monaghan was of a patticularly strong sectarian nature and the presence of the UVF and the Specials in the county is examined. The book is well referenced throughout.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
thegeneral | Jul 10, 2017 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
27
Also by
2
Membros
207
Popularidade
#106,920
Avaliação
4.2
Críticas
2
ISBN
36

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