Lecture 146: The legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party by Martin O'Donoghue

The Legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Independent Ireland, 1922-1949 provides the first detailed analysis of the influence of former Party members and methods, and the place of its leaders in public memory. Taking the Party’s dramatic fall in 1918 as a starting point rather than a conclusion, this book adopts a new approach. It explores how former Irish Party followers reacted to the changed circumstances of independent Ireland and presents the first statistical
analysis of the Irish Party heritage of each political party since 1922. The book also asks how the Party was remembered in a state founded on the sacrifice of the Easter Rising. This detailed study therefore situates the home rule legacy within the politics of independent Ireland and sheds new light on the way individuals such as Charles Stewart Parnell, John Redmond and Michael
Davitt were remembered.
In this lecture, Martin O’Donoghue explores the attitudes of former Irish Party politicians to the Irish Free State, assessing how they accommodated themselves to the new state, the political
ideas they expressed, and how they analysed the relationship with Britain and the nature of Irish sovereignty.
Dr Martin O’Donoghue teaches modern British and Irish history at the University of Sheffield. His book available from Liverpool University Press