The dominant Irish historical narrative, at its most basic, sees the history of Ireland since the nineteenth century as a series of revolts and risings which posed a direct challenge to the state with lulls in between. This narrative has been underpinned by a narrow notion of the political centred on the arena of the state. Little account is taken in this narrative of the more everyday forms of resistance that constituted rural agitation in Ireland, and the historical writings which seek to challenge its narrow parameters by focusing on such issues as agrarian unrest are widely considered to belong to social as opposed to political history. In this chapter Heather Laird, in making a case for broadening our definition of the political and the centrality of women to much local resistance, demonstrates how a variety of Land War ‘public’ activism reached into and overlapped with the ‘private’ household sphere.
The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. In eleven essays a group of authors including some of the most influential historians and social scientists of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explore Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents the current state of our understanding of the issue of land in Ireland in two survey essays that cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book's second section presents a series of reflections in which historians and social scientists look back on how they have approached the topic of land in Ireland in their earlier writings. A third section presents some innovative new research on various aspects of the Irish land question.