ABSTRACT
The identification of the Irish nation with the Catholic people of Ireland did not create fully segregated political communities in Ireland, nor did it divide its inhabitants into two completely distinct groups. Moreover, the eighteenth century tradition of Protestant nationalism did not entirely disappear; just as there had been Protestant emancipationists, so were there Protestant repealers; and out of O’Connell’s thirty-nine members in the parliament of 1832 thirteen were Protestants. The library of Ireland was central to the Young Inlanders’ purpose, that literature was a means of teaching nationalism and national self-awareness. This social and economic catastrophe was to have profound consequences for Irish nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century; but its immediate political effects were no less significant. Fenianism’s place in the complicated pattern of Irish nationalism that developed between 1842 and the 1860s cannot be understood if nationalism is placed within a rigid, compartmentalized structure of ‘constitutional’ and ‘revolutionary’ modes.
