Contested space: The revolutionary intersection of land hunger, memory and social justice impulse, within a rural west of Ireland community, 1793-1925 (a North Mayo case study)

‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt’, according to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George writing in Spring 1919. This also manifested throughout Ireland in the form of popular mobilisations, but which according to John Cunningham and Terry Dunne, has been heretofore principally interpreted through the lens of the struggle for Irish independence and graded against the militant republicanism of the Sinn Féin movement.4 This aligns with Gavin Maxwell Foster survey that found most (but by no means all) scholars saw the struggle for independence over 1916-23 as a narrow political venture: socially conservative in its outlook and aims […] pointing to the virtual settlement of the volatile land question by the turn of the century; the social safety valve of mass emigration; the nearly hegemonic social power of the Catholic Church; the growth of the Irish middle classes; and the necessarily cross-class basis of Sinn Fein's electoral support, among other factors, to explain Ireland's ‘social revolution that never was’. 5 However, he notes that even the most ardent proposer of this view concedes that the Civil War had noteworthy ‘socio-economic forces’ at play in a complex interaction of social structures.6 John Borgonovo also sees the apparent contradiction of such a ‘narrow political venture’ relying on methods of agrarian resistance from the earlier long nineteenth century without inheriting any of its social agendas.2026-10-1