Marc Mulholland – författare

From the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century to the entry into peace talks in the late twentieth century the Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. The traumas of violence in the Northern Ireland Troubles have cast a long shadow. For many years, this appeared to be an intractable conflict with no pathway out. Mass mobilisations of people and dramatic political crises punctuated a seemingly endless succession of bloodshed. When in the 1990s and early 21st century, peace was painfully built, it brought together unlikely rivals, making Northern Ireland a model for conflict resolution internationally. But disagreement about the future of the province remains, and for the first time in decades one can now seriously speak of a democratic end to the Union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain as a foreseeable possibility. The Northern Ireland problem remains a fundamental issue as the United Kingdom recasts its relationship with Europe and the world. In this completely revised edition of his Very Short Introduction Marc Mulholland explores the pivotal moments in Northern Irish history - the rise of republicanism in the 1800s, Home Rule and the civil rights movement, the growth of Sinn Fein and the provisional IRA, and the DUP, before bringing the story up to date, drawing on newly available memoirs by paramilitary militants to offer previously unexplored perspectives, as well as recent work on Nothern Irish gender relations. Mulholland also includes a new chapter on the state of affairs in 21st Century Northern Ireland, considering the question of Irish unity in the light of both Brexit and the approaching anniversary of the 1921 partition, and drawing new lessons for the future.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In 1842 Heinrich Heine, the German poet, wrote that the bourgeoisie, 'obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster' and 'an instinctive dread of communism', were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a 'politics motivated by fear'. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused of betraying liberty for fear of 'red revolution'. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth-century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War - these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie's fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring.From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain, and NATO became instruments of 'regime change', seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free-market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a 'watershed event in the global democratic revolution'. This was an extraordinary turn-around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers. Broad in its scope, it presents a clear set of arguments that shed new light on the creation of our modern world.

In the autumn of 1835, as the Orange Order faced a parliamentary inquiry and the imminent prospect of being banned, an 'Old Orangeman', signing himself 'Montanus', wrote a series of articles defending the Orange brethren and telling their story. Almost forgotten since first publication, these articles together form a unique and intelligent view from inside the Order in its first cycle. Montanus discusses the Orangemen's self-organisation by the Protestant peasantry of County Armagh in 1795, their struggle against the United Irishmen, dissensions over the Act of Union, feuding with the Catholic nationalist Ribbon Society, extraordinary influence on the government of Ireland and their last-ditch opposition to Daniel O'Connell's campaign for Catholic Emancipation.Old Orangeman was a product of eighteenth-century Enlightened thought and became an eloquent warning voice against the perils of toleration and liberalism. He had been associated with the Order from its birth. He knew both its leading men and their deadly enemies, including Theobald Wolfe Tone. Most striking, perhaps, is Old Orangeman's carefully argued justification of the Order as a timely and irreplaceable bulwark against the rising tide of democracy and radicalism.These 'Letters from an Old Orangeman' are not just a personal memoir or a one-sided history, but a carefully argued political treatise on the necessity of mobilising and organising the 'reactionary democracy' in an age of popular politics. Their republication now is an important contribution not only to the history of sectarian discord in Ulster and Ireland. It supplies an important source for the study of popular conservatism and the psychology of counter-revolution in the United Kingdom and beyond.Montanus feared that he, who had 'rocked the cradle' of the Institution, might now be fated to 'follow its hearse'. His letters instead provide an unrivalled insight into one of Ireland's most tenacious and consequential survivals.