conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled A Short History of Ireland about Irish, [the, Times with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "A book which compresses the Irish story from prehistory to post-Sunningdale with notable dexterity and justice of scale, [the author] attains a remarkably dispassionate detachment of tone." The Times Educational Supplement
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Edition, Short, History with the genre: History, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Short History of Ireland'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Short History of Ireland
  Hearing of the risings in the southeast, on 7 June Mc Cracken led a party to attack Antrim, but after some initial success was defeated by Colonel Durham's militia. He fled across the moors to Colin Glen to the west of Belfast town and hid out on Cave Hill where he, Neilson, Thomas Russell and Tone had renewed the United Irishmen's oath in May 1795. He might very well have managed to get on board a ship bound for America, a passage that his sister had arranged, had not he been accidentally discovered and captured by the Carrickfergus militia. He was hanged in the Cornmarket in Belfast on 17 July. The other show of defiance was at Ballynahinch, when Henry Monro held out against General Nugent's army for three days (11–13 June) before being hanged in front of his own house in Lisburn on 15 June. By the end of the month the ''98 rising', as it was later called, was virtually over. Harvey had been hanged on Wexford Bridge on 26 June and resprisals were in progress. Lake ignored the terms of Cornwallis's amnesty and the total death toll, often because of naked sectarianism, was finally computed at 30,000.
  There were a few dramatic sideshows, one tragic, another farcical. Tone, assiduous as ever in France, managed to gather French forces for a landing at Killala under General Humbert on 22 August. The French set up the Republic of Connacht and defeated the government forces at the famous 'Races of Castlebar' five days later. On 8 September, after a fortnight of ragged skirmishing, Humbert surrendered to Lake and Cornwallis at Ballinamuck, County Longford, and his Irish followers, mostly Mayo peasants who had never been United Irishmen, were slaughtered. A small force accompanied by the egregious Napper Tandy landed at Rutland Island opposite Burtonport in west Donegal on 16 September, but hearing of Humbert's surrender Tandy got blind drunk and was carried back to his ship. He eventually escaped with his life, largely through the insistence of Napoleon. Finally Tone, found in the company of yet another French force, under Bompard, was arrested by the British navy on 20 September, tried and condemned to death. He committed suicide in his cell by slitting his throat and died a week later on 19 November.
  The summer and autumn of 1798 had seen the greatest shedding of blood in Ireland's history, much of it in Wexford and nearly all of it sectarian. The rising there was more in the nature of a peasant's revolt for bread-and-butter issues, such as taxes, land and religious hatred. There was little of the Jacobin about it, although some of the insurgents, the 'Croppies', cut their hair short in fraternity with the revolutionaries in France. The second half of the century had been marked by the formation of localised, mainly rural, secret societies generated by agricultural discontent. Of these the 'Whiteboys', often an umbrella term, were the best known. They represented a Catholic sense of injustice but not necessarily a sectarian stance. There were northern Presbyterian equivalents in 'Oakboys' of the 1760s and the 'Steelboys' of the 1770s. The methods and the targets were similar; they fought increased rents and rates, and enclosures, and used firing of property, maiming of animals and the occasional murder of a landlord's agent to make their point.
  As the condition of Catholics slowly improved there was an inevitable reaction from northern Protestants and a growing sectarianism in the attitudes of the various 'Boys'. The more militant Catholic groups became known as 'Defenders' and there was evidence of oath-taking, 'con scription' and isolated raids, especially in the Cavan–Monaghan area from 1792. This spread into Armagh and Catholic activity was matched by rival groups among Protestants, notably the 'Peep O'Day Boys', largely linen workers whose economic stability was perceived as depending upon alliances with landlords. Demographically they should have been attracted to the United Irishmen but their strong Anglicanism, associated with the primatial see of Armagh, made them ideal members of the yeomanry. Their local knowledge was of prime use to Lake in his suppression of the radical society. Lake's policy, of course, was deliberately inflammatory and the yeomen with their gentry captains collaborated enthusiastically before, during and after the rising.
  Pitt could now say that his worst nightmare had materialised. Ireland was a 'ship on fire' but his remedy was extinguishment rather than cutting adrift. The turbulent end to the century was probably inevitable but the British government cannot be exculpated from complicity in its fomentation. Certainly it made Pitt's task of selling an act of union that he saw as the only cure for the distressful country and its muddied people much easier. His relief acts of 1795 had not offered full emancipation; it was the trump card he kept to win Catholic support for union. In fact there was on the whole little opposition from the mass of Catholics. The Orangemen were opposed to union because they feared enfranchised papists, and the Ascendancy gentry were reluctant to lose their recently won independence. Castlereagh and Cornwallis were given the task of easing the bill through the Irish parliament, which they did with fastidious distaste, handling 'the most corrupt people under heaven'. Many millions of pounds by today's values were used in bribery and honours granted so readily that the offices were devalued. The bill was passed by 158 votes to 115, only seven of the Ayes unbribed in Grattan's reckoning, and the Act of Union became law on 1 January 1801. Catholic emancipation was not granted. Westminster opposition was supported by Farmer George who found it against his coronation oath and produced one of the least convincing reactions of a man not noted for temperance of tongue: 'I would rather give up my throne and beg my bread from door to door throughout Europe than consent to such a measure.' Pitt, coldly honourable as ever, resigned, but was persuaded to return to power in 1804 as the only man who could save Europe from Bonaparte.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Short History of Ireland
  Hearing of the risings in the southeast, on 7 June Mc Cracken led a party to attack Antrim, but after some initial success was defeated by Colonel Durham's militia. He fled across the moors to Colin Glen to the west of Belfast town and hid out on Cave Hill where he, Neilson, Thomas Russell and Tone had renewed the United Irishmen's oath in May 1795. He might very well have managed to get on board a ship bound for America, a passage that his sister had arranged, had not he been accidentally discovered and captured by the Carrickfergus militia. He was hanged in the Cornmarket in Belfast on 17 July. The other show of defiance was at Ballynahinch, when Henry Monro held out against General Nugent's army for three days (11–13 June) before being hanged in front of his own house in Lisburn on 15 June. By the end of the month the ''98 rising', as it was later called, was virtually over. Harvey had been hanged on Wexford Bridge on 26 June and resprisals were in progress. Lake ignored the terms of Cornwallis's amnesty and the total death toll, often because of naked sectarianism, was finally computed at 30,000.
  There were a few dramatic sideshows, one tragic, another farcical. Tone, assiduous as ever in France, managed to gather French forces for a landing at Killala under General Humbert on 22 August. The French set up the Republic of Connacht and defeated the government forces at the famous 'Races of Castlebar' five days later. On 8 September, after a fortnight of ragged skirmishing, Humbert surrendered to Lake and Cornwallis at Ballinamuck, County Longford, and his Irish followers, mostly Mayo peasants who had never been United Irishmen, were slaughtered. A small force accompanied by the egregious Napper Tandy landed at Rutland Island opposite Burtonport in west Donegal on 16 September, but hearing of Humbert's surrender Tandy got blind drunk and was carried back to his ship. He eventually escaped with his life, largely through the insistence of Napoleon. Finally Tone, found in the company of yet another French force, under Bompard, was arrested by the British navy on 20 September, tried and condemned to death. He committed suicide in his cell by slitting his throat and died a week later on 19 November.
  The summer and autumn of 1798 had seen the greatest shedding of blood in Ireland's history, much of it in Wexford and nearly all of it sectarian. The rising there was more in the nature of a peasant's revolt for bread-and-butter issues, such as taxes, land and religious hatred. There was little of the Jacobin about it, although some of the insurgents, the 'Croppies', cut their hair short in fraternity with the revolutionaries in France. The second half of the century had been marked by the formation of localised, mainly rural, secret societies generated by agricultural discontent. Of these the 'Whiteboys', often an umbrella term, were the best known. They represented a Catholic sense of injustice but not necessarily a sectarian stance. There were northern Presbyterian equivalents in 'Oakboys' of the 1760s and the 'Steelboys' of the 1770s. The methods and the targets were similar; they fought increased rents and rates, and enclosures, and used firing of property, maiming of animals and the occasional murder of a landlord's agent to make their point.
  As the condition of Catholics slowly improved there was an inevitable reaction from northern Protestants and a growing sectarianism in the attitudes of the various 'Boys'. The more militant Catholic groups became known as 'Defenders' and there was evidence of oath-taking, 'con scription' and isolated raids, especially in the Cavan–Monaghan area from 1792. This spread into Armagh and Catholic activity was matched by rival groups among Protestants, notably the 'Peep O'Day Boys', largely linen workers whose economic stability was perceived as depending upon alliances with landlords. Demographically they should have been attracted to the United Irishmen but their strong Anglicanism, associated with the primatial see of Armagh, made them ideal members of the yeomanry. Their local knowledge was of prime use to Lake in his suppression of the radical society. Lake's policy, of course, was deliberately inflammatory and the yeomen with their gentry captains collaborated enthusiastically before, during and after the rising.
  Pitt could now say that his worst nightmare had materialised. Ireland was a 'ship on fire' but his remedy was extinguishment rather than cutting adrift. The turbulent end to the century was probably inevitable but the British government cannot be exculpated from complicity in its fomentation. Certainly it made Pitt's task of selling an act of union that he saw as the only cure for the distressful country and its muddied people much easier. His relief acts of 1795 had not offered full emancipation; it was the trump card he kept to win Catholic support for union. In fact there was on the whole little opposition from the mass of Catholics. The Orangemen were opposed to union because they feared enfranchised papists, and the Ascendancy gentry were reluctant to lose their recently won independence. Castlereagh and Cornwallis were given the task of easing the bill through the Irish parliament, which they did with fastidious distaste, handling 'the most corrupt people under heaven'. Many millions of pounds by today's values were used in bribery and honours granted so readily that the offices were devalued. The bill was passed by 158 votes to 115, only seven of the Ayes unbribed in Grattan's reckoning, and the Act of Union became law on 1 January 1801. Catholic emancipation was not granted. Westminster opposition was supported by Farmer George who found it against his coronation oath and produced one of the least convincing reactions of a man not noted for temperance of tongue: 'I would rather give up my throne and beg my bread from door to door throughout Europe than consent to such a measure.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The period was, then, far from quiescent or politically inert. There had developed a significant Catholic middle class. By the turn of the century most of the dioceses had impressive cathedrals and junior seminaries, so called because they provided the necessary secondary education for future priests and were established by canonical rule. They also provided places for pupils who would form the educated Catholic laity, supplementing the work begun by such pioneers as Edmund Rice (1762–1844), whose order of Irish Christian Brothers (1820) had pioneered education for the sons of the Irish poor, and Catherine MacAuley (1778–1841), who founded the Sisters of Mercy (1831) with a mission that included nursing, social work and the education of girls. Protestants, especially those who lived in the hermetically sealed north, affected to believe that Catholics, especially the 'southerners', were dirty, feckless and unreliable. The only ones they had real experience of were the poor of Belfast, whose livelihood they constantly attacked as a matter of policy. They were notably incurious about the twenty-eight counties where they felt threatened but it is unlikely that if they had been adventurous enough to visit other parts in any numbers they could have failed to notice that the bourgeois Catholics of, say, Limerick or Cork were as prosperous, probably as conservative and certainly as respectable as the lordly ones who dwelt up the Malone Road. They played tennis with the same vigour, were quite likely to be invited to army banquets, and took holidays in resorts as elegant and as decorously Victorian as Portrush or Bangor. It is still possible to see in places like Kilkee, Bray and Rosslare the archaeological remains of end-of-century 'watering places'. Golf, first played at the Curragh by a Scots regiment, became (and has remained) intensely popular, and the railways opened up the rugged beauties of Connemara, Kerry and Donegal to a growing tourist trade. It is a commonplace of history that the main interest of the Dublin populace on the Bank Holiday Monday of April 1916 was not in the shennanigans in the Post Office or Boland's Mills but in the usual Easter race meeting at Fairyhouse.
  The cause of Irish Unionism was taken up by Bonar Law, who had replaced Arthur Balfour as head of what was now officially known as the Conservative and Unionist party. He had two very powerful Irish allies in James Craig (1871–1940) and the Dublin barrister Edward Carson (1854–1935) who felt, each with a slightly different attitude, that Dublin should not rule Belfast. Carson was a true supporter of the Act of Union and was conscious of no dissonance in being Irish and British. Craig, the son of a rich Ulster distiller, was not so idealistic, and had already begun to formulate the idea of a separate Ulster state that was to prove at least temporarily acceptable to everybody except the northern Catholics. They knew that they would be used as a kind of ballast and subject to much more subtle penal practices than those of Queen Anne's reign. As ever obedient and seamless in their solidarity, the Protestants began the necessary preparations that would lead to 'the arbitrament of force'. As at other times when the terrors of Home Rule were expressed, drilling and manoeuvres began. Orange, Black and Apprentice Boys lodges were quickly turned into a recruiting network for the Ulster Volunteer Force which was to be effectively armed with 35,000 German rifles landed 'illegally' (but with police connivance) at Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee in April 1914.
  The Third Home Rule bill was introduced on 11 April 1912, proposing much the same terms as Gladstone's 1886 bill. The reaction in Ulster was much stronger. 28 September 1912 was designated Ulster Day and 218,000 men pledged themselves in solemn league and covenant 'to use all means to defeat the present conspiracy...' The bill was passed by the Commons on 16 January 1913 and thrown out with the usual vigour by the Lords, passed again in July and again dismissed. By the terms of the 1911 Parliament Act the Lords could now only delay the bill. Redmond seemed about to achieve what his uncrowned hero had failed to effect. The bill was finally carried on 25 May 1914. Already the army had signalled its non-cooperation in the Curragh Incident of 20 March, when General Gough persuaded fifty-seven out of seventy officers to resign their commissions rather than enforce Home Rule in Ulster. Carson and Craig were clearly kept informed of all developments by members of the High Command. Already the Liberal War Office, it seemed, was in danger of losing control of the armed forces. A bitter civil war seemed certain, with the prospect of 23,000 armed and exultant men ready to face down 1,000 soldiers and a now demoralised police force. With typical attention to detail, plans for the evacuation of civilians and a design for an Ulster currency had been approved. The means of permitting individual counties to opt out was included in Asquith's bill and the Lords successfully amended it to permit nine counties, not specified, to disregard it. Partition had been given respectability, but a conference called by George V, assumed to be on the side of the 'disloyalists', and which was held at Buckingham Palace in July 1914, failed to determine the nature of the separate state.
  The situation was defused by the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August and Britain's immediate declaration of war. Redmond and Carson vied in their enthusiasm for recruitment and a band of Irish Volunteers matched the UVF. The Protestants, compliant to charismatic leadership, joined up in their thousands. They were granted the honour of belonging to a specially named Ulster Division and of marching to their deaths at the Ancre, a tributary of the Somme, in July 1916. In the first two days of the slaughter five and a half thousand were killed. Their Catholic brothers, who had joined in even greater numbers, had been, on the whole, motivated by bread and butter concerns. Wives and children would be much better fed by army pay than by unemployment benefit. Of 200,000 Irishmen who joined, 60,000 never returned. Protestants and Catholics are represented almost equally in both these statistics.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hume argued that with the Downing Street Declaration the reasons for continuing a campaign of violence had been removed, and his meetings with Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, begun in 1988, resulted in a cessation of violence on 30 August 1994. The 'peace process' has not been a rapid one, the sticking points being the refusal of the IRA to decommission their arms before all-party talks. The Unionists have refused to attend any talks until decommissioning has taken place and apparently the DUP has refused to attend any talks with members of Sinn Féin. The Northern Ireland Office are felt by many to favour the Unionist point of view. One of the high-visibility brokers is President Clinton, whose personal visit to Belfast in December 1995 contributed to hopes of a breakthrough. The plain people of Northern Ireland are relishing the sight of the paraphernalia of 'trouble' – watchtowers, permanent checkpoints, ramps –being dismantled. A tropical summer which brought a large number of tourists in 1995 increased the cheer. The more sanguine believe that such happy welcoming of a kind of normality is the best index of continuing peace.
  The Republic has learnt during the twenty-five years of violence to take the northern problem seriously, and to understand its nature perhaps for the first time since the seventeenth century. The unfortunate Arms Affair which led to the sacking of Neil Blaney and Charles J. Haughey, the attack on the British Embassy after the Belfast violence in 1969 and its destruction on 2 February 1972 after 'Bloody Sunday', the 'fund-gathering' raids on southern banks, the need to increase the establishment of garda and army in border counties, the resentment at being called a 'safe haven for terrorists' – all these kept the North on the front pages of Irish newspapers and in Dáil reports. Fianna Fáil's instinctive support for northern nationalists left them open to accusations of being soft on the Provos, while Fine Gael's sometimes unctuous reminders of the rights and fears of Unionists were eventually paid more heed. The 'Irish Dimension', incorporated after Sunningdale, was accepted by all subsequent southern governments and rarely was the 'situation' used to make political capital, this in the most highly politicised country in the EU.
  Lemass's 'economic miracle' came a little unstuck with the oil crisis of the mid-1970s but the slump was weathered as well, if not better, than in other western countries. The recession of the 1980s again saw an increase of emigration but it was largely by skilled workers and university graduates from a country with a remarkably high standard of education and small opportunity. The most notable change, accelerated after EEC membership, was an increase in welfare provision and the gradual diminution of the Catholic Church's political and social influence. Ecclesiastical attitudes to censorship, contraception, the right to abortion (or at least information about where it might be obtained), and divorce are not automatically accepted as they had been in the era of de Valera. Recent revelations about erring pastors have made clerical pronouncements less dogmatic. The Church's auth ority to speak on faith and morals has not been discountenanced but the area covered by those two terms has been redefined. Irish people are still practising Catholics with a regularity and in numbers unique in western Europe and many hope that the Church's present crisis will lead to renewal and greater honesty.
  The 'free' part of Ireland is young in age and as aesthetically and culturally self-confident as other members of the EU. The response to the award of a fifth Nobel prize, to the Ulster poet Seamus Heaney, is a demonstration of a strong literary tendency and a pride in the international standing of its writers and dramatists. Its contribution to popular music, film and other literary forms is recognised. On this anniversary of its greatest affliction, the Famine, there is some satisfaction in the changes a hundred and fifty years can make. This artistic reputation may not seem important or desirable to the 'hard cold fire of the Northerner' but the Republic, with its economic buoyancy, its rapidly improving welfare provision, and the general improvement of its amenities (subvented by generous grants from Brussels) appears a more desirable partner than when de Valera's frugal comfort and a stoic disdain for materialism was all it had to offer. The glamour of its reputation was increased when Mary Robinson became president in 1990. She continued the process of erasing Ireland's old reputation as a place of violence, backwardness and unthinking subservience to the Church.
  Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have proved to be more centrist than their earlier reputations might have suggested, and Labour has found it possible to work in coalition with each. The parties have always prided themselves on the accessibility of their TDs and though a client system is believed to exist, accusations of corruption are seldom made and harder to prove. Young voters are not susceptible to Treaty rhetoric. Urban crime, often associated with drug abuse, is the seamy side of comparative affluence allied with persistent inequality, but outside the larger towns, crime rates are low by European standards. The state of suspense associated with the bogging down of the peace process is felt more keenly in the North; the South has other business to attend to and it can hope for no short-term advantage from a settlement of whatever kind. Yet it accepts its responsibility of playing its part in bringing light where there was more usually heat and of hoping to find after far too long the answer to the Irish question.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The 'peace process' has not been a rapid one, the sticking points being the refusal of the IRA to decommission their arms before all-party talks. The Unionists have refused to attend any talks until decommissioning has taken place and apparently the DUP has refused to attend any talks with members of Sinn Féin. The Northern Ireland Office are felt by many to favour the Unionist point of view. One of the high-visibility brokers is President Clinton, whose personal visit to Belfast in December 1995 contributed to hopes of a breakthrough. The plain people of Northern Ireland are relishing the sight of the paraphernalia of 'trouble' – watchtowers, permanent checkpoints, ramps –being dismantled. A tropical summer which brought a large number of tourists in 1995 increased the cheer. The more sanguine believe that such happy welcoming of a kind of normality is the best index of continuing peace.
  The Republic has learnt during the twenty-five years of violence to take the northern problem seriously, and to understand its nature perhaps for the first time since the seventeenth century. The unfortunate Arms Affair which led to the sacking of Neil Blaney and Charles J. Haughey, the attack on the British Embassy after the Belfast violence in 1969 and its destruction on 2 February 1972 after 'Bloody Sunday', the 'fund-gathering' raids on southern banks, the need to increase the establishment of garda and army in border counties, the resentment at being called a 'safe haven for terrorists' – all these kept the North on the front pages of Irish newspapers and in Dáil reports. Fianna Fáil's instinctive support for northern nationalists left them open to accusations of being soft on the Provos, while Fine Gael's sometimes unctuous reminders of the rights and fears of Unionists were eventually paid more heed. The 'Irish Dimension', incorporated after Sunningdale, was accepted by all subsequent southern governments and rarely was the 'situation' used to make political capital, this in the most highly politicised country in the EU.
  Lemass's 'economic miracle' came a little unstuck with the oil crisis of the mid-1970s but the slump was weathered as well, if not better, than in other western countries. The recession of the 1980s again saw an increase of emigration but it was largely by skilled workers and university graduates from a country with a remarkably high standard of education and small opportunity. The most notable change, accelerated after EEC membership, was an increase in welfare provision and the gradual diminution of the Catholic Church's political and social influence. Ecclesiastical attitudes to censorship, contraception, the right to abortion (or at least information about where it might be obtained), and divorce are not automatically accepted as they had been in the era of de Valera. Recent revelations about erring pastors have made clerical pronouncements less dogmatic. The Church's auth ority to speak on faith and morals has not been discountenanced but the area covered by those two terms has been redefined. Irish people are still practising Catholics with a regularity and in numbers unique in western Europe and many hope that the Church's present crisis will lead to renewal and greater honesty.
  The 'free' part of Ireland is young in age and as aesthetically and culturally self-confident as other members of the EU. The response to the award of a fifth Nobel prize, to the Ulster poet Seamus Heaney, is a demonstration of a strong literary tendency and a pride in the international standing of its writers and dramatists. Its contribution to popular music, film and other literary forms is recognised. On this anniversary of its greatest affliction, the Famine, there is some satisfaction in the changes a hundred and fifty years can make. This artistic reputation may not seem important or desirable to the 'hard cold fire of the Northerner' but the Republic, with its economic buoyancy, its rapidly improving welfare provision, and the general improvement of its amenities (subvented by generous grants from Brussels) appears a more desirable partner than when de Valera's frugal comfort and a stoic disdain for materialism was all it had to offer. The glamour of its reputation was increased when Mary Robinson became president in 1990. She continued the process of erasing Ireland's old reputation as a place of violence, backwardness and unthinking subservience to the Church.
  Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have proved to be more centrist than their earlier reputations might have suggested, and Labour has found it possible to work in coalition with each. The parties have always prided themselves on the accessibility of their TDs and though a client system is believed to exist, accusations of corruption are seldom made and harder to prove. Young voters are not susceptible to Treaty rhetoric. Urban crime, often associated with drug abuse, is the seamy side of comparative affluence allied with persistent inequality, but outside the larger towns, crime rates are low by European standards. The state of suspense associated with the bogging down of the peace process is felt more keenly in the North; the South has other business to attend to and it can hope for no short-term advantage from a settlement of whatever kind. Yet it accepts its responsibility of playing its part in bringing light where there was more usually heat and of hoping to find after far too long the answer to the Irish question.