Political Participation in Early Stuart Ireland

• Published in: The Journal of British studies 2017-10, Vol.56 (4), p.773-796
• Main Author: Darcy, Eamon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 17th century; Catholics; Common good; Communication; Culture; Debates; Linguistics; Political behavior; Political culture; Political participation; Politics; Prospectus; Public sphere; Religion
• ISSN: 0021-9371; 1545-6986
• DOI: 10.1017/jbr.2017.120

A consideration of political participation in early Stuart Ireland suggests modifications to the prospectus outlined by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus in “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” By investigating the structures that facilitated public debates about politics in Ireland, as well as the factors that complicated it, this article challenges the periodization of the public sphere offered by Lake and Pincus and suggests that there is a clear need to integrate a transnational perspective. Unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, the majority of Ireland's population was Catholic. The flow of post-Tridentine Catholic ideas from the Continent and Anglo-Britannic political culture meant that competing ideas of what constituted the common good circulated widely in Ireland and led to debates about the nature of authority in the early modern Irish state. These divisions in Irish society created a distinctive kind of politics that created particularly unstable publics. Thus, Ireland's experience of the early modern public sphere differed considerably from concurrent developments in the wider archipelago.