Bernadette Whelan

Between 1919 and 2011, the president of Ireland was a married person. Yet, there is no reference to the president's family in the 1937 Constitution. Beyond media curiosity, public discussion and scholarly interest in the wife or husband of the president is surprisingly rare. This study recreates the public and private lives of Irish presidential spouses including Maud Griffith, Louisa Cosgrave, Phyllis Ui Cheallaigh, Sinead de Valera, Rita Childers, Mairin O Dalaigh, Maeve Hillery, Nick Robinson and Martin McAleese. Following an examination of the role of the wife of the viceroy, the work focuses on how the experience of being the wife or husband of a president affected the individual's personal life, their ambitions, and expectations. They did not have guidelines or prescriptive advice on how to behave in office, except for the practices of previous incumbents, perhaps international models, their own view of public service and guidance from civil servants. The study explores the idea that while the incumbents seem to have had little in common except that their husbands or wives held the same post, there were common threads in their backgrounds and lives. Each individual had a sense of duty and held a concept of public service which evolved in different ways. The study explores whether the spouse of the president should be accorded greater respect and status, and an acknowledgment of their place in the institution of the presidency

How did Irish and American diplomacy operate in Washington DC and Dublin during the 1930s era of economic depression, rising fascism and Nazism? How did the Anglo–American relationship affect American–Irish diplomatic relations? Why and how did Éamon de Valera and Franklin D. Roosevelt move their countries towards neutrality in 1939? This first comprehensive history of American and Irish diplomacy during the 1930s focuses on formal and informal diplomacy, examining all aspects of diplomatic life to explain the relationship between the two administrations from 1932 to 1939. Bernadette Whelan reveals how diplomats worked on behalf of their governments to implement Franklin D. Roosevelt and Éamon de Valera's foreign policies – particularly when Éamon de Valera believed in the existence of a 'special' transatlantic relationship but Franklin D. Roosevelt increasingly favoured a strong relationship with Britain. Drawing on a wide range of under-used sources, this is a major new contribution to the history of American and Irish diplomacy and revises our understanding of the importance of Ireland to a US administration.

This book reconstructs American consular activity in Ireland from 1790 to 1913 and elucidates the interconnectedness of America’s foreign interests, Irish nationalism and British imperialism. Its originality lies in that it is based on an interrogation of American, British and Irish archives, and covers over one hundred years of American, Irish and British relations through the post of the American consular official while also uncovering the consul’s role in seminal events such as the War of 1812, the 1845-51 Irish famine, the American Civil War, Fenianism and mass Irish emigration. It is a history of the men who filled posts as consuls, vice consuls, deputy consuls and consular agents. It reveals their identities, how they interpreted and implemented US foreign policy, their outsider perspective on events in both Ireland and America and their contribution to the expanding transatlantic relationship.The work intersects diaspora studies, emigration history and diplomatic relations as well as illuminating the respective Irish-American, Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American relationships.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.The theme of this book is cultural encounter and exchange in Irish women’s lives. Using three case studies: the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism, it analyses reading and popular and consumer culture as sites of negotiation of gender roles. It traces how the circulation of ideas, fantasies and aspirations which have shaped women’s lives in actuality and in imagination and argues that there were many different ways of being a woman. Attention to women’s cultural consumption and production shows that one individual may in one day identify with representations of heroines of romantic fiction, patriots, philanthropists, literary ladies, film stars, career women, popular singers, advertising models and foreign missionaries. The processes of cultural consumption, production and exchange provide evidence of women’s agency, aspirations and activities within and far beyond the domestic sphere.