This chapter outlines the effective remobilisation and arming of elements of the Monaghan Ulster Volunteer Force in 1920 and refutes claims of a loyalist “collapse” by providing evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities after a wave of republican counter-reprisals in late March 1921. It contends that a number of IRA operations in the area of County Monaghan bordering Rosslea went badly wrong, and that a successful, well-organised loyalist defence helped to bring both sides to agree a formal truce in April 1921. Loyalist resistance continued elsewhere in Monaghan until the national truce of July 1921, putting the IRA under considerable pressure in parts of the county. It also argues that ties between Ulster loyalists in Belfast and those in Monaghan persisted, helping the latter to resist boycotting of their business interests, and shoring up their political position through the Protestant Defence Association in the new Free State.

This chapter sets out why a history of Ulster loyalism in the three counties after partition matters and outlines the literature on ethnic conflict, Ulster loyalism, and terrorism and political violence in Ireland. The chapter then sets out the book’s two main arguments. First, memories of the violence experienced by one generation of Protestants in the three counties entrenched a sense of separation from the new Irish state on the part of subsequent generations. Intergenerational grievance and inter-communal distance kept loyalism alive and set the conditions for militancy and revenge in the future, including during the Troubles. Three-county loyalists played an important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.

This chapter considers the presence and efficacy of loyalist armed resistance in Cavan from 1920 to 1923. It argues that resistance was generally less intense and more poorly organised in Cavan compared to Monaghan. A dispersed population meant that loyalist deterrence was primarily focused on pockets of the county that had sufficient numbers to contest republican control. The IRA in the area near Cavan town, where much of the Protestant population was concentrated, was more reluctant to carry out executions or inflict significant violence than in County Monaghan. This made resistance to arms raids less dangerous and successful relative to elsewhere in the county. Nevertheless, a poorly organised loyalist defence network in the Rathkenny area underlined the dangers of provoking republican violence through overt and ineffective resistance. West Cavan resembled shared similar experiences of IRA violence to that seen in neighbouring County Leitrim. A willingness by the IRA in West Cavan and Leitrim to resort to occasionally shocking acts of violence meant that the loyalist community in this area suffered disproportionately from acts of intimidation compared to east and south Cavan.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of three-county loyalists’ considerable impact on Northern Ireland’s security forces and radical or militant Ulster movements since partition. It describes how these individuals generally came from families that were threatened with, or experienced, republican or agrarian violence after partition. The chapter also explores the important roles played by three-county loyalists in paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association during the Troubles. A number of these individuals came from areas that had seen high levels of loyalist militancy in the first half of the century, suggesting an intergenerational consistency across the twentieth century.

This chapter underlines the main contribution of the book. It argues that Ulster loyalism has survived within the Irish state to the present day. The ’affective bonds’ or culture created in previous generations persisted. Three counties’ loyalists were still willing to embrace an Ulster identity even after the partition of the province. What mattered more than political logic or calculation was sentiment. It also observes an enduring strain of frontier militancy in Ulster, summarises the tactical successes of three counties’ loyalists and their wider movements in the 1920s and again in 1970s but concludes that militancy in successive conflicts only served to delay conciliatory reforms, truces and peace agreements.

This chapter considers evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities and resistance in County Donegal in the early 1920s. It investigates why a vibrant UVF movement, active in the county from 1912 to 1914, did not mount a sustained resistance to the IRA in the county from 1920 to 1923. It suggests that low levels of republican violence in the county during the Anglo-Irish War required a more limited response and goes on to demonstrate that Donegal’s loyalists prioritised the defence of Londonderry during a critical period in 1920. Unlike Monaghan, a number of Donegal’s outstanding UVF leaders were killed during the First World War or did not return home. There is also some evidence that erstwhile units of the Donegal UVF quickly and collectively allied themselves with pro-treaty forces during the Civil War (26 June 1922–24 May 1923). The exception was Pettigo, where loyalists targeted republicans in the wake of the British occupation of the village over a seven-month period, during which time they also campaigned to be included in the new Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines the resurgence of suspicions among republicans towards real or imagined loyalists in the three counties, that some Protestants were acting as a loyalist ’fifth column’ for the security forces and/or paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. A successful loyalist cross-border paramilitary campaign in the early 1970s precipitated an IRA counter-intelligence operation to eliminate spies in the three counties. Families that were well known locally for their historical involvement in loyalism were again targeted by the IRA in the 1970s. The chapter outlines the suspicions and inter-communal violence in County Monaghan that led to the murder of Senator Billy Fox and the burning of the family home of his fiancée, Marjorie Coulson.

Mandatory Madness closes with an epilogue, focussed squarely on 1948, which marked the end of the British mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Palestinian nakba or catastrophe. By reconstructing a series of psychiatric encounters, which attended the end of the mandate period, the epilogue draws out the profound and violent rupture of this moment, as well as the longer processes of partition, erasure, and pathologisation which surrounded it. While the epilogue traces some of these processes into the post-1948 period, it ultimately concludes that this rupture radically diminishes the possibilities for continuing any unitary, entangled history of psychiatry within the territory of what had once been mandate Palestine.

This chapter revisits UN General Assembly resolution 181(II) recommending the partition of Palestine. It undertakes critical international legal analysis of the resolution with reference to the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine whose report formed the basis of the resolution. Contrary to the traditional historiography, this chapter posits that the resolution was neither procedurally ultra vires the General Assembly, nor were its terms substantively consistent with prevailing international law as regards self-determination of peoples. Set against the larger context of the international legal status of Palestine from WWI to the end of the British Mandate, this chapter argues that resolution 181(II) was the opening act in the reification of Palestine’s legal subalternity within the newly minted UN system. It demonstrates that the resolution was an embodiment, in legal terms, of the lingering tension between the rule by law of late-European empire and the ostensible rule of law of the post-WWII era. It also shows that the resolution helped hasten the dissolution of Palestine and the dispersal of its people, the consequences of which remain with us today.

Gupta’s conviction indicates that Indian nationhood had earlier beginnings than has generally been supposed. The “Mutiny-Rebellion” of 1857, long regarded as a key transformative event, being hailed as the “first war of Indian independence” having “national” elements, was situated within a longer genealogy. This underscored the evolutionary process through which Indian nationhood developed. It also highlighted the multivalence of the revolt. It at once symbolized “power,” Indian agency, and collective identity: cutting across caste, class, and communal divisions. By connecting the revolt with the imperial glory of Mughal Delhi, Gupta mediated the many meanings of 1857, and linked it with a long patriotic past that evoked the idea of India despite endless fragmentation. His remarks hold the key to understanding how the many stories of Indian nationhood converged at complex levels.

The conclusion examines the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the formation of the Irish Free State, foregrounding the British-Irish political figures brought together at 10 Downing Street who illuminated the events of this book. Far from a sideshow to developments in Ireland, the concluding chapter submits, Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to both Irish and British contemporary assessments of the Irish Revolution. Irish nationalists in Britain, further, mobilised popular political interest, and activism, on an unprecedented scale across this decade of constitutional crisis, war, and revolution. The potential influence of Irish nationalism in British cities, moreover, occupied the minds and minutes of British policy makers, from Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George. How was Irish nationalism re-constructed across Britain between 1912 and 1922? Shaped by the influences of the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, and the British Empire, Irish nationalism was the cumulative experience of layers of overlapping representations of, and relationships with, ideas of nation. In its modes of political activism, gendered experiences of political life, and representations of public politics, Irish nationalism was impacted by changes, and continuities, across the British polity between the late Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods.

Chapter 3 explores the social conditions and normative constraints that influence the achievements that can be obtained through partition. The chapter’s main argument is that although novel ideas for “homogenizing” territories may arise, a reasonable theory for peace must assume that forcible transfers of population in any form are prohibited, and consequently that demographically homogenous territories are unattainable. By looking at the social realities in the four cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Israel–Palestine, the chapter illustrates that in most actual cases of ethno-national conflict, partition does not offer a viable course of action, if the goal is the creation of ethnically homogenous territories that can become “defensible enclaves” or “true” nation-states. Even in those cases where territorial partition make sense – as in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in postdivision Cyprus, or in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the ethnic cleansing – peace must be attained not on the basis of ethnically homogenous nation-states, but rather on the basis of ethnically heterogenous territories and states. Thus, the chapter concludes that while territorial partition may be considered as one tool for peacemaking in ethno-national conflicts, its limitations must be recognized, and attained with other policies for accommodating ethno-national diversity.