Rather than merely focusing on the stated platforms, activities, and appeal of different Irish nationalist organizations or individuals from the late eighteenth century to 1921, this study has probed particular contours of Irish nationalism during that time frame through the perspectival lens of multivocal and multivalent Irish nationalist imaginations and self-representations by way of references to a distant land (‘Iran’ in this case, in its broadest historical, geographic, and cultural configurations). This approach has underscored the always worlded dimension of nativist and/or nationalist Irish self-imaginings (in the case of nationalism, particularly after the emergence of the multiethnic and cross-communal Society of United Irishmen). This method has relied on an array of new analytical trajectories for interrogating particular trends in the history of Irish nationalism, yielding both information that is at times familiar and an extensive range of material and interpretations that are entirely new and otherwise inaccessible through other existing modes of engaging with the history of Irish nationalism. It is also imperative to emphasize once again that the focus of this study has been the exploration of particular strands of thought in the multifaceted sphere of Irish nationalism over a broad time span through the heuristic lens of ‘Iran,’ and not the study of Irish–Iranian relations during the period covered in this book or of solely political (in its narrowest definition) dimensions of Irish nationalist engagement with contemporary Iran.

The Iranian frame of reference in this book is only one of many potential modes of investigating the evolution and diversity of Irish nationalism in a comparative world-his-torical setting—keeping in mind also that this study has only probed particular trends in Irish nationalist historical, literary, cultural, and political expressions, and that in doing so, like other studies of Irish nationalism dealing with the period under investiga-tion, this study too has relied throughout on the available recorded Irish and other sources and, hence, makes no pretence of either reflecting the entire range of continuities and transformations in Irish nationalist articulations and “mentalities” (to borrow from the Annales School), or shedding light on the otherwise undocumented attitudes of ordinary Irish people during the period who gravitated to different strands of nationalism. Such a world-historical approach can be carried out at micro or macro levels, both synchronically and diachronically, each with its own advantages and limitations.

As noted in previous chapters—in addition to the general lack of awareness among Iranians (to this day) of the place of ‘Iran’ in certain corpus of Irish-nationalist antiquarian and other range of historical, folklore, literary, and/or more narrowly political writing during the time period covered in this book—, in the early twentieth century Iranian nationalists continued to to be apathetic toward Irish nationalist politics (until the Easter Rising of 1916), notwithstanding fervent Irish nationalist expressions of solidarity with the Iranian constitutionalist-nationalist struggle of 1906–11 and subsequently. By the turn of the twentieth century, at least educated Iranians following world events were not entirely ignorant of Irish political developments in general. Since the latter decades of the nineteenth century, summary coverage of Irish nationalist activities had appeared in a spectrum of Iranian publications. The topics covered in these reports ranged from Home Rule campaigns to agitation for land reform or armed republican activities. The delayed Iranian nationalist expressions of support for their Irish counterparts appears all the more confounding given the rapidly multiplying Iranian condemnations after 1907 of British imperial domination of India and Egypt. As discussed below, the Iranian neglect of the Irish Question prior to 1916 appears to have been considerably due to Ireland's somewhat ambiguous position as an English colonial entity. Notably, other than being England's oldest substantial colonial territory outside mainland Britain, as well as being a European colony, Ireland had its own separate parliament from 1264 to 1800 and was later incorporated into the new territorial-administrative amalgam of the United Kingdom in 1801. It was around this time that the British Empire emerged as a major outside player in Iranian affairs and attracted increasing Iranian diplomatic, military, commercial, historical, and cultural attention, with also a small (albeit gradually increasing) number of Iranian travelers visiting England during the nineteenth century, but rarely venturing into Ireland.

Commenting on the early phase of the Royal Irish Academy, the prominent twentieth-century Irish nationalist author and playwright William Butler Yeats wrote in 1937:

Yeats did not mention that by 1842 Petrie's position on the Round Towers (first articulated in 1833) was steadily gaining ground in the Royal Irish Academy, even if Petrie's most comprehensive study on the topic The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland did not appear in print until 1845. From 1833 to 1846, Petrie was in charge of the Ordnance Survey, mentioned by Yeats, with which O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry too were affiliated. Nor did Yeats elaborate that many scholars and other commentators continued to latch on to varying oriental theories of ancient Ireland, regardless of their perspectives on the origin of the Round Towers. As already noted, in some circles the former competing oriental theories of the likes of Vallancey, Sylvester O’Halloran, Louisa Catherine Beaufort, Betham, Lanigan, D’Alton (Dalton), Henry O’Brien, Windele, Thomas Moore, and others continued to hold sway, even if often in revised forms. These views were frequently echoed in the “national” and provincial press in Ireland. Examples of the latter include the Cork Examiner, founded in 1841 as an O’Connellite pro-Catholic rights and pro-Repeal movement newspaper. Certainly outside the Academy, no abrupt para-digm shift was detectable regarding the old antiquarian views of the Round Towers. Nor did the appearance of the Young Ireland nationalist movement and its newspaper The Nation in 1842, which was committed to cross-ethnic and cross-confessional Irish nationalism, mark any seismic departure from older oriental theories of Irish origins in general. The Young Ireland coterie, with their own dynamic brand of romantic nationalism, remained divided on the supposed oriental heritage of ancient Ireland, as well as on the subject of the Round Towers.

Irish antiquarians in the late eighteenth century did not invent the idea of Ireland's oriental past. As far back as the ‘Middle Ages,’ Irish scholars had presumed various oriental origins of the ancient Gaelic population of Ireland. In the Middle Ages, Scythia was the prevalent choice as the originary home of the Gaels, with Phoenicia later becoming the main alternative to this model. The supposition of Eastern origins of some of the earliest population settlements in Ireland can be traced back to sources antedating the initial twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquests in Ireland. A case in point is the elev-enth-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (variously translated as The Book of the Taking of Ireland or as The Book of Invasions), which with some alterations in its different surviving versions largely relied on earlier works by “Irish learned men, the filid, whose duty it was to preserve the genealogies and uphold the honour of their kings.” Among other (also legendary) oriental ancestors of early populations of Ireland, one recension of Lebor Gabála Érenn designated Fénius Farsaid (also appearing as Fenius Farsa)—purportedly a historical Scythian prince—as the ancestor of the Gaels, who reportedly arrived in Ireland following earlier smaller-scale settlements on the island by other population groups and subsequently constituted the major population branch of ancient Ireland. Farsaid's lineage was traced back through his supposed father Baath to Japheth, one of Noah's sons. In the seventeenth century, the oriental pedigree of the ancient Irish continued to be traced to Scythians, notwithstanding the designation of Scythians in ancient Greek and Roman sources as uncivilized and savage, albeit brave. The presumed pedigree of Farsaid and the Scythian designation of the early Gaels, which traced their route from Scythia to Ireland by way of the Iberian Peninsula (more specifically “Spain”), was an early version of what became the “Milesian” model of Gaelic ancestry that continued to be reproduced in different forms well into the twentieth century. The Gaels in this ancestral lineage of the ancient Irish were descendants of Scythian followers of Miledh/Milesius (Míl Espáine) and, hence, designated ‘Milesians,’ with Miledh/Milesius considered a descendant of Fénius Farsaid.

Whereas the ‘medieval’ Scythian theory relegated the ancient population of Ireland to a state of general “pagan” savagery prior to the introduction of Christianity to the island after the fifth century, by the seventeenth century some Irish antiquarians were hailing Ireland's ancient pre-Christian oriental past as a civilizational Golden Age.

Without question, the most traumatic event in nineteenth-century Ireland that affected practically the entire population in some way was the Great Famine of 1845–51. The Irish famine, also known among its many designations as “an Gorta Mór” in Irish (i.e., the Great Hunger), is generally estimated to have resulted in more than a million deaths and directly contributed to the emigration of nearly twice as many people—often under horrific conditions in their long voyage to distant lands—with large-scale emigration from Ireland continuing for decades to come. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ireland's population of four-and-a-half million was just over one-half of the island's population at the start of the century. The Great Famine, having directly touched the lives of nearly the entire population of the island in some form—as victims, observers, and/or those working to ameliorate the mass suffering of the population, and so on—became ingrained in the transmitted “historical” memory of subsequent generations of the Irish, constituting one of the most enduring components of so-called collective memory of the Irish at large, both in Ireland and in Irish diasporic communities. For the majority of those leaving Ireland during the famine and in the years immediately following the catastrophe, the famine was the most direct cause of their geographic and accompanying forms of dislocation, whether or not these emigrants found greater economic and/or social opportunities in their new diasporic settings, including in mainland Britain. Whereas in mainland Britain, the Irish transplants continued to be identified as “Irish,” or as ethnic sub-categories of the Irish population (such as “Anglo-Irish”), the diasporic Irish population elsewhere often assumed, or were accorded, new hyphenated identity labels (such as “Irish-Americans”). For the remaining ordinary Irish, whether or not internally displaced by the famine, the very soil and localities of Ireland were saturated with the melancholy memory of suffering and death. For decades, following the sharply dwindling population of villages and towns through death and the large-scale exodus of survivors during the famine, parts of the island, particularly in the hardest-hit western provinces, remained largely depopulated virtual ghostlands. With or without visible signposts, much of the land was pervaded with corpses of famine victims in rapidly expanded cemeteries and the remembrance of immense suffering and loss.

With the exception of allegoric social, cultural, and political referentialities to con-temporary Iran in the ‘Persian Letters’ genre of Irish literature, including in Moore's 1813 Intercepted Letters, prior to 1856 it was Irans of past historical and/or imaginary settings that featured in Irish nationalist commentaries in connection with Ireland itself (namely in antiquarian and literary works). In 1856 contemporary Iranian developments became a subject of Irish nationalist political observation and commentary in the framework of the Irish Question, more specifically in so-called radical nationalist circles. This marked the start of what became periodic Irish nationalist expressions of solidarity with variously configured “Iranian” acts of resistance to outside aggression, initially in the form of defending the Iranian state, which was itself engaged in an act of territorial aggression, and subsequently in the form of expressed camaraderie with varying Iranian popular expressions of anti-imperialist nationalism (as well as with Iranian anti-autocratic endeavors). In 1856 Britain and Iran went to war for the second time; the first occasion having been the brief Anglo-Iranian War of 1838 that resulted in a British military victory and subsequent commercial and other privileges in Iran under the eventual peace treaty of 1841. The 1856 Anglo-Iranian conflict occurred just as the ravages of the devastating Irish famine of 1845–51 had subsided. It also coincided with the closing stages of the Crimean War (1854–56), in which Britain and France had joined the Ottoman state in curbing Russia's territorial aggression against the Ottoman Empire and foiling St. Petersburg's control of the Black Sea. During the latest Anglo-Iranian War, British troops dispatched to Iranian territory from neighboring British India also included, alongside the native Indian sepoys, Irish soldiers and officers (Protestants and Catholic), as had been the case in the 1838 armed conflict between Iran and the British Empire. In Ireland and in the Irish diaspora (notably in the United States) the more “radical” Irish nationalists seized the Anglo-Iranian War as an opportunity to condemn what they characterized as Britain's continued imperialist aggression around the world, by also circuitously redirecting attention to continued English occupation and alleged maladministration of Ireland.

The Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57 (or the “Second Anglo-Persian War” as it came to be known) was waged by Britain as a means of reversing Iran's military operations for capturing Herat and its adjoining “Afghan” territories.

The title of this book is a play on the Irish expression “Éirinn go Brách,” frequently used interchangeably with the more correct “Éire go Brách” (Ireland Forever). Like all other works of history, this project has a history of its own. It originated as a side project long ago while I was revising my University of Iowa dissertation (1991) for publication. The dissertation focused on the opposition in the United Kingdom to London's Iranian policy during 1906–11. That opposition included Irish nationalists of differing political platforms. The revised and amended draft of my dissertation eventually appeared as a book titled Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent (2006). Along the way, among other tangential projects, I began to explore whether there had been prior episodes of Irish nationalist interest in Iranian encounters with the British Empire. Britain and Russia had been the two leading imperial interlopers in Iranian affairs after the start of the nineteenth century. The earliest episode of contemporary Irish nationalist espousal of Iranian sovereignty I uncovered dates back to the time of the (Second) Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57, albeit occurring under drastically different circumstances than the Irish nationalist advocacy of Iranian sov-ereignty after 1906. Moreover, during the course of my research, I came across works of poetry and literature by notable nineteenth-century Irish nationalist authors, such as Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan, that variously deployed Iranian settings, among other “oriental” motifs, as a means of commenting on Ireland's history of subjugation by England since the twelfth century, especially since the English Reformation in the sixteenth century. This particular research trajectory subsequently led me to probe not only the ways in which Irish nationalists of varying platforms at different stages since the emergence of nonsectarian Irish nationalism in the late eighteenth century had regarded contemporary Iran in the context of Anglo-Iranian relations, but also the ways in which they may have approached and comprehended Iranian history vis-à-vis the history of Ireland, in terms of manifold formulations of “nation” (including the nation-state), national formations, national identity, and anti-imperialism and territorial sovereignty.

Debates on Ireland's (in fact mythical) oriental origins and other similar accounts of ancient Ireland continued well into the early part of the twentieth century, even if by the middle of the nineteenth century a gradual consensus was taking shape on more rigorous historiographic standards, including more stringent methods of comparative and evidential verification. These improved historiographic standards also benefitted from advancements in philological and archaeological research criteria taking place around the same time, as flawed as some of these developments happened to be by our standards (without implying here that present-day standards are somehow perfect). The frequently intersecting fields of archaeology, philology, and history continued to serve as battlegrounds in ongoing debates on Ireland's ancient past in the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time the question of ancient Irish identities and Irish mythology also extended into emergent and inter-related fields of ethnography, anthropology, and folklore studies, which at the time were methodologically far less scrupulous compared to archaeology or even history. The ravages of the Great Famine of 1845–51 provided added impetus for studies in Irish folklore and other so-called traditions that seemed to be fast disappearing.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Petrie's (d.1866) assertion of the Christian origin of the Round Towers was rapidly gaining consensus in scholarly circles and among leading commentators. Petrie's verdict was even validated in such works as the 1864 Handbook for Travellers in Ireland, appearing as part of the prominent London publisher John Murray's series of handbooks of countries around the world and of different constituent parts of the United Kingdom. The Handbook, going through subsequent editions, noted with some confusion that, among other hypotheses, the Round Towers were believed by some to have been of Danish origin, while

As noted in previous chapters, on occasion certain Irish nationalist individuals and/or groups voiced opposition to contemporary British policy toward Iran. The most notable example in the nineteenth century was The Nation's coverage of the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57 (see Chapter Four). This was an instance of Irish Nationalist expression of cross-territorial anti-imperialist solidarity with Iranians; more specifically with the Iranian state in that setting. Some Irish nationalists also objected to London's handling of Iranian affairs during the 1891–92 Iranian “tobacco protest” movement. However, the most sustained and widespread Irish nationalist condemnation of London's Iranian policy occurred during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11. Irish nationalist critics of London on this occasion ranged from members of various Home Rule parties and organizations to militant republican groups.

The Iranian Tobacco Protest of 1891–92 and London's direct diplomatic intervention in the event elicited parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition in the United Kingdom to the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury's handling of affairs, with Salisbury also doubling as foreign secretary. This crisis concerned a tobacco concession granted on March 8, 1890, by the Iranian government to a British subject, Major Gerald Francis Talbot (coincidentally also a relative of Lord Salisbury). The comprehensive concession gave Talbot's company a monopoly over the purchase, sale, and export of Iran's entire tobacco output. Talbot then transferred his concession to two consecutive front syndicates (the last being the Imperial Tobacco Corporation of Persia) for grossly inflating the company's share prices and earning Talbot a lucrative profit without the company having undertaken any operations in Iran yet. In Iran itself, the concession sparked off a vehement popular condemnation, before erupting into a nationwide protest movement lasting from January 1891 to early 1892, with protests continuing even after the concession was finally cancelled by Iranian authorities in late December 1891. The Iranian monarch, Nasser al-Din Shah, who had also been on the throne during the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57, revoked the concession in light of the fierce domestic opposition that threatened his reign as well as steady diplomatic pressure by Russia, which regarded the concession as a substantial economic reinforcement of Britain's leverage in Iran contra Russia. The annulment of the concession encountered opposition from the British government, and authorities in Tehran were subsequently pressured by London to grant Talbot's Imperial Tobacco Corporation of Persia an exorbitantly inordinate indemnity for the abrogation of the concession.

Irish nationalist antiquarian and (mytho-)historical, literary, political, folklore, racial, and other range of commentaries about Ireland through the medium of “Iranian” referentialities (past and present) were among the many divergent instances of locating Ireland in a world historical setting. Both full-fledged and residual traces of theories of “oriental” origins of the Irish reappeared well into the early twentieth century, but with rapidly diminished frequency and declining power of persuasion, at least in Irish historical circles. Such works were still being produced during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and even after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. A case in point is the references to Scythians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, in Seumas MacManus’ 1921 The Story of the Irish Race. This was despite the fact that such theories were compellingly cast aside as legendary and mythological in the new historiographic models that emerged in Ireland after the latter decades of the nineteenth century and were further reinforced by the likes of Patrick Weston Joyce, Eoin MacNeill, Mary Teresa Hayden and George Aloysius Moonan, or Alice Stopford Green in the early twentieth century. In her 1925 History of the Irish State to 1014, Alice Stopford Green noted the past appeal of legendary accounts of ancient Ireland by casting her glance over a much broader time frame than just the period since the eighteenth century:

By the time Henry O’Brien's The Round Towers appeared in 1834, Thomas Moore (1779– 1852), who participated in the public pillorying of O’Brien, was awaiting the publica-tion of the first volume of his The History of Ireland, which offered an alternative oriental account of Irish origins. Appearing in 1835, this first volume of what became a four- volume history of Ireland from the earliest times until the middle of the seventeenth cen-tury covered the period up to the Norse invasions (beginning in the late eighth century). As already noted in the previous chapter, Moore's book too was destined to be assailed by George Petrie for its particular theory of the Round Towers. At the time of the publication of The History of Ireland, Moore was already a distinguished Romantic poet and dramatist, the pre-eminent Irish nationalist balladeer, an indefatigable champion of Catholic rights in the United Kingdom, and a supporter of the campaign to repeal the 1801 Act of Union. The Dublin-born Moore, who spent most of his life in England, continued to be regarded as “The National Bard of Ireland” in most Irish nationalist quarters even after the emergence of the Young Ireland literary circle in 1842 with its new divergent patterns of nationalist poetic sensibility. The Young Ireland poet Michael Joseph Barry dedicated his 1845 edited volume of nationalist poetry to Moore, with the collection containing some of Moore's own works. The poet and a founding member of Young Ireland, Thomas Osborne Davis (d. 1845), who was originally to have edited the aforementioned collection of nationalist poems, hailed Moore “as our greatest poet.” Davis, who was otherwise critical of Moore's grandiloquent style, wrote of Moore in the Young Ireland mouthpiece The Nation (Dublin):