Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

This chapter takes as its vantage points two crucial markers of contemporary Ireland – the Good Friday Agreement and the Celtic Tiger. The chapter focuses on the topic of development and environmental violence as they emerge in Northern Ireland after the peace agreement, and in the Republic during the Celtic Tiger years. While Belfast in the post-Peace Agreement era enticed tourists by reinventing the city as a global “anycity,” “Dublin, along with other southern cities, has been indelibly marked by economic boom and bust: So-called “ghost estates” now dot the country’s landscape, and rapid urban gentrification has exacerbated its homelessness crisis.” In a series of evocative readings of individual poems, Julia Obert and Nolan Goetzinger pay attention to the shifting definitions of violence in the Irish context – from the acutely visible and spectacular tragedies of the Troubles to the invisible or drawn-out calamities in the wake of the Celtic Tiger – and demonstrate an energetic critique of late-capitalist and neoliberal definitions of progress and the good life.

This chapter considers how Northern Ireland’s experience during and after Brexit informs our understandings of multi-level governance orders and interactions between and within those orders. A traditional view of governance structures would regard Northern Ireland as having little say in negotiations on trade. Nonetheless, the negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement have repeatedly seen all parties refer to and return to governance in Northern Ireland as a core concern. This piece will utilise scale theory – originating in political geography – to consider how Northern Ireland became central to the Brexit negotiations.  Scale, as a geographical and political idea, incorporates a range of concepts (core and periphery, population size, majorities and minorities, temporality (linear and nonlinear), geographic governance size), as well as questions of local, national, regional and universal spaces to consider how governance is constructed and the role law plays in constructing scales. Whereas traditional accounts of scaled governance orders deploy “nested” constructs to place Northern Ireland in a tidy frame, organised like a series of Russian dolls, this chapter challenges this narrative by interrogating the slippage between the governance orders and their methods of interaction, and what extent of ‘voice’ that ultimately leaves for Northern Ireland.

Chapter 3 examines the 1998 Tinderbox production of Stewart Parker’s Northern Star in the First Presbyterian Church in Belfast in relation to the “peace dividend” that has been widely promoted since the early days of the peace process in Northern Ireland but has at best been fitfully realised. This chapter takes seriously the proposition that, under certain circumstances, a single theatrical production might achieve a greater political and economic return than either the state or the market can. When Henry Joy McCracken stepped forward and addressed the audience in the First Presbyterian Church as “citizens of Belfast” in 1998, he realised a peace dividend in a very material and immediate form, to an extent that the state and the market have never convincingly been able to do in Northern Ireland. The production provided a living model of what a non-marketised peace dividend – a “citizen of Belfast” – might look and feel like, and posited theatre as the ideal (and possibly only) place to find it.

The introduction outlines how despite Stakeknife and Donaldson infiltrating the IRA, this book argues that the intelligence war did not force the IRA into the peace process. The secretive and elusive nature of rural IRA units, republican units in England and the IRA leadership, alongside the additional security provided by the cell structure in Belfast and Derry City, meant that the IRA was not pushed into terminal decline by British intelligence. I explain how the peace process resulted from a political and military stalemate that existed for all sides. I also outline how the IRA's prolonged ceasefires in 1972, 1975, 1994 and 1997 did not result from the intelligence war.