“A terrible beauty is born”: Craft and Revolution in Ireland

Ireland is exceptional in modern Western Europe in its experience of industrialization and imperialism. Colonized and ruled by the British since the twelfth century, partitioned into two separate states when they left in the twentieth century, visual and material culture has long played a vital role in the constitution of Irish unity and the construction of Irish identity. Whilst Ireland may have participated in the evolution and expansion of the British empire it was also a laboratory for many of its ideas. When William Morris first visited Ireland in 1877, to redesign an interior for the Earl of Charleville, he bore witness to many of the degrading realities of the British militarized presence. In 1886, when he returned to Ireland, after joining the Socialist League, Morris suggested that the struggle for national self-determination was a revolutionary idea allied to the liberation of labour under capitalism. From the 1880s many of the Arts and Crafts ideas Morris inspired in Britain were keenly felt in Ireland. In the revolutionary period, from the Home Rule movement in the 1870-90s and Partition in the 1920s to independence in the 1940s and after, “craft” became a key symbol of the experience of modernity in Ireland.