Eunan O鈥橦alpin in Burns Library (Lee Pellegrini)
For Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Eunan O鈥橦alpin, his fondness for reading print newspapers mirrors his approach to scholarly work, delving into bureaucratic archives of diplomatic, governmental, administrative, and military correspondence and records. 听
鈥淲hen you leaf through the newspaper to get to what you want to read, you find yourself stopping at something else that catches your interest, and this can lead to revelations that are as profound as they are unexpected,鈥� explained O鈥橦alpin, a professor emeritus of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College Dublin.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 how it is when I鈥檓 in a library or archive. If you want to get a ground-level view of history, this is the kind of material that offers straightforward, detail-oriented narratives. The joy of this work is what I call serendipitous research, where I might initially go for collection 鈥榅,鈥� but wind up looking at collection 鈥榊鈥� because of something I found in 鈥榅,鈥� and so I end up incorporating that in my project.鈥�
It鈥檚 this methodology that helped spark O鈥橦alpin鈥檚 interest in studying similarities between Ireland and Afghanistan鈥檚 struggles to cope with anomalous, British-imposed and maintained borders, for example, or the political violence precipitating the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923鈥攖he subject of his Burns Scholar Lecture on March 2 at 5:30 p.m. in the Burns Library Thompson Room.
A collaboration between the Center for Irish Programs and University Libraries, the brings outstanding academics, writers, journalists, librarians, and other notable figures to the University to teach courses, offer public lectures, and work with the resources of the Burns Library in their ongoing research, writing, and creative endeavors related to Irish history, art, and culture.
Eunan O'Halpin
O鈥橦alpin is a specialist in 20th-century Irish and British political, administrative, and diplomatic history, and in the role of intelligence in diplomatic, counter-insurgency, and related activities. His books include Head of the Civil Service: A Study of Sir Warren Fisher, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies Since 1922, Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War, and (with Daith铆 脫 Corr谩in), The Dead of the Irish Revolution. A former civil servant, he earned bachelor鈥檚 and master鈥檚 degrees from University College Dublin and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
This semester, Halpin is teaching the class Ireland, America and Britain during the Cold War and Beyond (1945-2023), which explores relations between the United States and Ireland in the context of evolving Anglo-Irish, Anglo-American, and broader geopolitics.
In his upcoming lecture, 鈥淎n Island at War: Reframing Irish Political Violence, 1922-23,鈥� O鈥橦alpin will offer his perspective on a controversial and troubling chapter in Irish history: the conflict known as the Irish Civil War that flared a century ago between supporters and opponents of the treaty ending the Irish War of Independence against Britain (1919-1921), with the pro-treaty side emerging victorious. Precise figures for combatant and civilian deaths have never been verified, but are estimated to be at least 1,500 and probably more, and the economic damage to Ireland was substantial.
O鈥橦alpin, for his part, believes the focus on the purely military aspect of the civil war is misplaced. More Irish civilians were killed, mainly in Northern Ireland, in the months leading up to the government/pro-treaty forces鈥� June 28, 1922, attack on an anti-treaty Dublin stronghold鈥攇enerally regarded as the start of the war鈥攖han afterwards, and most civilian deaths were from assassinations and other target