Ireland’s nationalist grand narrative held was that a ‘colonial nationalism’ formulated by Irish Protestant ‘patriots’ in the eighteenth century influenced the thinking of American ‘patriots’ who challenged the authority of the British government after 1763. Another proposition was that the revolutionary stance taken by America’s ‘patriots’ in 1776 inspired the creation of the Irish ‘Volunteers’ who, acting in consort with some members of ‘Grattan’s parliament’, supposedly wrested ‘The Constitution of 1782’ from a reluctant British government. This lecture will explain how and why this neat interpretation formulated by Young Ireland authors of the 1840s came to be challenged even as it was being composed, and how Michael Doheny advanced a modified account of relations between Ireland and Revolutionary America in A History of The American Revolution (Dublin, 1846). This lecture will address what of Doheny’s account has been upheld by recent scholarship.
Nicholas Canny was Professor of History at the University of Galway, 1979-2009; President of the Royal Irish Academy, 2008-2011; and Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council, 2011-2016. His major books are The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (1976), Making Ireland British (2001), and Imagining Ireland’s Pasts (2021). He edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) and, with Philip D. Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (2011). Elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (1981) he became a Member of Academia Europaea, (1995), a Fellow of the British Academy (2005) a Member of the American Philosophical Society (2007) and Member of the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid) (2011).
Date: Monday, 17 September 2026
Time: 20:00/8pm
Venue: Harbour Hotel, Galway