Staff Profiles

Peter is available to supervise undergraduate dissertations, especially those relating to late nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland. Peter specialises in the lived experience of Partition, its impact and contested legacy. His research interests concern the interface of politics and political identity with social and cultural history and he is happy to supervise topics relating to the Irish revolution, Northern Ireland Troubles, nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish nationalism and unionism, sectarianism, conflict and border studies.

Listen here to ‘Mind your P’s and queues: history and the Irish Border,’ a keynote lecture given by Peter at 'Partitions and borders: a comparative and interdisciplinary conference' jointly organised by University College Dublin and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, at University College Dublin, May 2018.

Books

• Leary P, Unapproved routes: histories of the Irish border, 1922-72, Oxford University Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9780198778578
  Abstract

  The delineation of the Irish border radically reshaped political and social realities across the entire island. For those who lived in close quarters with the border partition was also an intimate occurrence—profoundly implicated in everyday lives. Otherwise mundane activities such as shopping, visiting family, or travelling to church were complicated by customs restrictions, security policies, and even questions of nationhood and identity. The border became an interface, not just of two jurisdictions, but also between the public, political space of state territory, and the private, familiar spaces of daily life. Political disunity was intertwined with a degree of unity of social life that persisted and in some ways even flourished across, if not always within, the boundaries of both states. On the border, the state was visible to an uncommon degree at the same point as its limitations were uniquely exposed. For those whose life-worlds continued to transcend the border, the power and hegemony of either of those states, and the social structures they conditioned, could only ever be incomplete. Border residents lived in circumstances that were burdened by inconvenience and imposition, but also endowed with certain choices. Influenced by microhistorical approaches, this book uses a series of discrete ‘histories’—of the Irish Boundary Commission, the Foyle Fisheries dispute, cockfighting tournaments regularly held on the border, smuggling, and local conflicts over cross-border roads—to explore how the border was experienced and incorporated into people’s lives; emerging, at times, as a powerfully revealing site of popular agency and action.
  

  Website 

Journal articles

• Leary P, 'A house divided: the Murrays of the border and the rise and decline of a small Irish house'
  History Workshop Journal 86 (2018) pp.269-290
  ISSN: 1363-3554 eISSN: 1477-4569
  Abstract

  The thatched farmhouse in which the Murray family lived dated from at least the middle of the nineteenth century when James Fee, a grandfather of Mrs Murray, returned to Ireland from America with enough money to marry and settle down. Originally a public house it stood directly on the dividing line between County Fermanagh and County Cavan. The Government of Ireland Act, 1920 and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 elevated this unimportant boundary into a border between states. With one part in Northern Ireland (and, therefore, the United Kingdom) and another part in the Irish Free State, the Murrays could sit on a chair ‘in the Six Counties’ while eating off ‘the table in the Twenty-six’, or pass the salt back and forward from North to South. These humorous features of partition stood in contrast both to the family’s modest circumstances and to the conflict, road closures and restrictions that shaped border life. In time, the house attracted the attention of propagandists, journalists and travel writers, and brought the Murrays into contact or, in the last instance, correspondence with politicians, foreign visitors, and the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. This paper concerns the remarkable story of this otherwise unremarkable family and their home.
  

  Website 
• Leary P, 'Bicycles, ’barrows and donkeys: pinning a tale on the Irish border'
  Folklore 129 (2) (2018) pp.111-128
  ISSN: 0015-587X eISSN: 1469-8315
  Abstract

  A popular smuggling story still told in Ireland concerns a man who crossed the border every day, either on a bicycle or wheeling a wheelbarrow, and usually carrying some sort of load; hay, turf, potatoes, or vegetables—goods that were free from customs duty. The suspicious officials subjected the traveller to regular searches but could never catch him out. This article contextualizes that story in the history of the Irish border during the mid twentieth century, and locates it within Irish folklore traditions, before exploring its probable origin in similar tales found outside Ireland.
  

  Website 
• Leary P, 'Negotiating Ireland’s "decade of centenaries" in the new age of Brexit'
  History Workshop Journal 85 (2018) pp.295-301
  ISSN: 1363-3554 eISSN: 1477-4569
  Abstract

  Ireland is halfway through a ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorating the series of events that culminated in partition. Contested memories may be further aggravated by Brexit.
  

  Website 

Book chapters

• Hayward K, Leary P, Komarova M, 'The Irish border as sign and source of British-Irish tensions' in Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Timothy Dunn (ed.), Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration, Edward Elgar (2021)
  ISBN: 9781839108891 eISBN: 9781839108907
  Abstract

  The Government of Ireland Act, 1920 partitioned Ireland along a line set to ensure a stable Protestant majority in the small northern state. However, neither stability nor security were achieved by this act, in any social, political or economic sense. This chapter gives an overview of the practical and symbolic significance of the border, the impact of the conflict and peace process on the border region, and the anticipated effects of Brexit. Through a detailed case study of a border village, it demonstrates that, after a violent and disruptive conflict, the present-day interconnectedness of the border region is seen as both ‘normal’ and a precious part of everyday life. An appreciation for the achievements of peace is particularly acute in the border region, which has been so directly affected by the worst effects of conflict. These achievements are seen by local residents to be put under threat by Brexit – not least because it has revived some tensions in the British-Irish relationship.  The everyday lives of borderland communities continue to be buffeted by history as well as by national and even international politics.

  Website 

Reviews

• Leary P, review of James A Cousins "Without A Dogs Chance; The Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Boundary Commission, 1920-25", in Saothar 46 (2021) ISSN: 0332-1169
  
• Leary P, review of Divided village: the Cold War in the German borderlands / by Jason B. Johnson, in History 103 (358) (2018) pp.910-911ISSN: 0018-2648 eISSN: 1468-229X
  Website 
• Leary P, review of The end of outrage: Post famine adjustment in rural Ireland / Breandán Mac Suibhne, in Irish Historical Studies 42 (161) (2018) pp.196-198ISSN: 0021-1214 eISSN: 2056-4139
  Website 
• Leary P, review of Contested frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel region: cartography, sovereignty, and conflict / by Asher Kaufman, in Times Literary Supplement () ISSN: 0307-661X
  

Other publications

• Leary P, 'Borders and Beyond'
  (2020) Abstract

  This is part of our series on ‘Radical History after Brexit’, exploring the challenges facing radical history after Britain’s departure from the European Union.
  

  Website 
• Leary P, 'There are three ways out of the Irish border impasse. All are closed to Theresa May'
  Guardian (2018) ISSN: 0261-3077
  Website