Research Paper on:
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Irish Tensions

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
The often violent struggles to define a national identity and the tensions resulting from religious unrest have significantly altered Irelands tumultuous political, social and economic landscape during the nineteenth  and twentieth centuries. There has been no Irish person who has been left untouched by the strife. It is the men who have been killed in wars and  rebellions, the women who have suffered from gender oppression, and children who died from starvation and illness. The tensions of Irish history have one common thread that weaves them  together - the fervent desire for independence. Ireland has long been a complex puzzle of socioeconomic classes, religions and political ideologies. For centuries, the economy had been  based on agriculture and one crop in particular, the potato which had long been susceptible to blight or soil erosion and disease (Craig, 1998). The peasants who farmed the  land were impoverished and often feared eviction from their wealthy landlords, many of whom lived privileged lives in England (Craig, 1998). The struggles to survive were described in vivid  detail by the Irish Poor Laws Commission assessment of County Meath (more commonly known as Kells): "In one instance... the father, mother and four children slept in one comer, a  widow woman in a second, the donkey in a third, and a pig in a fourth, of a cabin about 14 feet by 12 inches" (Craig, 1998, p. 53).  A similarly appalling picture was painted by Cecil Woodham Smith in the text, The Great Hunger: "Furniture was a luxury; the inhabitants of Tullahobagly, County Donegal, numbering about 9,000, had  in 1837 only 10 beds, 93 chairs and 243 stools between them. Pigs slept with their owners, manure heaps choked doors, sometimes even stood inside; the evicted and unemployed