The Trouble with Irish History – RTÉ’s Hidden History December 4, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in History, Irish History.trackback
First up, a fascinating programme on RTÉ last week. Whether it worked quite as well as it should is a different matter. The narrated text was ponderous and shallow. Some of the questions were near asinine “30 second quiz show… what is the most significant event in Irish history”… yeah, well… let’s skip the quiz show bit. There was a tendency to skip over events, to leave the answers to questions hanging so that they appeared uncontextualised. And then the perennial bugbear of television, so much to say, so little time to say it in.
But for all that we actually did get a sense – but in some ways no more than that – of the course of Irish history and historiography. A number of interesting omissions. While great play was made of the early years, there was nothing about History Ireland, nothing about the rise of historical studies and research beyond the academy. Little sense that away from readings of the Troubles there was important work being done in labour, economics and other areas. Although not enough, not nearly enough.
The panel was actually pretty high-powered (see below). There were a couple of names that I’d have liked to have seen included, but the selection was reasonably representative. Each of them interviewed in the room in the Shelbourne Hotel where the 1922 Constitution was drafted. In a way the first question was one of the most interesting. Most seemed to eschew any romanticised or emotive linkage between place and history. I find this interesting in itself. As Roy Foster said, the light would have been different, the objects, and so forth… I’m not certain if that’s absolutely true but clearly while no moment replicates another and no environment can replicate itself I wonder at our perception to differentiate between them.
Much was made of facts as the basis for historiography. But also there was considerable play made of the point that all history can only work from a partial sampling and collation of data. The dangers of interpretation were clearly articulated. Some noted that when interpretation slipped across into prophecy that was problematic – naming no names. Again, this is an interesting aspect. Consider how historians have been allowed platforms in the Irish media and have used the authority of their research to make pronouncements far beyond that area. That isn’t an argument for censorship, but it is an argument that caution is required when assessing such pronouncements. Indeed one might argue that we saw in the 1970s the rise of a tranche of extremely politicised historians or commentators who drew on historiography who very consciously used that sense of authority to validate their political positions. That they were at least half right on some specific issues does not detract from the troubling aspects of their societal and political influence, and for me – at least – the elite nature of that project, one which didn’t merely offer an interpretation but actively sought to close down all other interpretations for fear of inflaming the supposedly (yet never clearly apparent) atavistic side of the Irish psyche is revolting. As ever our betters took it upon themselves to determine our responses.
And in a curious inversion of what Ciaran Brady Professor of History at TCD said, it wasn’t that disputes in academia are so bitter because the stakes are so low, but rather that in this instance the stakes were perceived as being near existential. That was overblown rhetoric in 1974. How much more so it seems today. Indeed Conor Cruise O’Brien was overtly critiqued for the hyperbolic nature of his interpretations and predictions.
Which of course encompasses the concept of ‘revisionism’. I have to be honest. I don’t actually see revisionism as being an anti-nationalist project so much as a class project – and a curiously paradoxical one at that with formations on the further left being as happy to indulge themselves as the more usual suspects. Within revisionism – it seems to me – was the (perhaps) unconscious, faint and delayed cri de couer of the dispossessed middle and upper middle classes for who the Irish Revolution, imperfect and often largely useless as it was, was perceived as being a rupture in their ‘ownership’ of cultural, social and political power in Ireland.
[a brief tangent. Recently a close relative of mine was at a wedding of a 'Fine Gael' family. A number of councillors were there and the conversation moved to politics. My relative was shocked at the vituperative language used in relation to Fianna Fáil. The only thing he could liken it to was the comments Paisley made about Brian Cowen's appearance... and - as he said - it went on and on and on. I've seen that dynamic at close hand many times and it is particularly unlovely and something that as time has progressed alienated me from the actual virtues (of which there are indeed some) of Fine Gael. But that dynamic is partially positioned, however loosely, within perceived class distinctions]
On the left we often wonder at our marginalisation in this society. It is the direct result, not merely of Fianna Fáil efficiency in the early 1930s at presenting a radical populist face, but also the inability of the left to decide whether to ally with those who present a certain social liberalism or those who while often socially conservative actually represent the overwhelming majority of the working classes. And this is before noting that the left itself is distributed between those two socio-political areas which also links into a pre-existing social structure that was ruptured by 1916 – 1921.
One comment I thought that was both honest and true was Margaret O’Callaghan’s point that she left UCD wedded to the Cruise O’Brien school of thinking on Irish history, but when she was in Cambridge “I changed my line on the North… I saw the North differently”. Ronan Fanning intriguingly also noted how Irish Republicanism is alive and kicking and ’some of my closest friends regard me … Ruth Dudley Edwardes invariably describes me as having become completely ‘green’”. This is something I think that is often overlooked by many Irish, a sense that there actually is a distinctiveness and distinction – like it or not – as regards our national identity from that of the English, Scottish or Welsh (or indeed arguably the Northern Irish). It is not that we can simply map ourselves onto another location at will. Nor can we wish them away. Yes, such distinctions on one axis are imaginary, both in the Benedict Anderson sense of national identity being ‘imagined’ and in the more prosaic sense. But the imagination can operate on an enormously subtle level. Ideally class should be a greater determinant, and I’d argue that on a social level it usually is. But in the broader web of social relations, particularly those relative to power centres, the status of the visitor or immigrant from the periphery is generally lesser or can be perceived as lesser. And comfort in a place should not be mistaken for cosmopolitanism. That’s not an aversion to, say, Englishness – quite the opposite – just the sense that it takes time to learn and to read a society and that time is generally much longer than some people think.
It was fascinating to see the divergence in opinion as regards the key events in Irish history. The Famine, the Plantations, 1916 (most significant and simultaneously most over–rated according to Paul Bew) and so on all figured. But tellingly no two historians said the same event was key. As interesting were the events which they thought were over-rated. I had to agree that the Declaration of the Republic in 1949 was certainly a prime contender. It was also significant that Brady thought that there was some overstatement of the English/British presence on this island (this reminds me of research mentioned in Stephen Howe about local histories where broad national events simply didn’t appear to impinge upon the consciousness… I’m intrigued by this).
Still that can lead to difficult places. What was very striking about the revisionists (at least the first wave of them) was the sense that Irish history (and in particular the Independence struggle) was essentially mythic, and in a bad way. For me this is difficult to contextualise since it leads to an apparently willful disregarding of the process of British state-building. It’s not just ‘whataboutery’ to suggest that state building in almost all contexts – and particularly the British – is a contradictory and often violent process. To suggest that Pearse et al were less than perfect does not – to me at least – lead directly and inevitably to the idea that they were without any redeeming qualities or that their project was somehow illegitimate anymore than the proposition that Churchill was a hugely paradoxical figure delegitimises British history. Still, I can’t help but think that all of these would have remained somewhat arid debates had it not been for the events of 1969 and after. In conjunction with an armed campaign North of the border the distortions in some of the analyses was perhaps inevitable.
There was one aspect was missing. A sense of economy as the engine of history.
Although I’d be strongly critical of Paul Bew in his later manifestations he was the only one, bar tangentially Mary Daly, to mention it, and intriguingly more in the context of the Peace Process than in the context of Irish history as a whole although he noted that ‘economic history underpinned the division of the island’. An obvious point, arguably a self-serving one – if like him one believes that economic development will simply dissipate Nationalist national identity – but at least one clearly focussed in a Marxist viewpoint. You can take the man out of an association with the Workers’ Party, but you can’t take the Workers’ Party out of the man…
And all told, as Ciaran Brady noted, there is a weird sense that somehow we’re a people wedded to history and moreso than others. I wonder about that too…although Margaret O’Callaghan implicitly made the point that in a small country ‘history’ tended to touch people to a much greater degree than elsewhere… The question as to whether our history was ‘catastrophic’ or ‘unique’ was pretty strange too. To me human history everywhere seems grim. But I found it a little hard to take Fosters point about ‘competitive victimhood in the history of colonised nations’. Mind you, I also thought Paul Bew got it about right that ‘if you wanted a quiet life in the 20th century, despite the civil war and the Troubles, Ireland was a good place to be’. It’s when we set the controls to take us further back, and only shortly further back that we see real catastrophes. As Mary Daly said, ‘the Famine is one that comes to mind, and the 17th century was pretty grisly’.
It was great simply to see the images of the Reading Room in the National Library in Dublin (although for balance – in more ways than one – perhaps someone might have shown us PRONI!). For those of us who have toiled long and hard there (and PRONI and the National Archive) it was nice to see the simple elegance of the place on screen. And perhaps it provides some vindication for the enormous amount of research that is done unsung…
And for those who want to know who took part:
Paul Bew Professor of Politics, Queens, Belfast
Mary E. Daly Professor of History, UCD
Ronan Fanning Professor of History, UCD
Roy Foster Carroll Professor of History, Oxford
Brendan Bradshaw Professor of History, Cambridge
Ciaran Brady Professor of History, TCD
John A. Murphy Professor of History, UCC
Margaret O’Callaghan Professor of History, Queens Belfast
Cormac O Grada Professor of Economics, UCD
Catriona Crowe Senior Archivist, National Archives
Gerard Lyne Surveyor of Manuscripts, National Library
I thought Bew was excellent on it. See my comment under the most recent Coolacrease thread. One thing he said struck me hard. He said basically that with the GFA and the peace process, things have the potential to really change i.e. that it is not inevitable that at some stage in the future the North will break down again into sectarian carnage. That we should not let ourselves be pessimistic that history inevitably repeats itself. I have to admit that I would be often of the view that it is inevitable that it will all break down again, that the sectarian divisions will always be there. But as socialists we should be optimists and believe and work towards it never happening again. NEVER AGAIN – THE WHYS AND HOWS OF STOPPING SECTARIAN CARNAGE IN THE NORTH. I feel a pamphlet coming on.
Thanks for that WBS. Most interesting. Where to start.
I guess I’ll start with the point about history beyond the ranks of academe. History Ireland is an extraordinarily successful and very valuable (though overpriced!) journal. Irish culture would be much poorer without it, and I think it is much better than the likes of History Today or the BBC’s History magazine. And a lot of ‘amateur’ historians are producing a great deal of interesting and useful stuff. But I don’t think that these areas affect the way Irish history is written and interpreted. More that they widen the audience it reaches and provide evidence to support or (more often) reject the hypotheses developed by university historians. As you say yourself, RDE and Conor Cruise started as academic historians, the exception to the rule being Harris. So I think leaving these out was defensible.
It also goes I think to the point about whether history has a special place in the Irish consciousness, as I guess we all like to think. Perhaps your bringing the History Ireland thing up is a subconscious reflection of this assumption – we all like and know our history, so why are you talking about only these bunch of elite privileged people. This proves the strength of your democratic sensibility but I wonder here if it’s not clouding the issue a little. Same too with your account of revisionism as to some extent the revenge of the dispossessed elite. I agree that the revisionist project has its problems, particularly in the zeal to demythologise without reference to the fact that all states have their foundation myths. As you point out, the insularity of Irish historians has meant that they haven’t properly contextualised this and so we have had the hysterical denunciations of works produced in the early C20th in Ireland as the worst things ever. Plain silly.
However, I don’t think revisionism is the product of a lost elite. This is an accusation that has often been hurled at, for example, Roy Foster (e.g. by Terry Eagleton). However his family background shows it is not true. I saw people saying the same thing about O’Briend on his recent birthday as he was related to an IPP person, but it’s hardly like he was dispossessed. Quite the opposite. I would say at the minute the most ardent revisionists are young people coming from the south whose mentality is entirely partitionist, and who mistake attacking the traditional story as an example of their shining cosmopolitanism while being so blinkered they never stop to think that their view of Ireland, and of the political, social and economic forces that affect it, stops at the border. In that sense, revisionism is the voice of Fianna Fáil as much as Fine Gael – of the middle classes who have done well out of the southern state and absolutely don’t want to be dragged into the northern barbarity. The Troubles absolutely poisoned the writing of Irish history in the south, to the extent that the notion that the application of violence might have been a reasonable and necessary thing to do is simply dismissed from the start. Tom Dunne’s Rebellions is a fascinating insight into the effects of the Troubles and then politics on Irish history writing and simply HAS to be read by anyone interested in the writing of Irish history.
I agree entirely on the class issue. Although I think that unfortunately the golden age of Irish social and economic history was 30-odd years ago, and that while some good work is being done on specific points, there is sadly little of major significance for the understanding of the island’s history over a large period of time. Still if they had Ó Gráda on and didn’t use him for the economy, then that’s outrageous.
The most significant event question is a bit silly, though you’d have to plump for the introuction of Christianity if pushed. More recently, nothing comes close to the Famine. This question of trauma or tragedy or catastrophe is as you say a silly one, and I do think there is something in the MOPE argument touched on by Foster in your victimhood quote. But it’s a disguise for the old nationalist myth. An example from Belfast. Some women from Latin America were over visiting a women’s centre, at which there were represetantives from PSF, The WP and others. The Latin American women were talking about how there husbands were dragged from their homes, and were never seen again, and their bodies never found. The PSF women said that they had had it the same, with the Brits taking their husbands and them never knowing when they were coming back. A WP member pointed out that the women from Belfast (including herself) always knew that their husbands would be coming back from being arrested, so the situations were different. Unconscious revisionism against the MOPE myth, or simply the application of common sense in comparisons?
Finally, and entertainingly for a programme on historians and the importance of facts, the list of historians that you got from RTÉ’s website contains several errors or omissions (At the least, Margaret O’Callaghan’s description is wrong, Foster’s is incomplete as it’s Carroll Professor of Irish History, and I don’t think Brendan Bradshaw was ever a Professor though I may be wrong there). This of course is minor, but it made me laugh. Particularly because the researchers for the programme don’t know how to use the internet properly to find each person’s page on the university where they work – they must have English degrees rather than history.
I should point out that in the bit where I talk about the reasonableness of the application of violence I meant that they reject the idea it was ever a reasonable idea rather than specifically related to the Troubles.
Garibaldy, if and when you see it if you’d like to critique it in a post that would be great… I largely agree with all you say above… However, as regards a dispossessed elite (or petit-b’s to be honest) I don’t believe that people need to have direct lineal connections with a class or faction in a society to have agency on behalf of that faction. And I’ll put money on it that neither do you.
Got to say as well, I’m not entirely entranced by your MOPE anecdote. That might well have been true of WP members although even that’s a dubious proposition, but deaths in custody were not unknown during the Troubles and on a purely emotional level I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to suggest that people (particularly those who weren’t politically fully engaged) might feel a sense of existential threat.
I’m looking forward to watching it. And will try and respond to it in a critique. On the MOPE thing, the woman concerned and her husband were involved in activities from before 1969, and having the house raided was a fairly common occurrence well into the 1970s. I agree that there are emotional similarities, but the number of deaths in custody during the Troubles was very small, and certainly not comparable to the situation in Latin America.
Your point raises important questions. Is it perceptions historians should measure things by, or by what in the old days might have been called ‘objective reality’? This is why I reject the idea that the Famine was an Irish holocaust – the forces at work were entirely different. And I don’t think that the situation of wives in Belfast was the same as in Latin America, whatever the similarity in feelings aroused. But the reason I mentioned it was because of your reference to people on the further left giving credance to revisionism. Complicating the old narrative that posits a seemles link between religion and nationality, and virtually ignores other factors including class, seems to me to be a suitable goal for the left.
I understand what you’re saying about the revisionists not needing direct lineal connections, and agree. There is a deal of truth in what you’re saying in their lamentation for a lost world. I think people like Foster do lament the loss of the cultural world of Ireland before WWI, and Bew’s argument about lost human capital with the supercession of the IPP is more explicit, even if it’s made for different and more political reasons. But I still don’t think that revisionists were acting consciously on behalf of the dispossessed. I think they represented those angry at the insular and conservative nature of southern society – let’s not forget revisionism, as a political as opposed to an historical phenomenon, starts in the 1960s and might well be worth viewing as part of the modernist, technocratic and liberal forces sweeping Europe at the time. The irony being that what created the Ireland they wanted to see was not their intellectual influence, but the economy that is so often ignored in their analyses.
RE: The famine. To describe it as ‘Britain’s genocide in Ireland’ (as a mural I once saw in Andersonstown had it) doesn’t stand up to serious examination. (You could call it a ‘holocaust’, however, so long as you don’t capitalise that noun; the literal meaning of ‘holocaust’ is a ’sacrifice by fire’, and can be an acceptable metaphor for a disaster. ‘Holocaust’ with a capital ‘H’, however, refers specifically to the Judeocide, and anyone who tries to muddy the water on that one is a wrong ‘un).
But that doesn’t let Britain off the hook. IMV, what the famine demonstrated was that the political relationship between the large island and the small island was a fundamentally, and irreparably, a dysfunctional one. And that therefore Wolfe Tone was right, and ‘breaking the connection’ with the large island was a consummation devoutly to be wished.
That being the end of choice, however, you are still left with the problem of means. And that’s a point you can argue. I doubt, however, if you can take the revisionists abhorrence of violence at face value. In the popular, vulgar forms of revisionism at least, there is more than a tendency to give the British empire (a criminal organisation that killed far more people than any Irish insurgency) the easiest of rides.
Revisionism, in the end, aspired to a rational recasting of Irish history, to liberate from the myths of past generation. But its proponents could not break free from their own emotional baggage, and in doing so merely substituted new lies for old.
a consummation devoutly to be wished
Ah, that’s a line about suicide, which is the opposite of what you mean….
there is more than a tendency to give the British empire (a criminal organisation that killed far more people than any Irish insurgency) the easiest of rides.
This is because we have to judge the people involved by the standards of their time and place, and not by our own….
….except when “those people” are the rebels, when suddenly it’s all irrationality, a thirst for violence and a lust for power.
Believe me, it’s not only Irish historiography which suffers from this syndrome.
To describe it as ‘Britain’s genocide in Ireland’ (as a mural I once saw in Andersonstown had it) doesn’t stand up to serious examination.
Listen, I know people who won’t even describe it as a ‘famine’. They insist that to do so lets the Brits off the hook by suggesting that people starved because there was no food in Ireland. I’ve tried pointing out to them that the internationally-accepted political definition of famine encompasses those cases where people were denied the food that could have been available to them – and that if it didn’t, there would be almost no such thing as a ‘real’ famine – but no use. They just refuse to accept the term.
There are folk at the other end of the spectrum who would tell you it was ‘the famine that never was’.
I think I’ve already raised my suspicions about Roy Foster’s account of the famine in his Modern Ireland. . .
Idris,
Have a look at Foster’s review of Paul Bew’s new book here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/fost02_.html
Some comments on the Famine you might find of interest.
Foster’s theme seems to be; Paddies hate each other for silly reasons, all very sad. Brits not to blame.
Garibaldy – comparing that review with what I remember off hand of ‘Modern Ireland’, I’d say Foster has completed the trajectory from enfant terrible to old fart terrible.
And his comments on the famine aren’t terribly insightful. Yes it was a catastrophe, yes it was a political phenomenon, yes the Yankees are silly to still be following John Mitchel’s line on it a century and a half later. But this is all said in an off-hand, throwaway style, and there’s no attempt to connect the dots, or even to consider how it was that it was possible for Mitchel and his ilk to portray the famine as a deliberate genocide.
Idris,
In fairness it was just a review, and so no space for all that. But, and this is why I thought it was worth posting the link, he says that Bew was right to call the chapter the Politics of Hunger because of the British government response as well as the later portrayal of it by Mitchel. That seemed to me to be saying that the British were at fault due to their own political theories – i.e. laissez faire. Once again I don’t have Foster’s Modern Ireland to hand, but that seemed to me to be an important point that I think is also in that book.
I’ll withhold judgement until I can once again consult Dr. Foster’s magnum opus. But until then, I plan to consider him guilty until proven innocent.
‘Vinjince, be jaysus’.
Anyone read that new Richard English book on Irish nationalism? I was looking at Robert Kee’s book on the same subject today and I noticed it was first published in 1972. So if English has managed to bring the story up-to-date, that might be worth taking a look at. . .
MOPE?
Most oppressed people ever?
Most oppressed people on Earth?
SoS,
Most Oppressed People Ever. Not on earth.
Idris,
I have read English’s book. Much of the modern stuff since 1972 was published before in his Armed Struggle. And is lacking almost totally in an analysis on the south.
Famine? Not a genocide – in the sense that it was a clear intention to exterminate the Irish people, but … arguably seen by some within the British elites as a means to an end to pacify Ireland. Laissez-faire economics did the rest… So perhaps something not dissimilar to, if even more pointed than, Baruch Kimmerlings use of the term “politicide”.
Excuse my butting in. I’m a fan of this site but not a contributor. Since you’ve mentioned Richard English’s book, there is a tremendous (and terrifying) review of it by Brendan O’Leary in the Field Day Review 2007, which touches on a lot of the themes you’ve been discussing. You can see it online at:
https://marketplace.nd.edu/fielddaybooks/ images/fdb/downloads/BrendanOLeary.pdf
Anyone have a recording of this programme? I am kicking myself for missing it. Not available online BTW.
Yeah I’ve read that review. Vicious. Although I thought O’Leary could have criticised some stuff he left out. Didn’t realise it was online. Good to know. Thanks for the info.
Thanks Bartholomew. Much appreciate the link.
Anamnua, there might be a way to get you a copy. Email me at the CLR email address above on the righthand side.. @ is the ‘at’. I’ll check the email address over the weekend…
Whats O’Leary’s claim to fame?
O’Leary is now in a prestigious chair at Pennisylvania I think it is. Before that he was at the LSE. He has written many books on NI (often co-authored with McGarry I think). He has since widened out to write on political arrangements in divided state. He is an advisor to the government in Kurdistan, and as such advocates the bill which ‘redistributes’ oil revenue in Iraq by opening the Iraqi oil industry up to foreign ownership.
A cool guy then. And Richard English? Didn’t think much of armed struggle.
Cool indeed. In the apologist for plundering of a country’s resources way. Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s. His early work was on socliast republicanism in the Free State, he wrote a biography of Ernie O’Malley, and he has also edited a collection of essays in honour of the Cruiser. A ‘revisionist’.