The Fight for Irish History

A post from our contributor Garibaldy….

As every good lefty knows, the cold, dead hand of history weighs heavily on the living generations. And that has certainly been the case in Irish history, as the recent Hidden History programme set out to explore. If a sense of history has been a key factor in Irish identity, second perhaps only to religion, then it should be no surprise that in an era that has seen the reshaping of Irish identity, by a range of economic, social and political forces, that the interpretation of Irish history has been hugely controversial. The Republic of the Celtic Tiger requires a new narrative, one of achievement, of verve, of success, of progress – in short, of triumph. The worries about the Vanishing Irish of the 1950s, of emigration, of the grinding poverty of the majority of the population have been forgotten. They are the past – in the words of the old cliché, a foreign country. The emergence of a new historiography telling a newly confident society what it wants to hear is inevitable, and the shoots of this historiographical revolution sprouted in the writing surrounding the commemorations of the 1990s. Controversy would inevitably follow, most noticeably with the publication of Tom Dunne’s Rebellions, which denounced the 1798 commemorations. While economics lies at the heart of the transformation of Irish people’s sense of themselves, the Troubles had already produced a comprehensive questioning of the old verities among the Irish political and intellectual classes – the dreaded Revisionism.

However, revisionism (with a small ‘r’ to use Brendan Bradshaw’s distinction) had deeper roots stemming from the way history in Ireland has been written since the 1930s, when Robin Dudley Edwards and Theodore W. Moody – influenced by time spent at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research – and others set up Irish Historical Studies. The aim of the new journal was to professionalize the writing of Irish history – in other words to ensure that arguments would be based on archival evidence and to remove the political passions and myths from the realms of academic history. The approach quickly spread throughout the island’s universities, and all subsequent history undergraduates have benefited or suffered as a result. One product of the new approach was the submission in 1966 to the Jesuit journal Studies of an article by Father Francis Shaw on ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’. The piece was rejected for fear of provoking uproar during the 50th anniversary of 1916. Eventually published in Studies in 1972, it is sometimes regarded as the first example of Revisionism. In fact, this point was made in Hidden History, but without reference to the fact it had first been written in 1966. Revisionism’s roots therefore lie not in the Troubles but in the failures of the Irish state to deliver on the promise of 1916.

Undoubtedly, it was nevertheless the Troubles that made Revisionism a major factor in Irish culture and politics. As Irish historians collectively recoiled in horror from the violence of the north, they set about rethinking how they wrote history, desperately seeking to avoid giving credence or succour to terrorism (the idea that propaganda needed and received a riposte from the academy expressed in the programme). Historic uses of violence in particular came under close scrutiny, and new virtues were found in figures like Redmond. Again, Tom Dunne’s book is the most revealing insight into this process. By 1983, Roy Foster could triumphantly declare ‘We are all revisionists now’. In 1989, Brendan Bradshaw published his ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, which mounted an attack on supposedly value-free history, ironically in Irish Historical Studies. Effectively, Bradshaw argued that history served a social function in bonding society together, especially in a country like Ireland with its history of conquest, colonization, and conflict. Bradshaw consciously echoed of the debate over the Whig version of history that had allowed the British to feel so smug about their parliamentary government in the 19th century by convincing them they were the most liberal and advanced nation of earth. In a telling phrase, he defended the traditional version of Irish history, “its wrongness notwithstanding”.

This argument was the background to Hidden History, which brought together many of Ireland’s leading historians. It was referred to, but never really brought out fully. The programme mixed some questions of the type liable to cause arguments in the pub, like the most overrated and underrated events in Irish history (alright, in a very nerdy pub anyway) with more academic issues like the basic principles that should guide a historian. For anyone familiar with the newspaper columns of Ronan Fanning, his absolute rigid adherence to the theory of writing history in a cold unemotional way may have seemed surprising. A historian does not have to write propaganda to be influenced by his own beliefs, and while historians may like believe to they work in a value-free zone, the reality is very different. Very many historians, including some of those on the programme, are thoroughbred political animals, and it is not intellectually honest to pretend otherwise. John A. Murphy’s point that an historian needed the imagination to emphasise with the mindsets of the people he studied seems much more realistic, and more useful than the illusion of objectivity.

One of the failures of Revisionism has been that it has undoubtedly created a gulf between the mindsets of historians and the people they have studied regarding violence, nationalism, and (and this is due to secularism rather than Revisionism) religion. This failure to understand the mentality of previous generations, added to the application of ahistorical, 20th and 21st century values, has poisoned our understanding of many areas of Irish history, especially in the 20th century. The participants in 1916 or 1919-23 are denounced as blood-crazed, undemocratic, solipsistic, fascists, while the formation of the UVF and events in the north are ignored. The cooperation of elements of republicanism with Germany is decried while the Blueshirts are exonerated from being fascists, and the widespread support for Germany and anti-semitism within both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are ignored. The list could go on. The Troubles unbalanced the writing of Irish history, and we have not yet found a satisfactory corrective approach.

This was the aim of the post-revisionists who emerged in the early 1990s, and who were backed by the Irish government. The key figures here are Bertie Ahern, who has openly criticized revisionists, Martin Mansergh, and Kevin Whelan. Again, the north is key. The 1990s saw the 150th anniversary of the Famine, and more importantly for historiography, the commemorations of the events of the 1790s which were noticeable primarily by their absence from the Hidden History programme. Firstly, no-one mentioned 1798 as either over or underrated – the one time when Protestants acted in pursuit of national independence – nor was the sustained argument over the packaging of history to suit the government’s political agenda in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement mentioned. Although the programme was clearly short on time, making the absence of economic and social history understandable, there is little excuse for ignoring the emergence of a new school of history specifically aimed at the post-revisionists, and openly sponsored by the government. There is a major challenge here to the value-free Irish Historical Studies tradition (Moody would never have declared himself a croppy historian in the way Whelan did). Is this challenge old nationalist wine in new postcolonial bottles, or does it represent something else? What of the embracing of the 1916 celebrations last year by the public? These are major issues for the Irish state, culture and society, and they were regrettably absent.

Brendan Bradshaw stood out as different from the rest. He clearly retains the feeling of membership of an historic Irish nation that the others lack. Where Roy Foster and Ciarán Brady displayed an inherent skepticism about the room at the Shelbourne where the Free State constitution was crafted, Bradshaw felt at home because of the amount of history and politics discussed there. Although others like Bew felt a sense of history, only Bradshaw felt connected to the room and what had happened there. And in fact it is exactly this sense of connectedness, of being part of a state with a continuous political history, that the New Labour government is trying to foster among British schoolchildren. In an Ireland with mass immigration, the creation of a communal, civic identity is also of increasing importance. It could be that while the past belongs to the Revisionists, the future belongs to Bradshaw.