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“Varieties of Irishness”: Historical Revisionism, Irish Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Nancy J. Curtin
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In an 1989 article in Irish Historical Studies, Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions.

Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 2: Revisionisms , April 1996 , pp. 195 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1996

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References

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9 Bradshaw's assertion that the revisionists claim such objectivity is wildly exaggerated. As one of the premier scholars associated with revisionism has written, “No historian, I would maintain, can be completely and thoroughly objective. In this sense, we are not only all prisoners of our history, but also of our individual biographies” (Lyons, F. S. L., “The Dilemma of the Irish Contemporary Historian,” Hermathena 115 [Summer 1973]: 49Google Scholar). It is reliance on the empirical method, which Bradshaw does not disavow, which is designed to contain the natural subjectivity of the historian.

10 Bradshaw (n. 1 above), p. 337.

11 Ibid., p. 338.

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22 I wish to offer my thanks to James S. Donnelly, Jr., for providing me with a tape of the panel on revisionism at the ACIS conference (University of Wisconsin—Madison, April 1991) in which Bradshaw presented these views.

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34 Bradshaw, p. 338.

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42 The historiographical revolution of the 1930s has tended to slight the eighteenth century as a whole, and its impact was felt in the realm of political history, which it has modified and filled out but has not profoundly challenged: Lecky, W. E. H., A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols. (London, 1898)Google Scholar. Neglect of the first half of the century, indeed, the first eight decades, is being redressed by the work of David Hayton, Thomas Bartlett, and others. See, e.g., Bartlett, Thomas and Hayton, David, eds., Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1900 (Belfast, 1979)Google Scholar. Louis Cullen has successfully revised interpretations of economic and social history by George O'Brien and K. H. Connell, and in this enterprise he has been ably supported by a younger generation of scholars. See, e.g., Cullen, L. M., An Economic History of Ireland since 1600 (London, 1976)Google Scholar, and The Emergence of Modern Ireland (London, 1981)Google Scholar. James Donnelly has led the way in examining closely agrarian secret societies and presenting them in the context of traditional yet rational responses to the erosion of the moral economy. See, e.g., Donnelly, J. S. Jr., “The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–5,” Irish Historical Studies 21 (March 1978): 20–45Google Scholar.

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51 Ibid., p. 13. In sharp contrast to O'Brien's work is a recent book exploring the interaction of public opinion and elite political behavior in the 1780s: Kelly, James, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992)Google Scholar

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64 Foster, , Modern Ireland (n. 7 above), p. 3Google Scholar.

65 See, e.g., Brown, Ireland.

66 To quote from an extreme postmodernist critic, Sande Cohen in Historical Culture, “Critical thinking is not possible when connected to academic historical thinking” (p. 2); liberal and marxist history arises “from the ill-conceived act of trying to make ‘history’ relevant to critical thinking. What actually occurs by means of ‘historical thought’ is the destruction of a fully semanticized present” (p. 1); history must be “radically severed from the past“; “‘history’ can only project the simulation of the remembered.” It is random and arbitrary, manipulated and abusive, “an alibi” of last resort to substitute for critical thinking (p. 329).

67 Whelan, , “Revisionists,” p. 26Google Scholar.

68 Foster, R. F., ed., The Oxford History of Ireland (Oxford, 1992), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

69 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 8Google Scholar. She goes on to justify this astonishing statement by asserting simply that the country was more Catholic than Protestant, thus eliding the fact that it was run by Protestants demanding an increasing share of imperial privileges, equally if not more responsive to threats from Catholic France, and which offered not only its young men in military service in greater proportion than other countries in the British Isles (Tom Bartlett estimates that one in six Irishmen saw some military service, a ratio he regards as an underestimate, with 200,000 Catholic soldiers alone serving in the military in the 1790s [Bartlett, , Fall and Rise (n. 46 above), p. 323Google Scholar]), but which also produced one of the most prominent spokesman for Britishness and empire, the very self-consciously Irish Edmund Burke. And in a study that extends almost four decades into the union of Great Britain and Ireland, she misses the opportunity to show how significant numbers of Irish Protestants and even Catholics came to jealously guard their British identity.

70 Gray, Peter, “Interview with Roy Foster,” History Ireland 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 12Google Scholar.

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72 See, e.g., Lynn Hunt's foreword to Ragan, Bryant T. Jr., and Williams, Elizabeth A., eds., Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992)Google Scholar, as well as the “introduction” by the editors for a review of French revolutionary scholarship and the new directions it is assuming.

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