Trials of Irish History

Genesis and Evolution of a Reappraisal

Evi Gkotzaridis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134331970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bringing her original insights into theory and philosophy to bear upon the controversial question of revision in Irish history, Evi Gkotzaridis presents the first historical and theoretical examination of the trailblazer historians who, from 1938, spearheaded an unpoliticized Irish history.

Drawing on hitherto unused archives, Trials of Irish History shows how the venture to disenthrall Irish and European history from official propagandas proved stimulating and challenging, but perilous.

Providing a new and stimulating conceptual framework for the study of Irish historiography, the book combines a theoretical approach with close analysis of important case studies and includes:

* an incisive restaging of the passionate joust that took place between revisionists and traditionalists in the shadow of the Troubles
* examination of the cultural contradiction of the first decades of independence, the estrangement of two regimes and the devastation of the Second World War
* comparison of the Irish Kulturkampf to similar discussions in German and France in order to identify and examine the arguments propounded on each side.

Prising open conflicting intellectual notions about the function of history in a divided society, this will be an informative and stimulating addition to the study of Irish history.

Part I
History and theory in the Irish debate

Foes or allies?

1 The intellectual mood in the 1990s

In a tribute to T.W. Moody, F.S.L. Lyons declared: “Of late years the phrase ‘the historiographical revolution’ has been used so often that it is in danger of becoming a cliché to which everyone subscribes, but which nobody pauses to analyse”.¹ For a long time, especially outside academia, when one dared to speak favourably of revisionism the vision of sitting on an automatic seat waiting for one’s imminent rejection from an entire community came frightfully into view. One may be forgiven therefore for having trepidations at the thought of pondering in earnest the implications of such a vexatious topic.

For two decades, it was impossible to raise the question of its origins and objective meaning without being embroiled in the sterile debate over England’s wrongdoing in Ireland. Those righteous patriots who wanted no truck with the tendentious hermeneutics of revisionism imposed on all what ought to be defined as the acceptable terms of the discussion. Everyone was summoned to display at once his colours, to take sides in the ancient quarrel between England, the ruthless oppressor and Ireland, this small nation that showed remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in its struggle for survival and freedom. The positions were presented in a deceptively simple manner and whoever dithered or straddled this intellectual fence was deemed to be at best cowardly or at worst a mind harbouring renegade tendencies. Revisionists were the henchmen of imperialist Britain and the revisionist school of history was merely an appendage to the reactionary ideologies of colonialism and unionism. Soon, revisionism became a word of defamation against those who spoke with casualness and disrespect of the national heroes. All those sceptical voices who perversely relished acting the devil’s advocate became the victims of a witch-hunt instigated by those whose Irishness felt offended by their declarations. Others dismissed it as an irrelevant relic, a pathetic time bomb, a belated reaction from the descendants of a deposed elite against the men who were propelled to the reins of power only two years after the 1916 Rising.²

Carried on in this moralizing way, not only the controversy poisoned the atmosphere by creating hostility and rigidifying disciplinary boundaries, but more tragically perhaps it aborted discussion on the sort of critical and methodological practice that this school stood for. All dignified efforts to ascertain what were its strengths and weaknesses were relentlessly swallowed up by the obsessive question of its ideology. Because the other side fore-grounded only the political repercussions of this new outlook and rushed to revile it on grounds of ethical slackness, many historians withdrew into a defensive corner and simply refused to be more openly reflective and dialogic. Compelled to respond to attacks that couched the issues in a dualistic manner and bordered sometimes on the personal, they had no time to think about their method, the theoretical intimations or even the ethical concerns that had guided them in their reform. Instead as Boyce and O’Day suggested it, the polemic had the effect of “inviting them to take refuge in their own primordial loyalties – perhaps even threatening them if they did not take refuge”.³

However, this politicization of the debate concealed the fact that Irish revisionism was not a phenomenon unique to the culture of Ireland but just one local expression of a larger reappraisal. Indeed there is little distinctively Irish about revision. French revisionists following the path-breaking work of the American Robert Paxton have destroyed the Gaullist myth of France’s universal resistance to Germany and disclosed the extent of collaboration with the enemy.⁴ Similarly the 1980s saw in Germany the explosion of a tempestuous quarrel opposing historians to philosophers over how to con-textualize, analyse and make sense of the Holocaust. In Greece, the notion of a pure race going back in a straight line to the Golden Age of Classical and Hellenic Byzantium and presenting all Greeks as direct descendants of Alexander the Great has been shown for what it was; a myth invented by a State anxious to establish its authority over a multi-ethnic people. Perhaps the most sensitive revision happening nowadays in Greek history is that on the Civil War. Stathis Kalyvas and Nikos Marantzidis have questioned the most axiomatic and hegemonic assumption of the Left; mainly that the latter was the main, if not the only, victim of violence.⁵ An assumption which could gain credence because the Left had lost in the Civil War and suffered heavy persecution in the aftermath but also because references to Left-wing terror were often dismissed as an appalling lie cooked up by the Greek Right. In Italy Luisa Passerini and Patricia Dogliani have challenged the alleged Marxist dominance over Italian culture in the post-war years and revealed how the artificially repackaged memory of the Italian Resistance failed sometimes to disguise that the Italian nation was too convulsed by a Civil War.⁶ In Spain, Stanley G. Payne, by looking dispassionately at the spectacle of the irresponsibility of revolutionary obsession, has revived, in a most problematic fashion, the Right’s accusation that the Civil War began not with the rising of the Nationalist Generals in July 1936, but with the armed revolt of the Left in October 1934.⁷ The case of Israel where Avi Shlaim⁸ and Benny Morris⁹ have shown how selective, varnished and self-serving was the Zionist version of the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 may yet offer the most compelling comparison with Ireland as the “new historians” in both countries had to wrestle with the not negligible problem that the actual political conflicts raging in their midst – the Northern Irish Troubles and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – could only prejudice their “objectivity” and bolster accusations that their project was ideologically purposive.

Furthermore, it is the firm belief of this author that in order to uncover the real impetus behind this revisitation, it is indispensable to locate it in the context of the paradigmatic shift, which occurred inside European political imagination. For the question of what are the origins of Irish revisionism cannot be answered wisely unless one is also prepared to examine its method against the backdrop of Enlightenment philosophy and its refutation with postmodern theories. Although there is little evidence to show that Irish revisionists were acquainted with continental thinkers such as Foucault, Barthes, Lyotard or Derrida, the morphological relationship of their conjectures to concurrent developments in European thought is hard to ignore. Their anxieties about finding an epistemology that could decontaminate and unlock a “superior” or more lasting “truth” about the past was more than just a coincidence.

Theirs was also a local manifestation of the anxieties of the postmodern age, a result of a complex set of circumstances that had affected other countries in parallel ways. This interlocking between postmodern theory and Irish revisionism does not however arise out of a rush for uniformity with the Continent, but rather by the premonition of a spontaneous harmony between the sort of issues treated by late twentieth century theory and those raised by the sequels of a local conflict-ridden past. Undoubtedly those who are most likely to dismiss the connection between postmodernism and revisionism are also those who are not comfortable with the proposition that history can benefit from philosophy. But the chances are this idea will also meet the resistance of those who in a sermonizing tone rush to declare history’s method terminally backward and condemned to repeat the partiality embedded in the documents it sieves. Hayden White wrote: “Historians have systematically built into the notion of their discipline hostility or at least a blindness to theory and the kind of issues that philosophers have raised about the kind of knowledge they have produced”.¹⁰ If this is so it may be because the majority in the English-speaking world, and especially those in Ireland, were and very much still are self-proclaimed empirical experts who view theorizing as a diversion from their real work, which consists of interrogating primary sources. To conclude however that the new school of Irish history was conceitedly indifferent to philosophy would be inaccurate as Michael Oakeshott, Herbert Butterfield and William Henry Walsh were all invited to expound their philosophy of history at the meetings of the Irish Historical Society.

Two major intellectual currents may have inspired historical reform in Ireland, but when one looks closely at these, one realizes that they are themselves closely interrelated. It is usually assumed that history in England, rooted as it was in a strong empirical tradition, managed for this reason to shelter itself from continental philosophical scepticism and to become only superficially affected by the apprehension of a crisis in historicism. But this is not exactly borne out by a close look at the evolution of historical reflection there. Indeed what was the attack of the Cambridge scholar Sir Herbert Butterfield on the Whig interpretation of history if not the symptom of a profound disagreement with the Whig historians mirroring at a local level the European loss of faith in Hegelian historicism? Ronald Hutton drew attention to the affinity between Marxist revisionism and Butterfield’s contention with the Whigs when he said that both were examples of a reaction against a historiography too much organized around teleological assumptions.¹¹

The argument of this book does not rest on some rigid hierarchy wherein theory is regarded as superior and history as inferior. Besides, in the context of Ireland it would be absurd to suggest the primacy of theory, since the first wave of historical revision predates the theoretical revolution that really began in the late 1960s on the continent. If anything, the opposite would seem to be nearer to the truth. As we hope to show in this study, theory underwent a profound conversion to a historical cast of mind in the second half of the twentieth century. Postmodernism’s retreat from totalizing theories could be attractive to historians because it confirms that they had been right all along, that their dominant practice of emphasizing the peculiarities, the ambiguity and untidiness of the past and displaying a measure of modesty about the possibility of any durable prognosis or judgement on the whole had been qualities too hastily denigrated by theoreticians. The polysemous and Siamese quality of political concepts enshrined in the theory is no revelation for the historian whose empirical observations often give him a heightened sense of the exceptionally dynamic and interactive aspects of human thought and action across time and space.

Rather local historical factors, for instance the existence of a strong tradition of political violence that had more than once jeopardized the infant state, the frustrating persistence of partition, the failure to revive the Irish language or the disappointing record of the isolationist economic policies of Fianna Fáil up to the 1950s, were reasons strong enough to cause an “Irish” introspection. What occurred, therefore, was no crude borrowing, but rather a natural congruence in intuition and in the common decision to stop genuflecting or, as François Furet put it, “commemorating the past”.

The adoption of an interdisciplinary approach is vital to our demonstration. With this method we hope to replace an impressionistic opinion of revisionism with a more cogent one. Revisionism has found itself at the crossroads between positivism and relativism. This straddling of two epochs is very important to remember because it has given Irish revisionism its unique profile. In truth this epistemological entanglement has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it deterred this school from venturing into a culde-sac by espousing the last principle of post-structuralism. For even though it enjoyed its own special brand of heuristic radicalism, it managed to avoid the nihilistic trap in which the extreme version of post-structuralism foundered. On the other hand, it invited charges of philosophical innocence or even, and this proved more harming, of bad faith and collaboration with hostile ideologies.

Comparing Irish revisionism with postmodern theory is just one possible approach. One which in historical terms makes of course little sense since Moody and Edwards embarked on their project of demythologization in the late 1930s long before the French gurus of the postmodern school thought of submitting Western philosophy to the same critical dissection. So our interest in entertaining this hypothesis is less historical than analytical. It is founded on the argument that Irish historiography, because of a primeval rift in the entrails of Irish society, had been stupendously precocious in divining the serious obstacle created by the intrusion of power in knowledge. Conditions unique to the trajectory of this nation, as the treacherous closeness between history and politics and the profound dissensions among Irish people, precipitated a crisis. The loss of faith in historicism, in the capacity of history to elucidate and explain human truths, let alone providing solutions to the problems of the community of which it reflected the destiny, the hope and the predicament, was experienced prematurely in Ireland. There is no doubt that revisionism in its journalistic form sprang from feelings of outrage and disgust at the terrible actions of the IRA. It was a visceral reaction against them and what the IRA presumably stood for. This journalism, concerned with the urgency of hammering into the heads of the Irish public the dangers in condoning this violence, has not always displayed the much-needed qualities of good judgement and moderation. In its condemnation of Irish republicanism it has wrongly collapsed into an anti-totalitarian and reductionist turn of mind, the main failing of which was that it hastily emptied Irish nationalism of any legitimacy.

There is also no doubt that this journalism has drawn some inspiration from a scholarly revisionism, which overall was more nuanced, sober and restrained and more meaningfully perhaps preceded the outbreak of the conflict. Indeed, there is no causal link between the conflict and the historiographic revolution. The work of rectification had been a reality of the Irish historical profession for nearly thirty years before the political commotion began. That this revision too ended up being coloured by the events is almost certain, but the fact remains that the forensic re-examination of the Easter Rebellion for instance, started well before the reappearance of violence in the streets of Derry and Belfast. Often upheaval becomes a distorting prism and one forgets that other factors internal to the evolution of the Republic facilitated historical re-evaluation. In 1965, Ireland signed an agreement of free trade with Great Britain. In 1973, it played a leading role in the organization of the United Nations by refusing to bow to the authority of the American administration and abide by its dictates. It also became a member of the European Community. By obtaining an international platform, the nation gained a self-confidence which no cult of a heroic past, no matter how consoling, could inspire. These developments were indubitable signs that national sovereignty had been proved and historians felt that it no longer needed its traditional apologists.¹²

The country was showing its abilities and its unique identity was asserting itself day after day inside a powerful structure. With its membership of the European Union, the appeal of absolute sovereignty diminished and naturally presaged the future obsolescence of a large part of the nationalist rhetoric.¹³ At the seventy-fifth Annual Dinner of the Scots-Irish society at Pittsburgh on Friday 27 April 1962, R.D. Edwards explained that independence had been tantamount to creating the conditions for the birth in Ireland of a real scientific history. The tasting of this independence was a prerequisite for the blossoming of intellectual freedom.¹⁴ In the concept of Europe, Ireland found also the prototype model for the resolution of a nationalist conflict and its adherence became not purely economical but intellectual and, it needs to be said, also ideological. Its parochial outlook softened and an increasingly pragmatic style of politics blossomed. By then, the country had also espoused the European challenge at its own level. Like its European neighbours, it sought to strike a balance between the local and the global, or between regionalism and European cosmopolitanism.

Finally the opening of new archives accelerated the pace of historical revision. But above all, this reform reflected the situation of a discipline undergoing a process of professionalism by aligning its method on the European model. Michael Laffan said as much. By looking at the past with a critical eye, by putting emphasis on complexity and ambivalence, Irish historians had simply applied the same techniques, which were deemed self-evident by their European counterparts.¹⁵ But if the revision of Irish history proceeded for a long period unobtrusively and remained the affair of professional historians, the situation in the 1970s and 1980s was to change dramatically as the crisis in Northern Ireland escalated and political revisionism embodied itself officially for the first time with the sustained series of discussions that took place under the umbrella of the Forum for a New Ireland. It is then when serious calls were made for the need to reappraise unionism and nationalism with at once the same level of respect and realism that the word revisionism acquired, in the words of Ciaran Brady, a new political valence in popular usage.¹⁶

2 The Revisionist

A new type of intellectual

Ireland, like other European countries, had eventually to wake up to its postmodern condition. The singularity of the Irish historical case has challenged more than one Utopian narrative. The hopes of unionism of creating an Ireland fully integrated with England and playing a vanguard political and economic role in the strengthening of the British Empire were dashed by the disruptive initiatives of an ever more...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I History and theory in the Irish debate: foes or allies?
• PART II The genesis of modern historical scholarship in Ireland
• PART III The Great Famine: the crisis of representation and the limits of empirical history
• PART IV Master narratives: discarding of historical thinking?
• PART V Tensions between theoretical intuition and empirical reflex
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index