Rebellion and Remembrance in Modern Ireland (review)

A collection of conference papers given during the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland: enough to give any reader familiar with occasion and genre pause. The same old names and topics? The usual shoehorning of unrelated and under-researched papers together under some all-encompassing alliterative title?

Not in this case, I am happy to report. It is very much to the credit of the organizers of the original conference in Cork, the contributors, and the editor that this is an interesting and coherent volume. The majority of the authors deal with the representation of 1798 and the United Irishmen in the subsequent century, with particular reference to Young Ireland and 1848, and the centenary celebrations of 1898. What really draws the essays together, however, is the unusual and judicious attention paid to sectarianism (or ethnicity, although the term is not used) in the event itself and also in nineteenth-century nationalism. Here is a vital topic all too often ignored or politicized in the writing of modern Irish history.

The first essay, by James Donnelly, is the only one to actually tackle the question of sectarian violence in the rising itself. His review of the evidence is offered in respectful answer to Kevin Whelan and Louis Cullen's oft-stated "political" interpretations of the radicalization of Wexford that downplay ethnic fear and hatred. Among other things, Donnelly makes the crucial point that, whatever the original intentions, the insurgents' distinction between loyalists and Protestants in general (and between neutrals and enemies) became fatally blurred once battle commenced. It is a most useful piece, destined to be paired with its targets for many seminar discussions.

Another of Donnelly's sensible observations—that Gaelic/Catholic popular politics typically identified opponents in religious terms—is carried forward in substantial essays by Maura Cronin and Tom Dunne on pre-Famine songs and verse. Cronin's wide survey of pre-Famine stories and ballads (the Chief Secretary's Office alone collected 388 over the century) leads her to conclude that popular memory "stressed the raw cruelty of the rebellion" (122) and even celebrated it in a spirit of bloody vengeance. Dunne's careful reconstruction of the politics of the Irish-speaking poor from similar sources also stresses the hostile perception of the Protestant ascendency as a foreign occupation and the corresponding equation of Irishness and Catholicism. Dunne has much more of great interest to say about the bilingual literary world in which, for example, poets were hired by missionaries to teach the Bible in the 1820s, thereby enabling them to form a key cadre in Daniel O'Connell's emancipation campaign. This he links to a larger argument about the colonial basis of Irish cultural development, which forced the native language to the commodified, subordinate margins.

The Young Ireland movement of the 1840s was, in part, a metropolitan attempt to inculcate a predigested national spirit among the same people. The Young Irelanders were ecumenical, middle class, and reluctant to mention 1798 and its crimes, according to Sean Ryder's study of their writings. In the Spirit of the Nation (1843) collection, for example, only two of 146 songs refer to the rising. When the rising was mentioned, it was usually in terms that de-republicanized and de-sectarianized the participants, casting Wolfe Tone instead as an eighteenth-century patriot. The militant John Mitchel broke with this timidity in 1848, calling his own paper the United Irishman and stressing the revolutionary nature of the event. Robert Mahony argues that Mitchel's radicalism—and his later support for American slavery—derived from the battle his father (a Presbyterian minister) fought against conservative "religious imperialism" (158). That Presbyterian radicalism informed his thinking seems likely, but Mahony doesn't present much actual evidence. Mitchel's followers, as organized into the short-lived Irish Confederation in 1847 to 1848, are the subject of Gary Owens's paper...