Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History

11. The Irish and Their History (1994)

Chapter Eleven The Irish and Their History () In  John Millington Synge met with bitter criticism from the Gaelic League for his alleged insults to Irish womanhood in The Playboy of the Western World. In  Sean O’Casey ran into similar trouble in Dublin and New York for certain scenes in The Plough and the Stars. Both playwrights are now regarded as leading luminaries of the Irish literary renaissance . During their lifetime, however, their work seemed to touch a sensitive nerve in Irish nationalist circles, much as Caradoc Evans offended Welsh nonconformity during the same period. Something of a similar sort seems to have occurred, though no doubt on a less elevated literary level, when historians from University College, Dublin lectured in London in the late s. At one session, on “the Flight of the Earls,” a member of the audience is said to have protested against the revisionist tone of the lecture by calling out, “For God’s sake leave us our heroes.” Another speaker was denounced in The Irish Post as a West Briton. What the native-born scholars regarded as legitimate historical criticism seemed to London-based Irish exiles to be misleading and offensive .1 Within Ireland itself a clash between nationalist and revisionist interpretations of Irish history is also in full swing. Something of the same kind may also be discerned in the United States, where Kevin O’Neill recently criticized Roy Foster’s study of Irish history for being anglocentric . It would be surprising if Irish communities in Britain remained immune from such tensions. In recent years, revisionism, in the sense of a critical approach toward received orthodoxy, has been in the ascendant in Irish academic circles. The latest revisionist piece, Professor J. J. Lee’s disenchanted look at Irish life in his successful book Ireland –, Politics and Society (), 203 seems to have touched a chord in the Irish public at large. As nationalist rhetoric turned sour and the early hopes of Sinn Féin failed to materialize, a certain skepticism among historians seemed appropriate. Nationalist history in the style of Mary Hayden, Dorothy McArdle, and P. S. O’Hegarty no longer was acceptable. However, there are now signs of a reaction against what was becoming revisionist orthodoxy. Such controversy in historiography as in other matters , may be seen as a sign of health. In English history, the social interpretation of the English Revolution has been subjected to severe criticism by Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Jonathan Clark. Among Irish historians, a champion of nationalism against revisionism has now made an appearance in the person of Dr. Brendan Bradshaw, Limerick-born, but now a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. In a recent article, “Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland” (Irish Historical Studies, November ), Bradshaw took to task the revisionist school of Irish historians . He described them as having introduced a “corrosive cynicism” into Irish historiography. In his eyes, even the critical methods introduced by T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards in the s and hitherto much praised, served to inhibit rather than enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience. Bradshaw resents especially the way in which the revisionists reject “the controlling conception of nationalist historiography , the notion of a ‘nationalist past’ of Irish history as the story of an Irish nation unfolding historically through the centuries from the settlement of the aboriginal Celts to the emergence of the national polity of modern times.” Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Bradshaw’s antirevisionist critique is his use of Herbert Butterfield’s argument that the English Whig interpretation, despite its being a historical myth, provided “a beneficient legacy” which enabled the English to avoid the horrors of revolutionary change on the French model. Echoing Butterfield’s phraseology, Bradshaw asks the question, “Is the received [the nationalist] version of Irish history a beneficient legacy—its wrongness notwithstanding—which the revisionists with the zeal of academic puritans are seeking to drive out?” His answer is in the affirmative. For Bradshaw the function of the Irish historian is to enable “a progressively more heterogeneous national community to appropriate the rich heritage of the aboriginal Celtic civilization.” These are disturbing words coming from an academic historian and not less so for appealing to the authority of Butterfield. The voice may be the voice of Herbert but the hands are the hands of Machiavelli. Bradshaw 204 The Irish and Their History in effect is stating that the...