Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History

18. Visions and Revisions: Views of Irish History (2001)

Chapter Eighteen Visions and Revisions Views of Irish History () This is a fuller version of an after-dinner speech given at the conference of “Irish Historians in Britain” held at the University of Sussex on – April . Hugh Kearney taught at U.C.D. and at Sussex in the s and s. Our conference, I note, is held under the rubric of “Irish Historians in Britain.” On looking at the program, however, I note that several speakers include a literary dimension to their talks. Clearly we are interpreting Irish history in an interdisciplinary spirit appropriate to Sussex, my alma mater (or one of them). In the year , such an approach has become almost unavoidable. Literary critics, such as Declan Kiberd, Seamus Deane, and Terry Eagleton see “Irish History” as very much their turf and are more than willing to comment upon the misconceptions of historians. In my view we should welcome such commentaries in the hope that we will learn from them. In my own university career I have welcomed opportunities to work with literary critics in running joint seminars, including one with Denis Donoghue in . When I first came to University College, Dublin, in , Irish historians took as their model the value-free “scientific” approach of the Institute of Historical Research in London and hence kept literature at arms’ length. Robin Dudley Edwards and Theo Moody, both graduates of the Institute, founded Irish Historical Studies in  with this aim in mind. Once praised as the founders of modern Irish historiography, they have since 290 come under criticism for constructing a bloodless model for Irish history lacking any tragic sense. In assessing their achievement, however, it is necessary to contextualize the intellectual environment in which they found themselves. They saw their role as creating conditions in which a relatively detached Irish history, acceptable north and south of the border, might be produced. In the south, the Catholic Church was a powerful force. University College, Dublin, though in principle a secular institution, had a clerical presence in certain key departments such as ethics, politics, philosophy, and psychology, where appointments were made with the advice of John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin. Clerical students from the diocesan seminary at Clontarf and the seminary of the Holy Ghost Fathers at Kimmage, together with the nuns drawn from several religious orders, formed a conspicuous section of the student body. Apart from The Bell there was no secular publication other than Irish Historical Studies. Thus, in my view, Edwards and Moody did remarkably well to maintain what they saw as a critical approach to an entrenched establishment view. Thus, under their auspices Fr. Paul Walshe produced a reassessment of Luaigh O Clerigh’s Life of Hugh Roe O’Donnell. Three decades later this would have been termed “revisionist.” Nor were they entirely without thoughts about the historian’s craft. At the Irish Conference of Historians in  Michael Oakeshott, at that time external examiner to the N.U.I., read a paper entitled “The Activity of being a Historian,” in which he argued the case for studying the past for its own sake without consideration of its contemporary, “practical” implications . In language which seems today extraordinarily “sexist,” he declared that the world in general wishes only to learn from the past: It deals with the past as with a man expecting it to talk sense and to have something apposite to say. But for “the historian” for whom the past is dead and irreproachable the past is feminine. He loves it as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense. (At this point Fr. John Ryan S.J., professor of early Irish history, walked out.) Oakeshott’s words were somewhat oracular, but Moody and Edwards may well have felt that he sympathized with the aims of Irish Historical Studies. The dangers of a “practical” approach to history was all too clear to them. What the political establishment viewed as the role of history was set out in Notes for Teachers: History, issued in  by Tom Derrig, minister for education in the newly arrived De Valera government. Teachers Visions and Revisions: Views of Irish History 291 were warned that “Irish history has been much distorted by those who wrote from the enemy’s standpoint.” In a seminal passage the Notes stated: The history of Ireland is the history of the various peoples who inhabited Ireland ever since the first...