Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and Memory in Modern Ireland (review)

The sad and untimely death in May 2004 of Larry McBride deprived Irish studies, and in particular modern Irish history, of a productive and popular scholar. His substantial body of individual publications, together with his work as an industrious editor of essay collections and organiser of conferences, will ensure that his reputation will endure as an historian with an impressive command of Irish and Irish-American history. More than that, McBride was an historian who was refreshingly willing to engage new perspectives and methodologies and fresh currents of enquiry, not least currents that conjoined approaches and discourses from several disciplines.

The volume under review is the second collection of essays edited by McBride that addresses the representation of national identity in nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century Ireland. The first volume, Images, Icons and the Irish Nationalist Imagination (1999), concerned a variety of symbols of Irish nationalist identity. This second volume focuses on texts—and the dynamic contexts of their composition, dissemination, and reception—in the construction of Irish nationalist identity during the period of the Union (1801–1922). There are ten essays in the collection that, while not radically groundbreaking, cannot be dismissed as a summary reprise of findings offered by the authors at greater length elsewhere. The arguments advanced are soundly based on conventional historical evidence; a minority also engage theoretical and methodological questions.

The role of educational institutions in the construction and dissemination of written history features in several essays. Within formal educational structures, Colin Barr examines the discussion of history as a subject in university education, with particular reference to the views of the Catholic hierarchy. McBride's own essay provides a wealth of evidence (including valuable statistical evidence) on the teaching and learning of history in Irish schools (elementary and second level) in the period 1870–1922, while alerting the reader to more popular texts, including fiction, through which young Irish readers may have acquired a sense of their past or of key episodes that shaped it. The role of the nineteenth-century reading room, of nationalist newspapers, and of the summer colleges of the Gaelic League in the early twentieth century, in the dissemination of a version of Irish history and identity, are explored in essays by Paul Townend, Anne E. Kane, and Timothy G. McMahon, respectively.

There are a number of predictable issues that arise in the context of these exercises in teaching history to the Irish through the medium of written texts. First, there is the matter of literacy in English. Here, despite some difficulties with self-reporting in the census, the evidence points clearly to a sharp rise in the second half of the nineteenth century in the reported ability of the Irish to read English: the figure in 1841 was forty-seven per cent (of persons over five years of age), but by 1911 it was eighty-eight per cent. Regional variations have implications that need further refinement (though Kane's essay touches on the issue), but newspaper circulation and anecdotal evidence support the general conclusion that by the later nineteenth century there was a strong appetite throughout Ireland for communication through the printed text. The ideological battleground for Irish nationalists, however, was the issue of what history ought to be taught—in the school curriculum or in school texts. Content as well as context was contested. How much of the history taught should be the history of the Irish people, and the particularity of their historical experience? Should the story of the Irish be simply a strand in the larger narrative of the great British Empire and its achievements? These debates, as one can imagine, were freighted with ideological and political assumptions and agendas. For many Irish nationalists, including those who refused to adopt the state-sanctioned curriculum and supported instead an independent network of schools, teaching history to the youth of Ireland should be principally teaching them Irish history, with the...