Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers
dublin |
history and heritage |
other press 
Tuesday May 16, 2006 20:11
by James Mullin - American Chronicle
'the historiography of the Irish counter-revolution.'
The traditional view of Irish history is based on the premise that the Irish people had a moral right to fight for their political, economic, social and cultural independence from Imperialist Britain.
According to Dr. Christine Kinealy,(A New History of Ireland, This Great Calamity, etc.) an opposing view began to emerge in Ireland in the 1930s, when a number of leading Irish Academics, following the lead of earlier British historians, set an agenda for the systematic revision of traditional Irish History, which they claimed was rife with “nationalist myths”. Their declared mission was to replace this so-called mythology with objective, “value-free history”.
In her essay, “Beyond Revisionism”, Dr. Kinealy says that the revisionist movement gained a new prominence in the battle for Irish hearts and minds during the 1960’s when the IRA campaign intensified: “Challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians”.
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Comments (3 of 3)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3some interesting points, which i would agree with. bot pretty superficial on the whole, and a misreading of toibin, who i read as being extremely critical of foster. the bit about 'this was about politics more than anything' is not meant as a compliment.
I think revisionist vipers can be found in all countries.
But every history will always get revised anyway as info and theories arrive.
Historians particulary like challenging dominant dogmatic views.
In a sense, the tide is turning - revisionists are no longer having it all their own way, and their assertions are being effectively and intelligently challenged at every twist and turn. My personal feeling is that revisionists have done a good deal of damage to our psyche as a nation - a bit like telling an abused child it's responsible for what happened to it. Revisionists who argue that English Colonial rule was / is beneficial to Ireland are simply rehashing old colonial ideas about 'civilizing the savages' and the social Darwinism of the 19th century. It is of course as deeply insulting as it is untrue to say we are an inferior race unfit to rule ourselves, but many of the comments about 1916 and the subsequent Irish state made by revisionists are basically trying to say as much. It is most ironic, of course, that revisionists such as Roy Foster should write of a 'nationalist myth', a history harnassed for political ends, while revisonists themselves are the prime example of the same. Their political agenda can easily be spotted for what it is when you consider their opposing treatments of 1916, say, and the Irish in the First World War. Whereas the 1916 leaders are presented as bloodthirsty fanatics, and their victims fleshed out in considerable detail, the First World war Irish are euologised and their victims nameless and faceless. Revisionists are all for constitutional nationalism and peaceful means of achieving political objectives until it comes to Britain's aims. Then it becomes perfectly alright to send hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, to create many more widows and orphans (a frequent charge laid against the 1916 leaders, see for example Kevin Myer's Irishman's Diary last January) in furtherance of a political aim. If constitutional means are so desireable, why did Britain go to war with Germany in 1914? Could they not have prevailed through parley on the Germans to pull out of Belgium? The Belgians could perhaps have held a number of referenda several dozen generations later to gain a limited measure of self-government. Of course, if all this seems to ridiculous to contemplate, it should help clarify Ireland's situation re. Home Rule. The difference is that the Germans did not succeed in hanging on in Belgium (hardly 'poor' or 'little' itself - it had vast colonies in the Congo) whereas the British did so in Ireland.
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