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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