Revisionist Scholarship and Modern Irish Politics

Robert Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409451273
• eBook ISBN: 9781317063575
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Almost nowhere are politics and history so intimately bound up as in Ireland. Over the course of several hundred years rival political and religious camps have shaped their identities according to particular interpretations of their shared history. As such, any re-examination and revision of Irish history has the potential to have a very real impact upon wider society. Defining revisionism in historiography as a reaction to contemporary conflict in Ireland, this book looks at how intellectuals, scholars and those who were politically involved, have reacted to a crisis of violence. It explores how they believed that revisionism in historiography was necessary - that a deconstruction, re-evaluation, and revision of ideology and therefore history was crucial in such a crisis of violence. This at times provocative approach seeks to better understand, clarify and de-mystify the ongoing revisionist debate in Ireland, through a critique and exposition of the theory of change and the process and product of change. Perry argues that revisionism should not be seen as solely a neutral form of academic or intellectual discourse, but one that is fundamentally linked to politics at the widest possible level; that revisionist assumptions underpin the validity and legitimacy of partition and the Northern Ireland state; that revisionism is widely judged to be anti-nationalist and pro-unionist; and that it is myopic with regard to the shortcomings of loyalism and unionism and has therefore a related ideological effect, if not intended purpose.

Chapter 1 Revisionism Origin and Controversy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606255-1

Introduction

The purpose of Chapter 1 is to examine the nature of the revisionist controversy in Irish scholarship. My intention is to understand, to clarify and, where appropriate, de-mystify the ongoing revisionist debate in Ireland. The chapter shows the relationship between historiographical revisionism and the contemporary political debate and it attempts to detect any revisionist political agenda. The chapter answers the question: to what extent has the recent war in Northern Ireland influenced Irish historiography? It also shows that there is no all-embracing revisionist school of thought. It argues that there are different types of histories and different types of historians. All bring their concerns and interests and prejudice to the diverse range of subjects that go to make Irish historiography what it is.

Chapter 1 offers a thematic approach to the subject of revisionism, incorporating the concerns contained within revisionism_ academic, theoretical and political. What unifies these sections is an exposition of the nature of the revisionist controversy. It starts with a look at the origin of revisionism; it examines the controversy associated with revisionism within Irish scholarship; it studies the ongoing revisionist debate and considers the views of historians and cultural and/or political commentators; it then looks at the political project most identified with revisionism, namely the removal of Articles 2 and 3 of the 1937 Irish Constitution; it then moves on to survey the perspectives of those from the ‘wider community’ i.e. representatives from the churches, the media and community activists; the chapter concludes with discussion on ‘post revisionism’ within historical scholarship.

What links this chapter to the other chapters in my thesis is an examination of the intellectual climate which was to question the use of violence to obtain political goals, the legitimacy of partition and attitudes towards Ulster unionism. ¹

¹ Material in this chapter has been drawn from an article (see Bibliography) that I had published in The Journal of European Studies (http://www.sagepub.com/journals/); this material has been revised and updated. I am grateful to the editors.

Context

‘In Ireland “history” has been traditionally a battlefield in the contest for cultural and political hegemony’ (Aughey, 2011, 7).

Paul Dixon (2001) asserted that both nationalists and unionists have different interpretations of history that justify their political positions. ‘Contemporary debates over history have political implications, that can imply both guilt and blame. History can be used to emphasise past injustices and patterns of oppression which can be used to legitimize violence to redress these grievances’. Dixon cites Paul Bew, when Bew commented, ‘the difficulty is that many people on “both sides” as a result of the “troubles” have an investment in a highly partisan reading of the history that validates their suffering or indeed suffering they have inflicted on others’ (Dixon, 2001, 18).

Historians have been conscious of the way history has been used in Northern Ireland. With the explosion of the northern conflict in the late 1960s history was used by those involved in the conflict to justify violence. ‘Myths were used by the various parties to the conflict in Northern Ireland in the “propaganda war” to mobilise support and shift the political agenda in their direction’. The ‘imperatives of the propaganda war also override the need for historical accuracy, since distortion can be more politically useful than truth’ (Dixon, 2001, 18). In a similar vein, Arthur Aughey argues that not only historians but also politicians are conscious that history can be used to justify violence, if there is ‘a common theme’ here it is ‘the fear that history will be “hijacked” or “rewritten” to suit malignant agenda or regressive political projects. First Minister Peter Robinson has made the point in Northern Ireland as has the leader of Fianna Fail Michael Martin in the Republic of Ireland’ (Aughey, 2011, 8).

Origin

In recent years ‘revisionism’ in Irish historiography has stimulated much debate and controversy. The study of history by its very nature involves continual reflection on the past, based on (an authentic and) systematic investigation of the widest possible array of sources. However, critics of ‘revisionism’ do not regard it as the act of correcting, improving, updating or re-interpreting from newly available material or sources in an unbiased or objective fashion.

Critics of ‘revisionism’ such as Brendan Bradshaw, Kevin Whelan, Desmond Fennell and Peter Berresford Ellis detect a neo-unionist, anti-nationalist slant, a concern to deny the existence of British imperialism (historical) and an attempt to rehabilitate the role of Britain in Irish history and politics. According to this view, Britain is an honest broker, peace-keeper and referee; and successive British governments faced Irish nationalist intransigence. This historically incorrect view of the Irish and therefore of Irish nationalism, these critics argue, portrays an ungovernable, unreasoned and, above all, violent picture.

The origins of revisionist historiography are to be found in a number of different circumstances:

1. The defeat of the republican forces in the 1922–3 Irish Civil War and the setting up of a state with a political establishment keen to protect its power and offering only a theoretical and rhetorical challenge to unionism.
2. The impact of the reality of partition on politics, culture and intellectual discourse.
3. The end of protectionism in the South. For Sean Lemass this modernisation involved the free trade agreement with Britain in 1965 and membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1972. The death of protectionism indicated that for many the Irish national project with its mission in the world seemed irrelevant.
4. The rapprochement with Northern unionism, beginning in 1965 with the Lemass-O’Neill meeting and leading to an all-party Oireachtas committee voting in 1967 to replace Article 3 of the Irish Constitution. The unionists were no longer to be considered ‘the rock on the road’ as de Valera had put it (Power, 1990, 20). Not one of the five key aspirations de Valera had set himself and Fianna Fail is now on the political agenda (O’Toole, 1995, 7).²
5. A European ideal which was to challenge and transform past conceptions of nationalism, sovereignty and independence.
6. The forwarding of a liberal agenda around such social issues as contraception, divorce, abortion and a greater secularisation of Southern Irish society.
7. The founding of the journal Irish Historical Studies in 1938, a journal which (as one influential writer has stated) ‘took history out of politics’ (Whyte, 1990, 122), and the opening up of the archives in the 1970s in both parts of Ireland and in Britain.
8. The development of north-Atlantic consumer capitalism (as a consequence of the policies of the late 1960s and 1970s) that has tended to erode Irish nationalist cultural values.
9. The explosion of the Northern conflict, a profound political crisis for the Republic of Ireland. To claim the historical validity of the cause of nationalism and Ireland’s fight for independence is also to extend and accept its validity in the part of Ireland still ‘unfree’.
10. The expanding size of the Catholic middle class in the north since 1971, who either vote for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) or the Alliance Party and who are prepared to support the questioning of the nationalist project.
11. The psychological aspect that ‘partition was an open wound that had to be closed – the solution the South chose was to distance itself from the North’ (Ruane and Todd, 1996, 251).
12. The revulsion in the South at the conflict in the North and the fear and expectation (O’Brien, 1994, 28) that the violence and instability will spill over the border, and the keenly felt desire to contain the strife in the Six Counties to the Six Counties.

² These are: 1) a united Ireland; 2) the restoration of the Irish language; 3) the ideal of allowing the Irish people to ‘live a noble and useful Christian life’ (this has little real content in a rapidly secularising society); 4) the family farm living on enough acres to give it a largely self-sufficient lifestyle (that has virtually disappeared); 5) the aspiration to make Ireland a ‘self-sufficient’ economic unit (officially abandoned by Sean Lemass, when out went protectionism).

In summary, all of these points have contributed to the creation of an overall intellectual climate in Ireland involving the gradual erosion or undermining of traditional nationalist assumptions, goals and ideals; this is a process which has been heightened and accelerated in moments of profound political crisis for the Republic of Ireland.

Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd (1996) argued that for the Irish Republic, Partition did bring practical benefits. It meant a society that was ‘virtually homogenous culturally and ideologically’ and that was ‘spared the political and religious rancour’ that characterised the North. It brought a ‘high degree of political stability’ that would not otherwise have been possible (Ruane and Todd, 1996, 251). Ruane and Todd asserted that there was the fear of the conflict spreading South and ‘a belief that the conflict was blocking progress on the island as a whole. There was shame at the image of Ireland being projected internationally. There was a sense of being morally and politically compromised by a conflict which Southerners believed was not of their making’ (Ruane and Todd, 1996, 253). Ruane and Todd outlined Southern government policy on the North:

Its policy had two strands. The first and more important centred on security – to defend its own integrity as a state and the well-being of its own (Southern) citizens. The second was to strengthen constitutional nationalism in the North as an alternative to republicanism by offering it moral and political support and by pressing for reforms. Successive Irish governments hoped for a return to peace and stability. All questions of Irish unity were shelved; the prospect of a possible British withdrawal in 1974 created alarm in a Southern government fearful of attempting to exercise authority over the loyalists who had so recently brought down the power-sharing executive (Ruane and Todd, 1996, 262).

Ruane and Todd noted, however, that ‘Southern attitudes to the North and to Northerners changed dramatically in the wake of the ceasefires … The ceasefires led to a new openness in the South to the North and to Northerners’ (Ruane and Todd, 1996, 254).

John Regan (2007) was to ask the question: to what extent has the recent war in Northern Ireland influenced Irish historiography? Regan in answering his own question responded that examining ‘the nomenclature, periodization, and the use of democracy and state legitimization’ as interpretative tools in the historicisation of the Irish Civil War (1922–3), the ‘influence of a southern nationalist ideology is apparent’. Regan went on to explain that:

A dominating southern nationalist interest represented the revolutionary political elite’s realpolitik after 1920, though its pan-nationalist rhetoric obscured this … Following the northern crisis’s emergence in the late 1960s, the Republic’s Irish governments required a revised public history that could reconcile the state’s violent and revolutionary origins with its counterinsurgency against militarist-republicanism. At the same time many historians adopted constitutional, later democratic, state formation narratives for the south at the expense of historical precision. This facilitated a broader state centred and statist historiography, mirroring the Republic’s desire to re-orientate its nationalism away from irredentism, toward the conscious accommodation of partition (Regan, 2007, 197).

John Regan (2007) expounds further on this ‘democratic state formation narrative’. When it came to challenging republican violence on the grounds of its illegitimacy, however, the problem remained concerning the state’s own origins in an unmandated revolutionary struggle. ‘Easter 1916 and subsequent unmandated republican violence could not be conjured from existence’. As a historian and government minister, Conor Cruise O’Brien sought ‘to solve the old conundrum of the state’s democratic formation and its revolutionary violence’. O’Brien was to argue that the men with whom Lloyd George negotiated in 1921 were all elected representatives and members of a political party with a large majority on the territory on which the state which emerged from negotiations was based … Conor Cruise O’Brien, for Regan, had thus ‘synthesized components of a democratic formation thesis in teleological constructions of the state’s borders and its legitimacy’ (Regan, 2007, 220–21).

Whilst not saying it has been a state policy, it can be argued that revisionism provides for a worried Twenty-Six County political establishment a historical methodology that would remove the national liberation struggle from Irish history. An Phoblacht/Republican News (the Sinn Fein newspaper) has stated that: ‘Southern political reaction to the Troubles was one of surprise at the extent of Northern nationalist disaffection from the Northern state, and of fear that the cosy stability of the 26-County state and its economic regeneration would be threatened by the upheaval across the border’ (MacThomas, 1991, 8–9).

One writer was firmly of the view that the ‘de-bunking’ of nationalism, revolution and native cultural resurgence suits conservatism, both in its ‘backward glance and current circumspection’ (O’Ceallaigh, 1994, 8). The past must be de-radicalised to help prevent radicalisation of the present. Another commentator has suggested that when contemporary writers engage in revisionism, they replicate, at an intellectual level, Michael Collins’ use of British guns to help the Free State army to defeat the republican insurgents in the Four Courts (Kiberd, 1994, 94).

An IRA spokesperson in an interview in 1989 was in no doubt as to the purpose of revisionism_

There are academics and leading media personalities trying to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Revisionism: Origin and Controversy
• 2 Revisionist Marxism
• 3 Revisionist Nationalism
• 4 Revisionist Unionism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index