CIAO DATE: 05/02

Between the Living and the Dead: The Politics of Irish History

Bernard Rorke

Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster

1999

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Nationalisms and the ownership of official history
2. The anti-revisionist broadsides
3. "We are all revisionists now"
4. The Great Famine
5. The Easter Rising of 1916

Conclusion

Introduction

The destruction of the past . . . is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.

Eric Hobsbawm's lament at the fin de millennium, in a world he describes as ever more bereft of recognizable landmarks, that has lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis, is that historical memory seems no longer alive. This, he claims, makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential now than ever before. By contrast, in Ireland, where there is no deficit of 'shared practices, common cultures, collective aspirations', it would seem to the casual observer that, to a man and woman, the citizenry is burdened with an excess of historical memory. The perception of this 'burdening' is such that debates between historians, in this gap between the past and the future, carry significances that resonate far beyond the academy. There is nothing novel about such resonances. In 1844, a leader in The Voice of the Nation opined: 'In other countries the past is the neutral ground of the scholar and the antiquary; with us it is the battlefield.' Contemporary commentary on Ireland is replete with novelistic impressions that in Ireland, in the words of Edna O'Brien, '(h)istory is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the subsoil, or snow, or blood. A house remembers. An outhouse remembers. A people ruminate. The tale differs with the teller'. Leon Uris concluded his elaborate fiction Trinity with the assertion that '(i)n Ireland, there is no future, only the past happening over and over'. This perception of Ireland's peculiarity is also harboured by more academic observers. ATQ Stewart would have the reader believe that '(t)o the Irish all history is applied history and the past is simply a convenient quarry which provides ammunition to use against enemies in the present'. Leaving aside the unsustainability of such a generalization about the Irish, whoever they are and wherever they may be, this 'application' of history is hardly unprecedented and such a preoccupation with the past is not peculiarly Irish.

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Endnotes

Note *: Bernard Rorke is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Democracy.Back.