I've seen people I once
respected traipse off into forests in the dead of night to keep themselves
limber for a war that would never happen or carrying semtex to blow the bejaysus
out of people they've never met for a cause they seldom understood. Tutored in
the paths of righteous 'genuine' Irish nationalism by head-the-balls who didn't
know their arse from their elbow. The 'conflict' became a sickening wastage of
human life whose plug should have been pulled long before. It's no consolation
to many that it has been the radical fringe of both sides which have clambered
to power. No-one stirred more mischief than Paisley in his time or created more
bigotry and hatred and the Provisionals have earned themselves the eternal
enmity of their many victims; many of whom were simply innocent bystanders with
no connection whatever to the British statelet or it's apparatus of
power.
The North blew out a collective wheeze long ago and most of it's people are just sick of it; some of them I know could care less about identity as long as they don't have to turn on the news everyday and hear about another mindless act of carnage. There is a power-sharing executive in place for the North which has been meeting fitfully over the past decade and a half. The two ''radical' wings of Unionism and Republicanism (the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively) have been elected as the major representative parties and contrary to many dire prognostications at the time have managed to form a working alliance; Ian Paisley & Martin McGuinness (former First Minister and Deputy First Minister) were even christened the 'chuckle brothers' recently such was the new found bonhomie that apparently existed between them.
This strong relationship seems to have continued with Paisley's successor Peter Robinson and apart from the inevitable disagreements over policy the consensus cross-community opinion is that the violence of the past should be consigned for evermore to the history books. Former IRA man McGuinness has called recent attempted car-bombings and shootings by splinter republican paramilitaries as the work of 'conflict junkies' - which of course it is. The conditions that prevail today are light years removed from the civil rights era and the days of the B-Specials.
Attitudes have changed enormously in recent times and this runs in both directions - for many (if not most) people in the Republic (that is to say down south) the issue of a residual animosity in Anglo-Irish relations hasn't been at all pronounced since probably the Second World War and least not to the extent it was before the Republican constitution was introduced by Fianna Fail and the Economic Wars of the 30's. Having said that, during DeValera's dominance, which was insular, economically autarchic, nationalist in it's leanings and above all fundamentally Catholic in outlook there was nevertheless much fertile ground for nurturing anti-English sentiment. He wouldn't have promoted it himself in any ham-fisted fashion it's just that this would be the inevitably way a mind would wander given his known generalised interpretation of Irish history; and DeValera, though by no means universally admired was undoubtedly deified in some quarters. I think also of Brendan Behan who was involved in the 40's IRA bombing campaign of London being still feted in the popular mind to such an extent that he was invited to turn on Dublin city's Christmas lights in the 50's - a hugely popular figure whose brimstone past only added to the allure.
Another point to note of course is that England's stance towards Ireland historically looms far larger in the average Irish mind than any corresponding influence Ireland ever exerted upon her. The Irish historical narrative regardless from which quarter it is being made has to account for an encroaching English polity on the old Gaelic chiefdoms, their effective expulsion and absorption into that polity during the 16th c. Tudor plantations and the rejection by the old English (medieval planter English and gaelicised Normans) of the Reformation and this community's subsequent alignment and eventual merging with an increasingly anglicised native Gaelic culture on the binding pivot of catholicism. This sets the stage for the politics which was to emerge in the late 18th century, the rising, Act of Union, the fight for Catholic Emancipation, Repeal and eventually Home Rule and finally full independence - achieved through the barrel of a gun; punctuated of course by a famine where one quarter of the population were shed through either disease, starvation or emigration. Most Irish school children are more than familiar with this narrative by the time their fifteen and it unavoidably comes to them in the form of a gigantic and seemingly age-long struggle for freedom and independence littered with the bodies of martyrs and heroes who have died in the cause or have rotted in English jails.
I'm not sure how history is taught in England but I would guess that Ireland and the Irish question occupies a vanishly small space in the curriculum. There is simply too many grand confrontations to cover otherwise; the eternal wars with France and Spain, the Netherlands, the epic battle to retain the American colony, the growth of the Empire, WWI & II - it is a history that leaves little room to consider her little island neighbour's residual hang-ups about being colonised when after all, half the world has been swept up into her embrace. A piffling inconsequence; a Lord Lieutenancy in Ireland was a dreary placement for most ambitious British statesmen during the 18th & 19th centuries when the entire globe was the expectant vista & challenge to which they were expected to rise.
So, on the one hand Irish national identity is constructed as an immense and existential struggle to preserve our singular Gaelic culture and traditions, our native Church and our independent political existence whereas English national identity is constructed in light of it's successful outward expansion which incidentally also included the early absorption of said Irish terrritory. Who do you think ruminates more about the relationship of the two countries - the average Irishman or the average Englishman? Most English people who identify positively with the standard benign model of Empire's expansion don't worry themselves overly on the question of Anglo-Irish relations or any conceivable Irish grievances there might be so, the animosity (when there is any) isn't mutual or a two way street it almost entirely derives from a single direction, driven by a regrettably bona fide persecution complex.
I would regard, lest it be said otherwise, the historic struggle for independence fought during the war of independence to be bona fide, along with O' Connell's programme for Emancipation, the fight for Repeal and the Parnellite struggle for Home Rule. In so far as each of these movements were opposed in turn by the British government and secondary status within the Union was maintained for the generality of Irish then we may speak of an imposition which may be viewed by some, and taken quite legitimately, as persecutory. A public man in Irish political life in the 19th century aligned to the nationalist movement had to throw his lot in with one of these movements and for the majority of them it proved to be largely an elusive undertaking riddled with setbacks and disappointments until the convulsive outbreaks of 1916 which thereafter transformed their prospects utterly - 'the revolutionary moment'.
In so far as I sympathise with this general trend and struggle towards an independent Irish polity and the lives which gave themselves fully to it's completion I correspondingly view dimly the attempt of sundry British statesmen to reverse, halt or divert this process - including the aborted territorial unity half promised by the Boundary Commission. That half of me which stands in the past and sees the older struggle dissolve in the mists of time is divided from that half which saw the Northern troubles evolve. The same emotive network of bonding associative nationalist ties thrusts me into communion with Northern 'catholics' - thus the nationalist dilemna in our own time ... it's an inescapable bind. But we are all umbilically tied to our country's past. Historically speaking, the Irish perspective is too often narrowed down by the oppositionalist nature of our past entanglements with Britain; it's kind of like a bilateral freeze - in many ways it's hard to think how it could have been otherwise - whereas from the British perspective, looking back, there is a history to consider which encompasses a much fuller spectrum; from the earliest colonies in the New World, to Egypt, Africa and the Far East. A deeper multilateral heritage you might say, which, notwithstanding the controversies over the inherent rightness of exerting foreign control over distant people and places does at least impart a fuller, more global perspective.
We often forget in Ireland, such was the power of the nationalist re-imagining, which tended to downplay such things - and to which I nevertheless fully subscribe (such was it's necessity), that we partook fully in the spread of Empire (albeit as a poorly paid foot soldiers for the most part - but also via our engrafted, naturalised and finally boycotted landed gentry). Burmese, Egyptian and Afghan historians could readily recall the Irish captains and regiments who helped extend Victoria's domains; for good or ill, as we will no doubt endlessly debate. But this rigid oppositionalism isn't confined to that conflict between a nation struggling to be born and another which saw no necessity (if not urgency) in it's delivery - it extends, in the Irish perspective to an emergent national identity actively synthesising it's own self-image, calling upon, divining almost, it's ancient Gaelic roots - and often with all the fury of a religious resurrection - but also, infusing this quasi-'spiritual' excavation with that famed mirrored Other; the negativised us/them construction, a necessary bait to quicken it's soldiers blood but a strained polarity scarring the psyche - an unsightly birthmark to some, and requiring no end of timely sutures. Peace in the North, after all, is/was the endgame of this operation.
From the 1890's onwards with the cultural revival Gaelic language preservation becomes important but it is as yet largely apolitical (at least officially) until possibly 1912 or thereabouts with the rejection of the first Home Rule Bills - by the time of the first Dail though it becomes a pivotal element. It's an enormous shift when you consider O' Connell had no time for the language at all (though he spoke it naturally enough) saying it were well it simply vanished off the earth as English had now become the language of international discourse (or words to that effect).
I think what happened from O' Connell's death in 1847 to the 'Celtic Dawn' (in Ulick O' Connor's phrase) was ultimately linked to the wider phenomenon of 'racialised' thinking that so marked the late Victorian era; studies in phrenology, theories of racial purity, notions of various ethnic groups having distinct languages & homelands (as in Herder's 'perfectability of the species'). From Germany and Britain came umpteen learned tracts (Gobineau's most notoriously in the 1850's) vaunting the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, their especial fitness to rule etc. Many of these used by comparison the inferior 'Celtic' races as exemplary instances of backwardness and barbarity placing them only above the Mongoloid (which became the great 'yellow peril') and Negroid races.
So ubiquitous was this racialised discourse and so earnest were the Celtic revivalists in disproving the 'natural hierarchy of races' through vigorously promoting the 'genius of the Celtic race' that the assumed connectivity between language and ethnicity was taken almost as a given. The republican and separatist nationalism of the deist Tone, the unitarian Mitchel and the Protestant Davis were to some extent downplayed in the minds of many - (though not by Pearse, the high priest of Irish 'Gaelic and Catholic' nationalism, who nevertheless included them along with the (Catholic) land agitator Lalor in his quartet of exemplary nationalist figures) - as Irish nationalism increasingly took on the coloration and 'ethnic' vigour of the times.
Once this organic connectivity between language and race began to be questioned the revivalists lost much of their original steam and impetus. Nowadays of course we can read geneticists like Oppenheimer who tell us that 90% of the British and Irish gene pool is indigenous and dates from the immediate post-glacial period (c.8,000 BCE), that there was no Anglo-Saxon 'wipe-out' (ala Gildas) and that like the British and Irish 'Celts' before them they only contributed about 5% to the common gene pool. On the level of genes and physical 'ethnicity' there are no real marks of distinction between the peoples of 'the Isles' - the cleavages which exist are almost entirely cultural.
Declan Kiberd ("Inventing Ireland") had drawn attention to this early bipolarity using the example of Anglo-Irish literature - mainly Yeats, Shaw and Wilde - to stress the reciprocity. That England, according to this thesis, was also being self-imagined, was constructing too an identity which partook of it's Irish relations, and was sufficiently influenced by them to alter its ship of state - but this was to grant our poets and playwrights more ballast then they could reasonably command. The truth was less comforting, England held on to the relation - the art was too embroidered to impact political sentiment abroad - and Westminster despite being at times ground to a standstill seemed capable of leaving the Irish question forever in abeyance.
A poisoning of relations to be sure, but one on the whole more part of our psyche than England's for whom autonomous self-government was never the issue; so there was no question there of a massive divestment, the sundering was felt as a ripple; a barely perceptible shrinkage of the imperial domain, even a sense, in some quarters, of good riddance to a millstone, but in Ireland the breach was traumatic; party politics cleaved on Civil War divides while the North stood quiescent; a timebomb.
Revisionist historical writing was engendered almost immediately, attempting to suture the more fatalistic and polarising rifts which had emerged but it's trademark top-heavy emphasis on high-end administrative politics ignored the emotive context and litany of grievances which had brought matters to such an ungovernable impasse. Just because the work is 'academic' with footnotes, references and is peer-reviewed fawningly in all the 'best' journals doesn't mean it's 'objective' or captures the essence of the times; which were above all guided by an unstoppable open sluice gate of emotional discharge. Almost immediately after independence and because of partition the task of the Trinity College History department was to rapidly put a bung in Irish nationalism; this process of course never stopped with English historians who naturally continued to emphasise the positive gains made by Ireland within the Union and the Empire in general.
The weight of academic scholarship in Ireland today is overwhelming revisionist; that is to say it's aims are everywhere to deconstruct nationalist narratives and self-imaginings particularly from the mid-19th century onwards. Such was the blatant bias and favouritism towards models of positive growth under the Empire, the depiction of benign social conditions and the minimalisation of disturbance along with the tendency to demonise or degrade nationalist figures that a counter trend emerged within academia led by post-nationalist, post-revisionist thinkers who objected mainly to the notion that a contemporary political impasse over the North should so obscure and distort the basic reality.
What has happened is that one form of overarching and transcendent narrative has merely supplanted another; the first and original narrative (if you can call the combined outpourings and life's work of key Irish nationalist figures a unitary body of work) focused on bringing a certain political situation into being (such as a separate, autonomous Irish Republic) - but because this aim was continually frustrated and real lives were absorbed in it's consummation the language evoked is naturally emotive and yearning. This symphony built into a crescendo until it exploded in 1916, wound down only in the late 30's and re-emerged again with the outbreak of the Troubles in the 70's.
The counteracting narrative, the revisionist one, is deployed to tone down all the previous excesses and has the solitary purpose not of narrating history objectively but to dampen the nationalist ardour in the context of the unresolved issue of the island's partition. The difficulty of course is that a whole generation of Irish scholars have imbibed this second version as a neutral, value-free and objective assessment of Irish history without relating it to it's own historical context. So, it's well to remember there's more than one type of tribal myth in action here.
With respect to English historians in the immediate post-independence period the wish was naturally to preserve a respectable gloss on the first evidence of Empire's imminent decay, so much better we expect to bolster it's credentials elsewhere. A natural patriotic function on their part which they shouldn't be faulted on particularly, an honourable service to the Crown in fact, but one unfortunately which only distorts to our detriment the picture of Anglo-Irish relations
To the future, I suppose power-sharing in the North will inevitably make demands on 'both' communities. On the one hand, many Unionists may be reassessing their sense of 'Irishness' whereas some nationalists have been obliged to expand their own conceptions of what it actually constitutes. Much of Irish nationality was constructed for so long in opposition to the Crown that it seems difficult to reconcile the notion of their being conflated, dual or composite identities.
This is a simplification obviously as for a long period it was perfectly feasible for Catholic 'old Irish' families to promote themselves under the Crown's auspices without engendering the ire of their brethren (as in after the Nine Year's War) but this in more instances than not was simply a case of adapting as best one could to adverse circumstances. In a sense, people are always pragmatic when their backs are to the wall or more accommodating when circumstances leave them little option to do otherwise.
Anyway, we live in hope.
The North blew out a collective wheeze long ago and most of it's people are just sick of it; some of them I know could care less about identity as long as they don't have to turn on the news everyday and hear about another mindless act of carnage. There is a power-sharing executive in place for the North which has been meeting fitfully over the past decade and a half. The two ''radical' wings of Unionism and Republicanism (the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively) have been elected as the major representative parties and contrary to many dire prognostications at the time have managed to form a working alliance; Ian Paisley & Martin McGuinness (former First Minister and Deputy First Minister) were even christened the 'chuckle brothers' recently such was the new found bonhomie that apparently existed between them.
This strong relationship seems to have continued with Paisley's successor Peter Robinson and apart from the inevitable disagreements over policy the consensus cross-community opinion is that the violence of the past should be consigned for evermore to the history books. Former IRA man McGuinness has called recent attempted car-bombings and shootings by splinter republican paramilitaries as the work of 'conflict junkies' - which of course it is. The conditions that prevail today are light years removed from the civil rights era and the days of the B-Specials.
Attitudes have changed enormously in recent times and this runs in both directions - for many (if not most) people in the Republic (that is to say down south) the issue of a residual animosity in Anglo-Irish relations hasn't been at all pronounced since probably the Second World War and least not to the extent it was before the Republican constitution was introduced by Fianna Fail and the Economic Wars of the 30's. Having said that, during DeValera's dominance, which was insular, economically autarchic, nationalist in it's leanings and above all fundamentally Catholic in outlook there was nevertheless much fertile ground for nurturing anti-English sentiment. He wouldn't have promoted it himself in any ham-fisted fashion it's just that this would be the inevitably way a mind would wander given his known generalised interpretation of Irish history; and DeValera, though by no means universally admired was undoubtedly deified in some quarters. I think also of Brendan Behan who was involved in the 40's IRA bombing campaign of London being still feted in the popular mind to such an extent that he was invited to turn on Dublin city's Christmas lights in the 50's - a hugely popular figure whose brimstone past only added to the allure.
Another point to note of course is that England's stance towards Ireland historically looms far larger in the average Irish mind than any corresponding influence Ireland ever exerted upon her. The Irish historical narrative regardless from which quarter it is being made has to account for an encroaching English polity on the old Gaelic chiefdoms, their effective expulsion and absorption into that polity during the 16th c. Tudor plantations and the rejection by the old English (medieval planter English and gaelicised Normans) of the Reformation and this community's subsequent alignment and eventual merging with an increasingly anglicised native Gaelic culture on the binding pivot of catholicism. This sets the stage for the politics which was to emerge in the late 18th century, the rising, Act of Union, the fight for Catholic Emancipation, Repeal and eventually Home Rule and finally full independence - achieved through the barrel of a gun; punctuated of course by a famine where one quarter of the population were shed through either disease, starvation or emigration. Most Irish school children are more than familiar with this narrative by the time their fifteen and it unavoidably comes to them in the form of a gigantic and seemingly age-long struggle for freedom and independence littered with the bodies of martyrs and heroes who have died in the cause or have rotted in English jails.
I'm not sure how history is taught in England but I would guess that Ireland and the Irish question occupies a vanishly small space in the curriculum. There is simply too many grand confrontations to cover otherwise; the eternal wars with France and Spain, the Netherlands, the epic battle to retain the American colony, the growth of the Empire, WWI & II - it is a history that leaves little room to consider her little island neighbour's residual hang-ups about being colonised when after all, half the world has been swept up into her embrace. A piffling inconsequence; a Lord Lieutenancy in Ireland was a dreary placement for most ambitious British statesmen during the 18th & 19th centuries when the entire globe was the expectant vista & challenge to which they were expected to rise.
So, on the one hand Irish national identity is constructed as an immense and existential struggle to preserve our singular Gaelic culture and traditions, our native Church and our independent political existence whereas English national identity is constructed in light of it's successful outward expansion which incidentally also included the early absorption of said Irish terrritory. Who do you think ruminates more about the relationship of the two countries - the average Irishman or the average Englishman? Most English people who identify positively with the standard benign model of Empire's expansion don't worry themselves overly on the question of Anglo-Irish relations or any conceivable Irish grievances there might be so, the animosity (when there is any) isn't mutual or a two way street it almost entirely derives from a single direction, driven by a regrettably bona fide persecution complex.
I would regard, lest it be said otherwise, the historic struggle for independence fought during the war of independence to be bona fide, along with O' Connell's programme for Emancipation, the fight for Repeal and the Parnellite struggle for Home Rule. In so far as each of these movements were opposed in turn by the British government and secondary status within the Union was maintained for the generality of Irish then we may speak of an imposition which may be viewed by some, and taken quite legitimately, as persecutory. A public man in Irish political life in the 19th century aligned to the nationalist movement had to throw his lot in with one of these movements and for the majority of them it proved to be largely an elusive undertaking riddled with setbacks and disappointments until the convulsive outbreaks of 1916 which thereafter transformed their prospects utterly - 'the revolutionary moment'.
In so far as I sympathise with this general trend and struggle towards an independent Irish polity and the lives which gave themselves fully to it's completion I correspondingly view dimly the attempt of sundry British statesmen to reverse, halt or divert this process - including the aborted territorial unity half promised by the Boundary Commission. That half of me which stands in the past and sees the older struggle dissolve in the mists of time is divided from that half which saw the Northern troubles evolve. The same emotive network of bonding associative nationalist ties thrusts me into communion with Northern 'catholics' - thus the nationalist dilemna in our own time ... it's an inescapable bind. But we are all umbilically tied to our country's past. Historically speaking, the Irish perspective is too often narrowed down by the oppositionalist nature of our past entanglements with Britain; it's kind of like a bilateral freeze - in many ways it's hard to think how it could have been otherwise - whereas from the British perspective, looking back, there is a history to consider which encompasses a much fuller spectrum; from the earliest colonies in the New World, to Egypt, Africa and the Far East. A deeper multilateral heritage you might say, which, notwithstanding the controversies over the inherent rightness of exerting foreign control over distant people and places does at least impart a fuller, more global perspective.
We often forget in Ireland, such was the power of the nationalist re-imagining, which tended to downplay such things - and to which I nevertheless fully subscribe (such was it's necessity), that we partook fully in the spread of Empire (albeit as a poorly paid foot soldiers for the most part - but also via our engrafted, naturalised and finally boycotted landed gentry). Burmese, Egyptian and Afghan historians could readily recall the Irish captains and regiments who helped extend Victoria's domains; for good or ill, as we will no doubt endlessly debate. But this rigid oppositionalism isn't confined to that conflict between a nation struggling to be born and another which saw no necessity (if not urgency) in it's delivery - it extends, in the Irish perspective to an emergent national identity actively synthesising it's own self-image, calling upon, divining almost, it's ancient Gaelic roots - and often with all the fury of a religious resurrection - but also, infusing this quasi-'spiritual' excavation with that famed mirrored Other; the negativised us/them construction, a necessary bait to quicken it's soldiers blood but a strained polarity scarring the psyche - an unsightly birthmark to some, and requiring no end of timely sutures. Peace in the North, after all, is/was the endgame of this operation.
From the 1890's onwards with the cultural revival Gaelic language preservation becomes important but it is as yet largely apolitical (at least officially) until possibly 1912 or thereabouts with the rejection of the first Home Rule Bills - by the time of the first Dail though it becomes a pivotal element. It's an enormous shift when you consider O' Connell had no time for the language at all (though he spoke it naturally enough) saying it were well it simply vanished off the earth as English had now become the language of international discourse (or words to that effect).
I think what happened from O' Connell's death in 1847 to the 'Celtic Dawn' (in Ulick O' Connor's phrase) was ultimately linked to the wider phenomenon of 'racialised' thinking that so marked the late Victorian era; studies in phrenology, theories of racial purity, notions of various ethnic groups having distinct languages & homelands (as in Herder's 'perfectability of the species'). From Germany and Britain came umpteen learned tracts (Gobineau's most notoriously in the 1850's) vaunting the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, their especial fitness to rule etc. Many of these used by comparison the inferior 'Celtic' races as exemplary instances of backwardness and barbarity placing them only above the Mongoloid (which became the great 'yellow peril') and Negroid races.
So ubiquitous was this racialised discourse and so earnest were the Celtic revivalists in disproving the 'natural hierarchy of races' through vigorously promoting the 'genius of the Celtic race' that the assumed connectivity between language and ethnicity was taken almost as a given. The republican and separatist nationalism of the deist Tone, the unitarian Mitchel and the Protestant Davis were to some extent downplayed in the minds of many - (though not by Pearse, the high priest of Irish 'Gaelic and Catholic' nationalism, who nevertheless included them along with the (Catholic) land agitator Lalor in his quartet of exemplary nationalist figures) - as Irish nationalism increasingly took on the coloration and 'ethnic' vigour of the times.
Once this organic connectivity between language and race began to be questioned the revivalists lost much of their original steam and impetus. Nowadays of course we can read geneticists like Oppenheimer who tell us that 90% of the British and Irish gene pool is indigenous and dates from the immediate post-glacial period (c.8,000 BCE), that there was no Anglo-Saxon 'wipe-out' (ala Gildas) and that like the British and Irish 'Celts' before them they only contributed about 5% to the common gene pool. On the level of genes and physical 'ethnicity' there are no real marks of distinction between the peoples of 'the Isles' - the cleavages which exist are almost entirely cultural.
Declan Kiberd ("Inventing Ireland") had drawn attention to this early bipolarity using the example of Anglo-Irish literature - mainly Yeats, Shaw and Wilde - to stress the reciprocity. That England, according to this thesis, was also being self-imagined, was constructing too an identity which partook of it's Irish relations, and was sufficiently influenced by them to alter its ship of state - but this was to grant our poets and playwrights more ballast then they could reasonably command. The truth was less comforting, England held on to the relation - the art was too embroidered to impact political sentiment abroad - and Westminster despite being at times ground to a standstill seemed capable of leaving the Irish question forever in abeyance.
A poisoning of relations to be sure, but one on the whole more part of our psyche than England's for whom autonomous self-government was never the issue; so there was no question there of a massive divestment, the sundering was felt as a ripple; a barely perceptible shrinkage of the imperial domain, even a sense, in some quarters, of good riddance to a millstone, but in Ireland the breach was traumatic; party politics cleaved on Civil War divides while the North stood quiescent; a timebomb.
Revisionist historical writing was engendered almost immediately, attempting to suture the more fatalistic and polarising rifts which had emerged but it's trademark top-heavy emphasis on high-end administrative politics ignored the emotive context and litany of grievances which had brought matters to such an ungovernable impasse. Just because the work is 'academic' with footnotes, references and is peer-reviewed fawningly in all the 'best' journals doesn't mean it's 'objective' or captures the essence of the times; which were above all guided by an unstoppable open sluice gate of emotional discharge. Almost immediately after independence and because of partition the task of the Trinity College History department was to rapidly put a bung in Irish nationalism; this process of course never stopped with English historians who naturally continued to emphasise the positive gains made by Ireland within the Union and the Empire in general.
The weight of academic scholarship in Ireland today is overwhelming revisionist; that is to say it's aims are everywhere to deconstruct nationalist narratives and self-imaginings particularly from the mid-19th century onwards. Such was the blatant bias and favouritism towards models of positive growth under the Empire, the depiction of benign social conditions and the minimalisation of disturbance along with the tendency to demonise or degrade nationalist figures that a counter trend emerged within academia led by post-nationalist, post-revisionist thinkers who objected mainly to the notion that a contemporary political impasse over the North should so obscure and distort the basic reality.
What has happened is that one form of overarching and transcendent narrative has merely supplanted another; the first and original narrative (if you can call the combined outpourings and life's work of key Irish nationalist figures a unitary body of work) focused on bringing a certain political situation into being (such as a separate, autonomous Irish Republic) - but because this aim was continually frustrated and real lives were absorbed in it's consummation the language evoked is naturally emotive and yearning. This symphony built into a crescendo until it exploded in 1916, wound down only in the late 30's and re-emerged again with the outbreak of the Troubles in the 70's.
The counteracting narrative, the revisionist one, is deployed to tone down all the previous excesses and has the solitary purpose not of narrating history objectively but to dampen the nationalist ardour in the context of the unresolved issue of the island's partition. The difficulty of course is that a whole generation of Irish scholars have imbibed this second version as a neutral, value-free and objective assessment of Irish history without relating it to it's own historical context. So, it's well to remember there's more than one type of tribal myth in action here.
With respect to English historians in the immediate post-independence period the wish was naturally to preserve a respectable gloss on the first evidence of Empire's imminent decay, so much better we expect to bolster it's credentials elsewhere. A natural patriotic function on their part which they shouldn't be faulted on particularly, an honourable service to the Crown in fact, but one unfortunately which only distorts to our detriment the picture of Anglo-Irish relations
To the future, I suppose power-sharing in the North will inevitably make demands on 'both' communities. On the one hand, many Unionists may be reassessing their sense of 'Irishness' whereas some nationalists have been obliged to expand their own conceptions of what it actually constitutes. Much of Irish nationality was constructed for so long in opposition to the Crown that it seems difficult to reconcile the notion of their being conflated, dual or composite identities.
This is a simplification obviously as for a long period it was perfectly feasible for Catholic 'old Irish' families to promote themselves under the Crown's auspices without engendering the ire of their brethren (as in after the Nine Year's War) but this in more instances than not was simply a case of adapting as best one could to adverse circumstances. In a sense, people are always pragmatic when their backs are to the wall or more accommodating when circumstances leave them little option to do otherwise.
Anyway, we live in hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment