Historians and the Irish republican struggle of the early 1900s

By Phil Ferguson

Part One

Nationalisms and anti-nationalisms in Irish historiography

In Ireland the past is not a foreign country. Its influence is everywhere, since the overriding issue of the past - the national question - was never resolved. The “solution” of partition was forced upon Ireland under the threat of “immediate and terrible war” by the British government on the one hand1 and the duplicity of elite sections of Irish society (the nationalist and north-east unionist bourgeoisies) on the other.

The nationalist population of six counties of Ireland was handed over to an artificial statelet in which they were discriminated against in jobs, housing and voting rights. The labour movement was divided both between the two statelets and along sectarian lines within the north. Lacking much of an industrial base, the south remained a predominantly rural society, over which a particularly conservative Catholicism found it relatively easy to hold sway in allegiance with the state. In such a society the possibilities for working class advance were highly limited. For women, it meant confinement in the domestic sphere was backed up by the full power of the Church’s sacred laws and the state’s temporal ones.

Successive “settlements” of the “Irish question” - whether through wholesale inclusion in the United Kingdom by the 1801 Act of Union or through the partial separation embodied in the neo-colonial arrangements of 1921 - have never recognised the right of the Irish people as a whole to national self-determination. For this reason, they have inevitably been challenged. Since such arrangements have been maintained by force, those most serious about challenging them have often ended up resorting to force as well. Both the attempts to legitimise and challenge such arrangements have meant that, as Hoppen notes, “Since at least the seventeenth century almost every group with an axe to grind has thought it imperative to control the past in order to provide support for contemporary arguments and ideologies.”2

Ironically, Hoppen’s own work can be seen as part of this process as it belongs to the currently dominant school in Irish historiography, “revisionism”. This school is based around a critical, in fact hostile, re-evaluation of traditional (nationalist) accounts of Irish history. Prominent revisionist Marianne Elliot sees it as “a term normally applied to scholars using scientific standards of research to re-interpret the myths and long-held truths of the past, now used more frequently as a term of abuse to describe those who attack romantic nationalist historiography.”3 Flag-bearer R.F. Foster, the author of the revisionist classic standard history of modern Ireland, is a little more frank about the problems the new historians have with the old histories, expressing concern about “the legitimization, and even sanctification, of violence in Irish history.” 4 The shift from nationalist to revisionist historiography is seen by him as “The transition from piety to iconoclasm”.5 However Peter Gibbon, himself a writer hostile to Irish nationalism, holds that revisionism “(relies) upon the same methodological devices with which the straightforwardly ideological contributions engage in their special pleading”.6 He also sees procedural problems in the way revisionists draw conclusions from documentary sources.7

While the revisionists have noted a whole tradition of myth-making in Irish nationalist historiography, used firstly to provide justification for the struggle for some form of independence from Britain and then to provide both a legitimising past and social cohesion for the southern Irish state, and they are rightly scathing about this,8 they themselves have undertaken, with a scarcely concealed eagerness, a rewriting of Irish history which delegitimises all resistance to British rule, particularly the most militant variety (republicanism).

The revisionist critique can be divided into a number of themes. Irish nationalism is seen as backward-looking, conservative, romantic or reactionary; regionalist; Anglophobic to the point of being “racist”; irrational; having a preference for physical force methods, glorifying violence and involving a messianic aspect, bound up with the concept of “blood sacrifice”; and attracting eccentrics and social misfits. These themes serve to undermine the legitimacy of Irish anti-colonial nationalism and republicanism.

Tom Garvin’s “Great Hatred, Little Room: social background and political sentiment among revolutionary activists in Ireland, 1890- 1922” combines a number of these themes.9 He attempts to draw a parallel between subsequent European fascism and the Irish nationalist thought of this period. According to Garvin, “frustration due to mismatch between education and available employment, a declining artisanate and the persistence of aristocratic resistance to democratisation and equality of opportunity in a context of urbanisation and the persistence of rural political loyalties and traditions often are used to help us understand political radicalisms in many parts of pre-1914 Europe; Ireland, where these factors were certainly significant, was not unique.”10 Irish separatist leaders are viewed as similar to “other radical movements of the period, whether nationalist, leftist, palaeo-fascist or some other indeterminate ideological mixture.”11 In fact, given that even the title of his essay suggests demographic and psychological factors as the causes of Irish nationalism, it is not surprising that it is with the right-wing nationalisms of Europe, and with fascism itself, that Garvin most closely associates Irish nationalism.

To make this amalgam Garvin has to play down the fundamental differences between Irish nationalism and right-wing ideologies in Europe, the different material conditions in Ireland, the divisions within Irish nationalism between bourgeois and revolutionary elements, the fact that everyone in Ireland who attempted to provide socialist leadership for the working class saw that British rule had to be removed, and also the political writings of leaders of the struggle for national freedom such as Pearse and Connolly. Most essentially, Garvin has to leave entirely unmentioned the idea that Irish nationalism might be a response to British occupation, and therefore has more in common with the nationalisms that developed in Latin America, Asia and Africa as peoples in those continents sought to win political freedom and modernise and develop their countries.

He attempts to portray Irish nationalism as characteristically backward-looking, romantic and Catholic. For instance, painting Maud Gonne as anti-Semitic, a virtual fascist and a “believ(er) in witchcraft”, he claims that in her eyes “England’s unforgivable sin was to be urban and modern and to have increasingly less place for a traditional aristocracy and gentry”.12 This is, to say the least, a rather extraordinary view of Gonne, given that she spent much of her life fighting precisely the “traditional aristocracy and gentry” (and inherited wealth in general) in Ireland. She was radicalised by the land war and became actively involved on the side of the peasantry whose struggle to get possession of the soil was an indispensable part of modernising Ireland. In Dublin she organised among the poor, specifically in opposition to the patronising charity work of the aristocratic elite. She was also a founding member of a Marxist revolutionary group in the mid-1920s, the Workers Party of Ireland, although she does not appear to have played a very active part in organised Marxist work.

In criticising C. Desmond Greaves’ analysis of the class forces at play during the war for independence13, Garvin claims, “In effect, the separatists laid siege to Dublin Castle, and in 1922 the Castle fell.”14 In other words the separatists’ aim was simply to take over the British administration rather than to change anything fundamental. Those fighting for national freedom are seen simply as an elite or would-be elite who had been excluded from power and whose ambition was merely to grasp hold of the existing state apparatus. This avoids an examination of the politics of the 1916 revolutionaries, who were social radicals as well as national separatists; indeed they saw the two things very much as interwoven.

When the republicans triumphed electorally in 1918 they established a separate parliament in Dublin. The parliament declared independence and established its own government, its own ministries, its own courts, passed its own laws and had its own army. This constituted a form of dual power and was clearly seen as such by the British who declared Dail Eireann an illegal assembly and spent the next several years attempting to destroy by force of arms the expanding republican state apparatus. But the British government, well-versed in dealing with rebellious natives - including by co-option - did not see the republicans as a relatively homogeneous, aspiring bourgeoisie simply wishing to take over the existing state apparatus. During the 1918-21 struggle it was clear that the independence struggle contained both pro-capitalist elements and sizeable sections of the working class, the latter holding two general strikes and a range of other industrial struggles against British rule as well as battles over wages and conditions.

The British government did come to appreciate well that the Irish independence movement contained respectable middle-class gentlemen, and even “gunmen”, with whom it could do business. But, unlike so many of the revisionists, the British government also understood both that the liberation movement included many who had no respect at all for the social, economic and political system which Britain had introduced into Ireland and that struggles for national independence which involved armed struggle and general strikes contained within them the possibilities of social revolution. Moreover, the threat of revolution in Ireland was far more worrying than in Egypt or some other colonial possession because of the unique connections between Britain and Ireland. A revolution in Ireland posed a threat to the British state in Britain itself, especially at a time of widespread class conflict there, and with the Russian revolution providing workers with ideas beyond their station.15

Republicanism, irrationalism and incoherence

Foster, on the other hand, questions whether the republicans had even the opportunist coherence conferred on them by Garvin’s comments about their laying siege to British power. He casts doubt that any rationality was involved in their cause, asking, “Who, in fact, had the revolution been against: a British state already committed to Home Rule for twenty-six counties (which until a very late stage most nationalists would accept as a good beginning) or an Irish Parliamentary Party whose forms, practices and, eventually, ethos the new mass movement increasingly came to take over rather than replace?”16 Republicanism has a further disturbing quality for Foster who argues that in it, “Many marginalised and rootless people found a raison d’etre; and many would cling to it by electing to fight against the Treaty.”17 This, perhaps, sheds more light on present-day middle-class fear of the “underclass” than it does on the ranks of the Irish Republican Army and associated organisations during the independence war.

The theme of irrationality and incoherence is also reflected in Robert Kee’s highly-acclaimed three-volume work on the struggle for an Irish nation state. He tells us for instance, “it was Larkin who first effectively brought the old incoherent national emotions into Irish twentieth century labour relations.”18 For Boyce, Irish nationalism “was always more of a bundle of sentiments than a logical array of facts.”19

Irish nationalism is today increasingly portrayed as inherently Catholic and sectarian, a stance which leads to the conclusion that loyalism is a logical reaction on the part of Protestants, including Protestant workers. This also removes the responsibility for partition from the British, and places it on the shoulders of Irish nationalism. Conor Cruise O’Brien even goes to the extent of arguing that the sectarian discrimination against Catholics in the north is a response to fear of Catholic domination. Criticising the constitution of the southern state for its reference in several articles to Ireland as comprising the whole of the island, he asked in 1971, “Is it altogether surprising, then, in view of that, that the majority there (ie, in the north - PF) feel justified, in imposing their will on the Catholic minority?”20 This is particularly absurd, given that Catholics had been second-class citizens in that part of Ireland long before the 1937 Free State Constitution, and long before the Easter Rising and war for independence.

For Foster, among others, even the attempt to keep the Irish language alive has a sectarian and “Anglophobic” character, while “The Irish nationalism that had developed by this date (the early 1900s - PF) was Anglophobic and anti-Protestant. . .”21 Here he is actually reflecting a theme typical of the Irish Times during the struggle for independence. This newspaper propagandised, for instance, that Sinn Fein had “an insane hatred of England,”22 and that republicans were marked by “political lunacy” and “black passions and private lusts.”23 For A.C. Hepburn, Irish nationalism is “political Catholicism”, while unionism is “political Protestantism”.24 For Gretchen MacMillan the idea of the Irish nation is “a product of the nineteenth century”, particularly the land war, the home rule struggle and the rise of cultural nationalism. This latter aspect, in the 1890s, “established the foundations of a distinct national identity. It was the fusion of Irishness and Catholicism which came to be perceived as the true Irish character.”25

Yet it is precisely the “came to be perceived” aspect which MacMillan, in common with the revisionists, leaves uninvestigated. This eventual perception is treated as a natural progression, rather than the result of contradiction and conflict in which secular republicanism and socialism lost out to a counter-revolution. The successful counter-revolutionaries were able to appropriate both the symbols and rhetoric of republicanism and nationalism and give them a thoroughly reactionary content. This reactionary content was necessary to provide stability for the southern state, to give it legitimacy, especially when so many of its inhabitants actually opposed its establishment. In fact this conflation of nationalism and Catholicism is shared by the southern state and its revisionist critics. In this sense, the southern state and the revisionists are like mirror images, accepting the same essential picture of things, whereas a republican/socialist approach sees the southern state and its ideology as a grave-digger of national liberation in Ireland or, at least, the spade with which Britain was able to bury that cause for half a century.

A rather major problem faces the revisionists here, in that all the founders and main figures of separatist nationalism in Ireland, up to the pre-Easter Rising period, were themselves Protestants. Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish republicanism, along with all the other 27 founding figures of the United Irish organisation, was Protestant. Indeed, 26 of the 28 were Presbyterians, the same denomination as today’s most committed loyalists.26 Throughout the 1800s all the great figures of republicanism were Protestant - John Mitchel, Fintan Lalor, and their colleagues of the 1840s and the attempted rebellion in 1848, James Stephens and the other founders of Fenianism and leaders of the 1867 rebellion, and Michael Davitt, the architect of the land struggle. Even the founder of cultural nationalism, Thomas Davis, was a Protestant. As Boyce, no sympathiser of Irish nationalism, has noted, “the ideology of the Easter Rising was in large part an Anglo-Irish creation.”27 He points out that Pearse’s view of nationality was derived from Davis, national separation from Tone, Gaelic Ireland from Hyde, and the idea enshrined in the Easter proclamation of “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland” derived from Lalor.

It was only in the 1900s that Catholics became the majority of republican leaders. Given that they were the big majority of the population, there is hardly anything peculiar about this. Just as the completely downtrodden condition of Catholics prevented them assuming this position earlier on, their new role, as Boyce explains, stemmed from the “fruits of 100 years of concessions”. Catholics “were now educated enough, able enough, and, above all, possessed of sufficient self-confidence and self-esteem to produce their own leaders, constitutional and revolutionary.”28 Foster tersely writes, “middle-class Catholic Ireland had found an extremist leadership that was not Anglo-Irish.”29 In fact, Protestants and the Anglo-Irish continued to be welcome at all levels of the movement, a stark contrast to the closed, sectarian practices of loyalism. As leading republican Constance Markievicz, in an article about the movement of that period, wrote, nobody much cared about the background of members. Anyone prepared to struggle for Irish freedom was welcome.30

Those republicans who were Catholic also had little time for Catholic Church meddling in public affairs and social life. Griffith, who was on the conservative end of republicanism, criticised the Catholic hierarchy as being, “next to the British government”, the people “most responsible for the depopulation of the country”. He attacked priests for having “made life dull and unendurable for the people”. The priests’ attitudes on segregation of the sexes, he said, “brought a Calvinistic gloom and horror to Ireland.” Meanwhile the people were “being bled right and left to build all kinds of Church edifices and endow all kinds of Church institutions. . .”31

To overcome the problem of describing as Catholic an ideology and movement constructed by Protestants, the revisionists conflate under the title of Irish nationalism diverse and deeply antagonistic ideologies and movements. Republicanism, conservative Catholicism and moderate home rule politics are thrown together and attributed the features borne primarily by reactionary Hibernianism. One critic of revisionism, Brian Murphy, has also accused writers such as Patrick O’Farrell, Oliver MacDonagh and Foster of “erroneous uses of source material” in order to portray the Gaelic League - founded by the Protestant (and Unionist) Douglas Hyde, and involving many Protestants at all levels of its organisation - as sectarian to the point of racism.32 In fact, as T.A. Jackson noted many years ago, the League strongly resisted attempts by both theologians and politicians to impose their will upon it. R.M. Henry, giving the example of a priest objecting, for moral reasons, to the League’s mixed study classes, notes the League, in response, “asserted its right to control its own activities, and established once for all (sic) so far as it was concerned, that the sphere of the clergy’s activities is not co-extensive with human life.”33

Given their insistence on dealing with “the evidence” to debunk myths, there is a curious lack of examination of primary republican source material by the revisionists when dealing with the supposedly xenophobic and sectarian impulses of Irish nationalism. For instance, no use is made by Foster or other major revisionists of the two most important republican newspapers of the time in relation to these specific questions - Irish Worker, the voice of the militant and pro-republican working class movement, and Irish Freedom, the paper of the republican militants who allied with Connolly to carry out the Easter Rising. Irish Freedom clearly saw British imperialism as the problem in Ireland and continuously stressed its view that Irish Unionists were part of the Irish nation. Far from being anti-Protestant, the paper was partly run by Protestants such as Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough and was clearly in favour of religious freedom and respect for the personal faiths of every person in Ireland.

In a typical example of the paper’s attitude, it editorialised early on in the Home Rule crisis, “The eighteenth century attempt (by Britain - P.F.) to keep two nations in Ireland had failed, and at its close she was found not with two nations but with one, or at least with two converging portions of an Irish nation - the older Gaelic portion and the younger Cromwellian-Williamite portion. Before the convergence actually happened (Britain) tore them asunder again.” This was done, the editorial said, through the suppression of the United Irish movement, the granting of concessions to Presbyterians in order to split them from their radical alliance with the Catholics, and through scaring Protestants in general into believing that their interests lay with England. Nevertheless, the paper argued in relation to the Ulster Unionists, “In the century which has passed they have become Irish, as Irish as the Irish of the South, and as distinct from the English as from the Germans.” It pointed to the need “to appeal to Ulster’s reason and to answer the objections which she raises to the Nationalist position. That attempt must be made and those objections must be answered, as they very easily can be. Not in speech-making and dialectics, but in deeds. . .” The editorial showed a clear respect for the beliefs of Unionists, while absolutely vilifying Redmond and the bourgeois nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party.34

The other main way the revisionists deal with the leading role played by Protestants in the development of Irish nationalism, especially in its radical republican form, is to imply - or even state outright - that such Protestants were eccentrics of one sort or another and to engage in amateur psychological analysis. This technique is particularly used in relation to women, so we will turn now to an examination of women and the national struggle.

Women, republicanism and revisionism

The psychological analysis mentioned above is used most noticeably in the cases of Alice Stopford Green, Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz. Foster, in dealing with Alice Stopford Green, a Protestant historian prominent in the early 1900s, author of several major works, and a supporter of Irish independence makes the extraordinary statement: “A Freudian, or a seeker after symbols, might note that from the age of seventeen she spent seven years in semi-blindness, and during the ordeal relied upon an already well-stocked mind and a remarkable memory; for her view of Irish history represented a similarly restricted vision, and an ability to feed omnivorously on preconceptions.” Stopford Green, he says, “may be seen as a representative of those Ascendancy Irish whose insecurity drove them to extremes of identification. . .”35 For Garvin, Maud Gonne was “one of those curious English or half-English people who feel impelled to adopt Ireland.”36

Kee engages in the same form of analysis, describing the 1916 revolutionaries as “an overlap of poets, eccentrics, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, politically-minded Gaelic Leaguers and frustrated parliamentarians. . .”37 This writer descends to the level of telling us, “Many lone wolves with a romantic or dogmatic or otherwise obsessional love of Ireland. . . gravitated towards Sinn Fein. And as with every movement that attracts rebels there were those who put into their love of Ireland obscure psychological motivations of their own. Among the more extreme of such figures were some drawn from what would normally have been thought of as the Protestant Ascendancy. Maud Gonne was one of these. Another woman from the same upper class background was Constance Gore-Booth. . .”38 After noting that Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth) had shown abilities on the hunting field in her youth, he tells us “her intellect was not great and her artistic talent was no better than second rate, but it was this spirit of the hunting-field, and a lonely wildness that endured beyond all the physical ravages of time, which she was to carry into Irish nationalist politics.”39

If, for someone born into the upper class to take up the banner of struggle against that class was eccentric, then in the case of women it was doubly so. We are left with the impression that Markievicz could not be an artist, was reaching middle-age and losing her beauty (and probably going through menopause) and therefore, out of frustration, became a revolutionary.40 (We might note that her closest political comrade, Connolly, has also been blessed with a psychological analysis, courtesy of Samuel Levenson.41) A rather more historical, and convincing, explanation of the involvement of a significant layer of Protestant women in nationalist and republican activity than that given by Foster, Garvin and Kee is provided by Carol Coulter:

When one considers the alternatives available to them - constricted lives within the framework of the dreary round of the social caste into which they had been born, wilful ignorance of the lives of the majority of the people around them, an extremely restricted outlet for any cultural aspirations they might have - it is hardly surprising that the adventurous and intelligent among them seized the opportunity to throw off the restrictions imposed upon them by birth and sex and sought to forge a new society in which they could play a full part.42

The issue of women and republicanism is particularly interesting since the “iconoclastic” revisionists have in twenty-five years had little to say on the subject.43 The Revolution in Ireland 1879-1923, for instance, a work which contains essays on all the main aspects of life in Ireland during this period, ignores the position of women and their role in the events of these years. Such an absence cannot be justified on the basis that no historian is capable in this field, nor that there is a paucity of information. It also could not be argued that women were not engaged in any significant activities during that period: during the years covered by this book women emerged from the constraints of a Victorian-imposed conservative society in Ireland to play an important part in social struggles. During the Land War, the Ladies Land League was founded and developed beyond being simply an adjunct of the Land League. The LLL carried on militant activity after the suppression of the Land League and the imprisonment of male activists. LLL leaders, such as Anna and Fanny Parnell had a far more radical political perspective than the parliamentarian wing of the land movement epitomised by their brother Charles Stuart Parnell. Anna Parnell was also the author of a telling critique of the politics of the moderates.44

Women played an important part in producing nationalist literature and newspapers. In the 1890s, for instance, Alice Milligan, a Belfast-based Protestant and republican produced the Shan Van Vocht newspaper which played a major role in publicising and developing militant republican politics.45 Among its contributors was revolutionary labour leader James Connolly. The suffrage movement involved thousands of women, but was also riven by the national question: should women simply fight for the vote in British elections or should they fight to gain the vote in an independent Irish parliament? Those women who took the second view played an important role not only in the fight for women’s equality through groups such as Inghinidhe na hEireann, but in the labour movement and nationalist struggle. Women workers became organised in unions such as the Irish Women’s Workers Union which was attached to Larkin and Connolly’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union. A number of these women, such as Helena Moloney, were also involved in the Irish Citizen Army and took part in the Easter Rising and war of independence. Several prominent ICA and left-wing women were successful Sinn Fein candidates in the local body elections of 1920. In 1921, in the British-organised elections in the north and south, six women were elected as Sinn Fein TDs/MPs.46 Cumann na mBan, the women’s wing of the IRA, involved thousands of women, drawing them out of the cloistered, limited and oppressive existence of the home. As Markievicz noted, their involvement in the hazards of a war for national liberation raised the confidence and aspirations of women.47 Not surprisingly, all the women TDs voted against the Treaty, as did the bulk of Cumann na mBan.48

Following the Treaty settlement of 1921, and the subsequent defeat of revolutionary republicanism, women were pushed back into the domestic sphere. In fact the position of women in the home was subsequently enshrined in the Constitution. Formal limits were also placed upon women’s right to work.

Such a silence could, of course, be said to be evidence of “gender blindness”, but it is also worth considering further explanations. “The woman question”, after all, presents a particular problem for the revisionists since their presentation of Irish nationalism as conservative, Catholic and anti-modern is rather belied by the fact that virtually all of the most militant women in Ireland were republicans - throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They saw the emancipation of women as impossible under colonial rule and as inseparably linked to national liberation. In 1909, in one of her first political speeches, Markievicz urged her female audience: “Fix your mind on the ideal of Ireland free, with her women enjoying the full rights of citizenship in their own nation. . . ” Warning against those Irish suffragists who wanted the vote only to send members to Westminster, she asked “every nationalist woman to pause before she joined a Suffrage Society or Franchise League that did not include in their programme the Freedom of their Nation. ‘A Free Ireland with no Sex Disabilities in her Constitution’ should be the motto of all Nationalist women. And a grand motto it is.”49

At the same time some important works on women in this period have emerged, primarily the product of modern feminism and its attempt to write women back into history.50 This project, however, is not unproblematic. Apart from the danger of an ahistorical approach, inherent in some feminist writing, feminist historians can fall into the same trap as other historians dealing with a single sector of society. The danger of forgetting about the interconnections between economics and politics and between the interests of different oppressed layers of society that can easily slip into accounts of the history of groups of workers is just as liable to appear in accounts dealing with women. As Ward notes, “feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. . . historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs.”51

Ward is able to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls since the women she has mainly dealt with in her principal work,52 the most determined women’s rights fighters of the time, themselves saw the importance of these interconnections and therefore were involved in struggles to change society as a whole. Because of this Ward is able to offer an explanation of the defeat suffered by women’s rights with the establishment of the new Free State that goes beyond simply blaming the sexism of individual male revolutionaries or the alleged machismo of republicanism.53 Although she notes that the women were still deprived of an equal say in the decision-making of the revolutionary movement of the time, the defeat of women’s rights was bound up with the broader, societal defeat of the revolutionary struggle as a whole. The struggle for complete national independence, the struggle for workers’ liberation and the struggle for women’s emancipation all went down with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, partition, and the establishment of two reactionary statelets on the island.

Ward recognises the way in which revisionism has impacted upon the historiography of Irish women. She sees in general the growth of “an intellectual climate where even the expression of a desire to understand what was happening in the North of Ireland was liable to result in accusations of undue sympathy with terrorism. The academic community in Ireland failed in its task of engaging with the issue, so discussion seldom moved on to more fruitful levels. State repression and undisguised censorship was allowed to operate without challenge, while the refusal to accept that what was happening should be of concern to researchers and writers imposed serious distortions upon the ivory towers of Irish academia.” An “intellectual border” was erected so the north could be ignored. “For historians, this practice was legitimized by a revisionist discourse within the discipline which minimized the impact of Britain’s colonial role within Ireland. The direct political consequence of this was an implicit assumption that if the British presence in Ireland was less malignant than formerly considered, the struggle of the nationalist minority in the North could be dismissed as an atavistic impulse, to be ignored if not condemned by a progressive new generation.”54

As a result of this, “For many Irish feminist historians, the post-nationalist age has arrived and women’s struggle for emancipation can now be documented without undue stress being placed upon the age-old story of the British imperial presence in Ireland.”55 This approach, which Ward rightly questions, misses the interconnectedness of the “national question” and the “woman question”. She suggests an alternative perspective: “If we argue that the movement for national self-determination that existed in Ireland at the turn of the century was as important for women as for men, then the question for feminists becomes one of exploring the extent to which feminist concerns conflicted or were accommodated by nationalists. Instead of dismissing nationalism for its lack of relevance to feminism, one interrogates past nationalist movements for its (sic) programmes and examines the extent to which women were able to make an impact.”56 Moreover, as Coulter argues, “politically active women of the early twentieth century came out of a pre-existing tradition of women’s involvement in nationalist struggle, that this offered them scope for a wider range of activities in public life than that experienced by their sisters in imperialistic countries, and that all this was then closed off to them by the newly-formed patriarchal state, modelled essentially on its colonial predecessor.”57 Coulter also notes “in the writings of women involved in the nationalist movement an assumption of equality with men” even though it was understood this assumption was not widely shared.58

In contrast to Ward and Coulter, Cliona Murphy sees nationalism as “limited and confined to the interests of certain male groups. . . the very antithesis of feminism.”59 Interestingly, Murphy, in her The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century,60 treats “Irish society” as the twenty-six counties, even though this state did not exist at the time. As Ward notes, “Partition is read back into an unpartitioned society and we lose any sense of the reality of the suffrage movement in the North” as well as the fact that “the most militant of all suffrage activities took place in counties Antrim and Down, not in Dublin”.61 Murphy’s ahistorical and partitionist approach leaves her unable to discuss this.

In general, as Coulter notes of feminist historiography:

a lot of the discussion concerns the extent to which ‘national’ demands and concerns were allowed to override those of women, or the manner in which women sought to maintain their independence from the nationalist movement.

However such an approach risks subordinating actual historical processes to the preoccupations of today, where the debate about separate organisation is a central one in the feminist movement. It is also based on acceptance of the modern propaganda of the Irish state, which projects the present domination of a conservative patriarchal, Catholic, pro-capitalist outlook back onto the nationalist movement, implying a hegemony for this element that was not there.62

In fact the emancipatory movements overlapped to a large extent, in effect being what Coulter describes as “part of a generalised eruption of resistance to the status quo.”63

Imperialism, republicanism and violence

A key part of the revisionists’ portrayal of republicanism as an aberration, even a psychopathology, is their claim that republicans glorified violence and that this alleged glorifying is “deranged” and “extreme”. Foster even argues, “The Anglo-Irish war from 1919 to 1921 was the result of the politics of exaltation” of the violence of 1916, while IRA tactics were a “grisly process” amounting, “essentially, to shooting down policemen, on and off duty, arguing that the Royal Ulster Constabulary - however Catholic and Irish in personnel - were objectively the representatives of alien oppression.”64 In this way the conflict is not only irrational in the sense of being violent to the point of “grisly” but also in the sense that it is internecine - Irish against Irish. (Of course, the fact that the IRA shot Catholic, Irish policemen rather weighs against the claim that republicans were Catholic sectarians.) The republican attempt during the war for independence to set up alternative civil structures, Foster continues, “was only made effective, as in the Land War, by the sanction of violence in the background.”65 Even in articles which are relatively balanced we find expressions such as “revolutionary zealots”66 being used to describe republicans who, apparently unlike the British state, were engaged in a “campaign of violence”.67 The sheer repetition of such terms, applied in this totally one-sided way, can only serve to create the impression in the mind of readers that Irish republicanism is some kind of pathological condition.

MacMillan reflects this dominant revisionist theme when she claims that the IRB wished to sever the connection with Britain, “preferably through the use of violence”.68 Further on in this chapter she informs us that “A particular characteristic of militant nationalism was the glorification of violence” and, in the following paragraph she refers to “This glorification of violence” and quotes Pearse’s revisionist biographer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, who suggests it showed “a deranged view of the world.”69

No-one but a psychopath “prefers” violence, yet this “preference” for violence is constantly attributed to militant nationalists in the revisionist literature. There is a clear political message here: republicanism is a reflection of psychological disorder at least if not an outright pathological condition. MacMillan quotes a passage from Pearse which included the comment that “bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed and slavery is one of them.”

Far from suggesting a deranged view of the world, this is a statement which could have been made by any number of people fighting wars for national independence or against slavery. Abraham Lincoln clearly believed that bloodshed to get rid of slavery was less horrible than slavery itself. According to the great American democrat Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”70 Leaders of national independence movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia have used phrases similar to this quite frequently. Even decades later, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the ANC and its military wing in South Africa, to name just two, have talked in a similar way about violence. The Algerian movement for independence from France and the figure who most clearly articulated its cause, Frantz Fanon, dealt in far more detail with the question of violence and why its use by oppressed people was not only justified but part of the process of shaking off the mental fetters of colonialism.71 At best, the incapacity of MacMillan and the revisionists to understand this suggests they seem to lack any historical or imaginative ability to put themselves in the position of anyone not in the same class/social position as themselves. But given their constant hammering on this theme, the way in which they refuse to put it in the contexts of British oppression and anti-colonialism generally, and also ignore the attitude to violence on the part of the anti-republican forces of the time, we must suspect that there is a political motivation in all this.

Here it is worth noting the attitude taken towards violence by those sections of Irish society which are never described as “deranged”, “extremists” or people who “glorify violence”. The Irish Parliamentary Party, for instance, supported Britain in the First World War and called on Irish men to do their patriotic duty and fight and die in their thousands in a “grisly process” on the battlefields of Europe. Mr Serjeant Sullivan, a prominent IPP supporter, in a 1918 speech typical of those made at recruiting meetings, said, “The war might be won without Ireland, but that would be the most dreadful thing that could happen to Ireland” and that “he would rather there were 100,000 conscripts with the colours at the end of the war than that Ireland should be out of it.”72 Shortly afterwards, addressing Strabane Urban Council, Sullivan described Irish volunteers for the British Army as “those who went at the call of this country and had sanctified the cause with their blood.”73 Another respectable member of society, Mrs St Clair Stobart, speaking at a meeting organised by the Red Cross described the continental conflagration as “a woman’s war” and asked her audience whether they realised “this was a war to save civilisation and that if (they) were not going to do their utmost, they were not worthy of a place in civilisation?”74 The Dublin Diocesan Synod, meanwhile, was told by the city’s Protestant archbishop that until the war was ended, “happily and victoriously, by God’s blessing, let us not betray our dead by talking instead of acting” and that thousands more Irish men should join up.75

Throughout the war, the most respectable and moderate of unionist newspapers, the Irish Times, ran a daily “Roll of Honour” for the thousands of Irish casualties of war. For the Irish Times, the role of the British on the Aisne was “A Record of Heroic Sacrifice”,76 while it editorialised typically that “The German people should be told, on the authority of the whole Entente, that for every town which their armies lay waste in France the Allied Armies will destroy a town in the Rhine Provinces. The Assyrian heart can be softened only by Assyrian methods.”77 (It might be noted both that this violent diatribe occurred in the last stages of the war, when Germany was clearly near collapse, and that such a grisly display of violence directed against civilians is never evident in republicanism.) The paper saw the Dublin Fusiliers (like other Irish men in the British Army) as “heroes who have gloriously upheld the best traditions of our Irish soldiers”, while “A thoughtful onlooker could not help thinking of what might have been had Ireland, as a whole, followed their noble lead.”78 The paper also believed that “Most of the greatness (in Ireland - PF) has been contributed by our Irish soldiers.”79

This mouthpiece of respectable Ireland was not just keen on mass slaughter on the battlefield and the killing of civilians. It also appreciated efficient weaponry. For instance, a report from the London Times’ special correspondent on the “Afghan frontier”, reprinted in the Irish Times, described the ability of new howitzers: “The splendid utility of this gun in modern warfare was once again demonstrated and new fuses made the shell burst forward, instead of upward, and caused havoc among the surprised enemy” who retreated “leaving many dead and wounded behind him. Our aeroplanes now went into action, bombing and machine-gunning. . .”80 Like the Irish, the Afghans were opposing a foreign power (Britain) which was operating in their territory and opposing English rule made anyone in the colonial world irrational.81

Nor was the paper to overlook the spiritual dimension to violence. Commenting on the decision to build a war memorial at Trinity College, one of the great bastions of the Protestant Ascendancy class, the paper argued that the memorial should not be associated with anything too material: “This is no occasion for the erection of a new laboratory or the foundation of scholarships. The memorial, a possession forever, must utter inspiration and consecration. It must bring into the daily atmosphere of Trinity College such a breath of the sublime that even the most careless student will pause within its shadow to say, ‘Let us now praise famous men.’”82

Given that this paper represented the more moderate wing of their opposition, it is hardly surprising that republicans felt they had little alternative but to use violence themselves. In any case in an armed world, it was inconceivable that those with the monopoly on weapons and their use (the imperialist powers) would simply hand freedom to people who desired it. Every movement for national independence in Ireland sooner or later had to face the reality of British armed power. They could bow down before that power as Daniel O’Connell had when, under pressure of the British threat of violence, he called off his monster rally at Clontarf and thereby effectively destroyed his own constitutional movement for repeal of the Act of Union, or they could resort to violence themselves. Taking the latter course is hardly surprising or unusual in colonial situations, let alone evidence of individual inadequacies or psychopathic tendencies.

Republicanism: rural and backward?

Another major focus of the revisionist view of nationalism is rural Ireland. This is seen as the epitome of backwardness and conservatism. These features, moreover, are seen as almost intrinsic, rather than as a product of centuries of colonial rule which denied education to Catholics, imposed feudal patterns of land ownership, long after feudalism had been overthrown in Britain itself, and, under the threat of a coming together of insurgent Protestants and Catholics,83 rehabilitated the Catholic Church and ensured its power as a means of maintaining social control and respect for the property rights of the ruling elites.

J.J. Lee, one of the few major intellectual figures whose work contains both revisionist and traditionalist features, has criticised the new orthodoxy, complaining about “the shallowness of much liberal thought, fashionable in the media, and reeking with condescension towards the ‘peasantry’, defined to include virtually everyone who dared query their assumptions.”84 For Fennell, “The liberals give out about ‘Irish society’ because they see it as a burden and a threat. Opposed to its inherited Catholicism and nationalism, they have written off the Irish nation, but value the state called Ireland because its power - like the national media and themselves - is highly concentrated in Dublin, and its nameplate gives them seats at international conferences. They value it particularly because, under their influence and at their urging, it is embarked on a course of provincial bending to London, the unionists and the EC that is cleansing it of Irishness, making it theirs, and rendering it docile to their agenda.”85

In fact, despite their mutual antipathy Fennell and the revisionists - or liberals, as he often labels them - share some common key assumptions. Both see Catholicism as virtually an inherent part of Irishness. Not surprisingly, like the revisionists and the unionists themselves, Fennell, although regarding himself as an Irish nationalist and even a republican, views the “Ulster Protestants” as British. Yet this is both historically false and at variance with republican principles. For a start, there is no such thing as an historic Irish nation, existing for thousands of years. Before the emergence of modern, capitalist society nation-states in the way we know them today did not exist. In pre-capitalist societies, people identified as members of a family, a locality, a region or some other non-national entity. The world of a peasant tied to a local lord was very limited indeed. Just as feudalism could not develop a national economy, there was simply no way that people in such a localist existence could develop a “national consciousness”.

Throughout the pre-capitalist period successive waves of raiders and invaders arrived in Ireland. Each of these waves mixed with the existing inhabitants. The processes of invasion, intermarriage and reproduction, and social, economic and political development together created an Irish nation. Far from being one of the oldest nations in Europe - a concept which only has any meaning in the sense that some countries in Europe developed more slowly than others in the modern period - the Irish nation is a very recent creation. It has been formed out of the common experiences and inter-relation of all the people on the island, which are distinct from the experiences both of the early Gaelic inhabitants and of those Danes, Normans, Anglo-Saxons and so on who did not invade Ireland. This is why we speak of an Irish nation and not a Gaelic nation. In fact the conceptualisation of an Irish nation dates back less than two hundred years to the United Irish movement whose leader Wolfe Tone declared that he aimed to break the connection with Britain and get the inhabitants of the island to think of themselves as Irish rather than as Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. The defeat of the United Irish movement - in other words the defeat of Ireland’s attempt at a progressive, modernising bourgeois revolution - delayed this process so the task of completing the formation of the Irish nation was left to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.86

The ideology of republicanism, in its successive stages, therefore reflected the actual level of development of Irish society itself while also desiring to shake off the fetters of national oppression so that Irish society could progress. Republican “modernising intellectuals”87 attempted to carry this process forward in the context of Irish society in the early 1900s. A useful insight can be gained into the development of republican intellectual thinking of the time from looking at Lowy’s analysis of anti-capitalist intellectuals in Europe, especially Germany.88 Lowy notes that as well as a romantic, conservative intellectual opposition to capitalism there was “a quite different section of the petty bourgeoisie - the Jacobin, enlightened, revolutionary-democratic, anti-feudal” elements. This current, existing mainly in Germany, “was profoundly disappointed by the ‘political cowardice’ of the German liberal bourgeoisie, by its incapacity to wage a consistent revolutionary-democratic struggle against the feudal monarchy.”89 With certain qualifications, due to the different levels of socio-economic development in Ireland and Germany, this helps explain the outlook of the republican intellectuals of the early 1900s. Their roots lay in Jacobinism - Irish republicanism was born under the influence of the French revolution and its high-points in the 1790s, 1848 and the late 1860s, coincided with revolutionary upsurges in Europe - and they were “profoundly disappointed” by the inability or “cowardice” of the Irish national bourgeoisie in confronting the British Crown and the old order in Ireland. Thus in the early 1900s, as in the 1800s and 1790s, the Irish republican intellectuals can be seen not only as a product of Irish society but also as an element of the European revolutionary tradition.

The concentration on republicanism as a reflection of rural backwardness and the peasant mentality dovetails with the attempt to deconstruct Irish nationalism and render it incoherent by examining individual localities and rooting the conflict in narrow parochial concerns. This allows Foster to state that the “idea of a ‘national’ struggle can be exaggerated”,90 while for Hoppen “many of the incidents commonly labelled IRA engagements were in reality no more than land seizures thinly disguised.”91 This theme is developed further by Bew, who claims that “incidents which appear to be agrarian in origin, were transformed into significant episodes of the national struggle. . .”92 The big picture - that of Irish nationalism representing the legitimate desire of the Irish people for control over their national affairs - is lost in a welter of localism, just as the overall look of a jigsaw puzzle is lost when the pieces are broken up and spread out. In a recent sociological review of trends in historiography, Furedi comments that in such an approach “Local histories and small narratives call into question the making of history on a societal level.”93 In his view, “The recent revision of Irish nationalism by historians provides an example of the tendency towards the deconstruction of a coherent subject to its most caricatured form. This anti-nationalist literature not only denies the national status of the movement but succeeds in reducing the struggle against Britain to a series of morbidly parochial concerns. By casting doubt on the motives of the participants, the historian robs the Irish liberation struggle of even a hint of idealism or of political objective.”94 This view is confirmed in Foster’s 1994 address at Oxford where he states, “Irish historians, working in many areas, tried to break up the seamless construction of narrative incident which was presented as the Story of Ireland; and to analyse the moment, rather than simply the flow.”95

Removing any dint of idealism or national coherence to the Irish national struggle is a central aspect of an important revisionist article by David Fitzpatrick.96 In a comment reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there is no such thing as society, only individuals, Fitzpatrick argues that “Nationalism is the attribute not of nations, but of nationalists.”97 Reducing it to an individual level he is able to comment, “The Irish publican who advocated first Home Rule, then the Republic, in order to secure his clerk’s stipend on the Old Age Pensions Committee, was as much a nationalist as Padraic Pearse, who had himself shot in order to secure his place in Irish history. Both Pearse and the publican sought benefits for themselves but also participated in collective actions designed to benefit their country: Pearse in an insurrection intended to jolt Irish people into renewed awareness of their national peculiarities; the publican, we may suppose, in political meetings intended to prepare Ireland for the coming of a new order under which the excise on whisky would be lower and stipends on Old Age Pensions Committees higher.”98

While the revisionists like to portray their work as thoroughly modern, “scientific”, iconoclastic even, their depiction of Irish nationalism, and attempt to undermine its legitimacy, bears striking resemblance to the work of imperialist ideologues and apologists of the early 1900s. In a review of what he calls “the moral rearmament of imperialism”, Furedi has drawn attention to the way in which “the dilemma posed by the assertion of anti-colonial aspirations was resolved in the West not by explicitly questioning the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, but by casting doubts on the claim as to what was called genuine nationalism.”99 Imperial propaganda portrayed anti-colonial nationalists as “unrepresentative agitators, criminal subversives, religious fanatics or malevolent individuals driven by anti-white hatred.”100 We might note that all of these depictions have been applied to Irish nationalists by today’s Irish revisionists, except the indictment of “anti-white hatred” has been amended to anti-English hatred. A critic of the demonisation of anti-colonial nationalism, S.K. Ratcliffe, writing in The Sociological Review (Britain) in 1908, noted of British commentators, “we exaggerate the natural divisions of India: we exaggerate enormously the difference of race, of speech, and of creed; we misread, I am persuaded, the moral of Indian history before our own beneficent advent.”101 Again, this is an apt description of the revisionist approach which both over-emphasises Catholic-Protestant schism in Ireland and absolves British policy from any causal role in the degree of schism which does exist.

Another feature of the imperialist writing of the early 1900s, Furedi notes, was that “Western experts questioned the ability of the African or Asian to cope with the demands of modernity. And since nationalism was an expression of modernity, whatever anti-colonial politics was about it had little to do with genuine nationalism. Accordingly it was now proposed that Third World nationalism was not so much a symptom of modernity as a reaction to it. . . a revolt against modernity.” Furedi further notes the way in which Anglo-American sociological literature between the two world wars “helped in reinterpreting anti-colonial protest as a manifestation of backward-looking impulses.” 102

“The Social Background of Asiatic Nationalism”, an article by N.J. Spykman published in 1926-1927 in the American Journal of Sociology, appears to bear a striking resemblance to Garvin’s article, and not only in its title. Spykman claims:

The ultimate source of much Asiatic nationalism is the individual’s resistance to a change in habit patterns. . . they had not been fitted for the new type of social order introduced by the West. An intellectual training had been provided which enabled them to understand Western ideas, but not the character formation which enabled them to function adequately in a dynamic competitive society.103

Furedi comments, “virtually every assertion of anti-colonial nationalism has been contested by the West. . . Whenever the character of nationalism is made into an issue, it is a prologue to an assault on its authenticity.”104 While the nationalism of the metropolitan powers is uncontested, in fact held up as “liberal” and “universalist”, anti-colonial nationalism is presented, at best, as “frustrated nationalism”, “tribal nationalism” and so forth. During the interwar years, “The line between imperial propaganda and academic contributions to this subject is often unclear.”105 In the following chapter we will explore how this unclear distinction has been evident in Ireland and trace an alternative understanding of the evolution of Irish nationalism and republicanism.

Part Two

Politics and the rise of revisionism

The origins of revisionism have been traced to several different dates. Brendan Bradshaw, a historian of medieval Ireland, who has recently entered the fray against revisionism and in defence of a particular kind of nationalist-moral history, sees it originating with the professionalisation of Irish history in the 1930s by figures such as R. Dudley Edwards and T.W. Moody. In Bradshaw’s view they took their credo from a misunderstanding of Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History.106 He criticises the revisionists for attempting to remove, by stealth, the catastrophic aspect in Irish history, and for undermining people’s faith in their nation and its achievements. Stephen Ellis, one of the people criticised by Bradshaw, has responded by pointing out the dangers inherent in Bradshaw’s view that historical research and writing should serve the purpose of national upliftment.107 Although this is a valid point, and a valid criticism of a whole trend of nationalist historiography, it can also be interpreted as rather disingenuous since the revisionists themselves are thoroughly committed to what is essentially a political project, the destruction of Irish nationalism and the neutralising of any critical attitude to British rule in Ireland. Presenting their history as scientific can be seen as an attempt to back up their particular interpretation with an authority higher than mere mortals.

Yet history is not a science like physics or biology. Historical “facts”, have to be interpreted and, as the revisionist Elliot notes, reinterpreted. While there are scientific methods for uncovering information, there are certainly no agreed, objective scientific rules governing interpreting and reinterpreting. Historical work inevitably involves a certain amount of creative reconstruction and such reconstruction cannot be removed from the influences of the present. Moreover although statistics are vital to historical work, they will invariably mean different things to different people and can be interpreted in different ways. And one historian’s interpretation can be another historian’s romantic fairytale. This is particularly the case where there is substantial social conflict in the present and this existing conflict is pressing the past into service. In the case of revision, Irish resistance to British rule becomes unintelligible except as the irrational actions of a backward people who simply could not understand their benevolent colonisers.

Bradshaw’s dating of revisionism’s origins and founders is accepted by Brady108, whereas Brian Murphy sees “Modern revisionism of the kind associated with Roy Foster” as first manifesting itself in F.S.L. Lyons’ Ford lectures at Oxford in 1978, subsequently published as Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939. This work, which took a far different tone to Lyons’ earlier Ireland Since the Famine was, in turn, influenced by Patrick O’Farrell’s Ireland’s English Question: Anglo-Irish relations 1534-1970.109

While Bradshaw and Brady are right to notice the changes pioneered by Dudley Edwards and Moody, the revisionism which has emerged over the past two decades has its own character and roots. It represents a far more coherent and conscious challenge to both the romanticised, conservative and Catholic-centred official form of nationalist historiography and the secular republican and Marxist historiography. It is also conditioned by a particular set of circumstances.

Anti-revisionist critics such as Anthony Coughlan, Seamus Deane110 and Desmond Fennell have noted that this new revisionism coincides with the outbreak of armed conflict in the north of Ireland. In their view revisionism is the ideological stance taken by that section of people who grew comfortable, prosperous and powerful in southern society, particularly after it opened up to foreign capital in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This social layer completely ignored the institutionalised discrimination against the nationalist population in the north.111 And, as long as the northern nationalist population made no fuss about its conditions, they were prepared to endure the largely empty and hypocritical nationalist ideology and rhetoric of successive southern governments. Things changed when the struggle for civil rights in the north was met with violence by the northern state and state-backed loyalist ultra-rightists, and a sizeable section of the northern nationalist population resorted to arms themselves.112 In a short space of time Ireland became transformed into a war-zone and the conflict in the north threatened to upset stability throughout the island. Nationalist ideas, harmless enough in peace time, suddenly became extremely dangerous and threatening. As Newsinger has noted:

The history of Irish republicanism is charged with political significance, not so much for what it has to say about past struggles and conflicts, but because of its relevance to the war that the Provisional IRA has been waging in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s. Inevitably, any assessment of past republican struggles has implications for our understanding of the contemporary conflict; correspondingly the contemporary conflict has inevitably influenced historians’ views of the republican past. This is all the more so because republicans claim to be the heirs to a nationalist tradition that stretches back to the 1790s, and beyond.113

It also became rather difficult for the authorities in the south to differentiate the actions of those whom they regarded as the state’s founders from the activities of the present-day IRA. Fine Gael, for instance, traces its roots back to the pro-Treaty party and holds annual commemorations at Beal na mBlath, where Michael Collins was killed. Upholding Michael Collins as a role model for Irish youth has no ramifications in peace-time. But with a war raging in the country it becomes problematic, to say the least, to hold up as an example of outstanding character someone mainly noted for organising the killing of members of the British “security forces”. In another case, present-day republicans pointed out with some amusement, “in September 1984 the Labour Party leader and Free State deputy-premier, Dick Spring, was tongue-tied in attempting to explain the difference between the IRA gun-runner Roger Casement (in whose honour he was unveiling a statue at Ballyheigue, County Kerry) and those IRA gun-runners on the ‘Marita Anne’ who had been arrested by his government’s forces off the Kerry coast 24 hours previously. Spring had no answer. . .”114

The establishment in the south reacted to armed conflict in the north not only through resorting to repressive legislation and rigid censorship, but also through turning against the very nationalism it had used both to justify its own existence and impose a conservative binding glue upon southern society throughout its existence.

Critics of the revisionists have also noted that the poor achievements of the southern state in terms of economic development and modernisation, and the continuing power of the Catholic Church, have alienated a liberal middle-class which increasingly looks towards Europe and regards Ireland, in particular rural Ireland, as a backwater of religiosity, conservatism and small-minded parochialism. Given that the southern state, especially under Fianna Fail governments, has presented itself as the outcome of centuries of struggle by an historic Irish nation for self-realisation and independence, this alienated middle class has come to reject the nationalist ethos and see in it the most important cause of Irish underdevelopment and lack of modernity. Looking towards Europe and Britain today, the revisionists - critics have said - project into the past the idea that Britain was a force for progress in Ireland and nationalism was a peasant reaction against modernisation.

That this analysis of revisionism contains a great deal of truth is evident from a simple comparison of the way Irish historiography before and after the outbreak of war in the north dealt with revolutionary nationalism. In 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was celebrated with enormous pomp and ceremony by the southern state, yet once the conflict in the north broke out such official celebrations were halted. From a viewpoint hostile to republicanism, Colm Toibin, a novelist and short story writer of the generation which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, recalls:

In 1966 the state celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Rising with enormous gusto, with marches in which schools took part and rousing speeches and an emotional television series called Insurrection, broadcast nightly. But once the North broke and the IRA campaign recommenced, the state’s attitude changed. ‘In an act of astonishing political opportunism, O’Loughlin wrote, ‘1916 was revised. By 1976, and the 60th celebrations, a different tune was being played. For people of my generation, who were and are, in an important sense, neither Republican nor non-Republican, this was a lesson they would never forget. To see history so swiftly rewritten was to realise that what was called history was in fact a facade behind which politicians manoeuvred for power.’. .

In 1991, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Rising, there were calls to retransmit Insurrection, but the television station refused on the basis that it was too inflammatory. There were a few half-hearted public ceremonies, presided over by the Taoiseach but hardly anyone attended.115

Among those who had happily commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of an insurrection against Britain during wartime - surely the ultimate in subversion - was the Irish Times. In 1916 it was a thoroughly neo-British paper, bitterly opposed to the Rising, to the extent of even running a claim that Constance Markievicz had a room full of human skulls for bizarre worship practices in her house.116 In 1966, the paper ran a special sixteen-page supplement on the Rising, which subsequently became the basis for 1916 The Easter Rising, edited by Owen Dudley Edwards and Fergus Pyle. Here, the Gaelic revivalists appear not as Anglophobic racists, but “an exceptionally gifted group” and, indeed, all the revolutionaries are quite splendid people. Even D.P. Moran’s reactionary, Catholic Leader is a harmless and happy little weekly contributing “to the spread of cultural nationalism.”117

In the introduction Dudley Edwards and Pyle treat readers to a glowing account of Connolly, whose “presence. . . among the insurgent leaders was a formidable indictment of a major failure of the Home Rule movement and the British government alike.”118 Connolly’s drive for insurrection is treated sympathetically and the progressive views of the other 1916 leaders, and Connolly’s influence on them, is noted. In particular Connolly is said to have influenced Pearse, “whose later writings show evidence of advanced social thinking”.119 The editors even state, “It is to be hoped that a revival of interest in the 1916 rising will bring with it a renewed study of Connolly’s writings, whose remorseless analysis of the evils of his own day has all too much relevance to the present.”120 In the book’s epilogue, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s only criticism of the rising is that, from a tactical point of view, it would have been better if the insurrection had been in 1918, when Britain tried to introduce conscription. In such a situation, an insurrection would have had more chance of success.121 He then, interestingly, goes on to show that the goals of Pearse and Connolly were never met, that the “republic” (ie the southern state) which claimed their mantle did so fraudulently, and indicated the effect that this had on his own generation:

My generation grew into chilling knowledge that we had failed, that our history had turned into rubbish, our past to ‘a trouble of fools’.122 With this feeling it is not surprising that the constant public praise for the ideals of Pearse and Connolly should have produced in us bafflement rather than enthusiasm. We were bred to be patriotic, only to find that there was nothing to be patriotic about; we were republicans of a republic that wasn’t there. Small wonder that Pearse’s vision of an Ireland ‘not free merely, but Gaelic as well’123 did not convince us. In Pearse’s sense, Ireland was not free; why should it be Gaelic, which was a much more unlikely condition.

Pearse died, not for an island, or part of an island, but for a nation: an entity with a distinct culture, based on its own language. The nation for which he died never came to life.124

He further notes that “Tone and Pearse lived and died to close” the division between Catholic and Protestant,125 “that Connolly regarded the Easter Rising not just as an Irish rising against England but as a blow against capitalist imperialism”,126 and that, in the case of Connolly’s writings and actions, “The sense of these is the sense of the revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world today.”127

Yet, a few years later, O’Brien wrote States of Ireland, whose dustjacket rightly summed up its contents as “asking a great deal of the Irish; an acknowledgment that their history, their beliefs, their public thoughts about themselves, are significantly wrong.” The book is also said to be “therapeutically essential”.128

The book’s appendix includes the text of a statement made by O’Brien in a public debate in Dublin in May 1972 at which, among other things, he declared that Irish republicanism by its very nature tended to develop towards fascism. The book also contains one of the first sustained attacks on Connolly by an Irish intellectual. Given that the writings and actions of the deceased Connolly were the same in 1972 as in 1968, as were the fundamental views of Irish republicanism, it seems reasonable to explain the change in O’Brien’s views as a reflection of contemporary events in Ireland itself. Namely, war broke out. Those who, like O’Brien, recognised that the southern state, although appropriating the names of Tone, Pearse and Connolly and the symbols and rhetoric of republicanism, really bore no resemblance at all to what these “founding fathers” had stood for, that it was all sham and betrayal, were faced with two alternatives: they could either hold to their positions, oppose both British rule and what they had said was a fraud of a state in the south, or they could turn their backs on their entire understanding of Irish history and go along with both London and Dublin.

The liberal middle class social layer which O’Brien represented both intellectually and, to a certain extent, as a member of the Irish parliament, although deeply disillusioned with the southern state, were nevertheless a privileged section of society. To have stuck to the critique of southern society made by O’Brien in the 1950s and 1960s and acted upon it, would have made them pariahs as the southern state was increasingly drawn into collaboration with Britain and moved to repress republicanism south of the border. Suddenly, being actively republican in the south became dangerous; in fact it became the equivalent of being a communist or having communist friends during the McCarthy period in the United States. Most of this social layer, unprepared to follow through on their original analysis of the British role in Ireland and the bankruptcy of the southern state, simply dumped everything they had said they believed in, including their view of Irish history. And, with all the zeal of new converts, or perhaps the zeal of people flagellating themselves for past sins such as republicanism, began also to lash any views, including historical interpretations, which might be seen as justifying rebellion against established authority. Indeed, O’Brien even became a member of the 1973-77 coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour, holding the position of minister of posts and telegraphs and being responsible for the notorious censorship of broadcasting (Section 31). This legislation banned radio and television from interviewing representatives of Sinn Fein, a legal political party in the south. (In fact, the way it was implemented meant that thousands of people were banned from radio and television for over 20 years, the ban not being modified until late 1994.129 The ban also had the spillover effect of removing from all broadcast media many academics and intellectuals who held nationalist and anti-colonial views. The revisionists were direct beneficiaries of this censorship since it was virtually impossible for their critics to get a public hearing.)

O’Brien’s States of Ireland helped open the way for a plethora of historical rewriting. Assisted by the McCarthyite atmosphere in the south, revisionism soon became dominant in Irish historiography. By the mid-1970s Ruth Dudley Edwards was producing a biography of Pearse, not as someone with “advanced social thinking” but as a person with “a deranged view of the world” and a paedophilic interest in children. Acclaimed by revisionist critics for demythologising Pearse, the book was viewed by others as essentially a hatchet job.130

F.S.L. Lyons who, as we have seen, is cited as a seminal figure in the development of revisionism, has said that, as well as widening Irish horizons, membership of the EC is useful in providing “an increasing awareness that terrorism is an international phenomenon and that anti-terrorist techniques are developing as a result of international experience is not without relevance for Northern Ireland. To have been, as it were, an experimental laboratory in this question is, God knows, no comfort for the dead and the maimed, but if in due course it leads to more effective measures against this unmitigated evil, then we may feel that to belong to the wider world may have its compensations as well as its stresses.”131

These comments are especially interesting since, so often, the revisionists deny that they have any particular political slant or agenda. For Lyons, the “terrorists” are clearly not the British Army and other “security forces” in the north of Ireland, but those engaged in a war with the British state. The “terrorism”, not the injustices and violence which gave rise to it (and which remain unalluded to by Lyons), are the “unmitigated evil”. And, if the IRA today are “terrorists” and the British Army are “peacekeepers” and “security forces”, the next step is to project that conception into the past.

Yet dispensing with the older version of Irish history is not regarded as unproblematic by revisionists such as Lyons. After all, a particular form of that interpretation (the Catholic, conservative one) has provided the ideological glue legitimising the southern state and holding it together. If this glue is melted away, what will replace it? Here again, we see the political side of revisionism. After noting that “the old Catholic-Gaelic stereotype cannot hold out much longer” he remarks, in the very next sentence, that “some of the consequences of our belated entry into the twentieth century are not very attractive.” He sees “devastated inner cities”, “vandalism”, “broken homes”, “drug and drink problems”, “callousness towards the old and the helpless”, “obsessive cult of sport as a substitute religion” and “sleasy seductions of the consumer society” as all part of “the filthy modern tide” washing over the new Ireland.132

Critics such as Coughlan, Deane and Fennell paint the revisionists as privileged members of society, setting about the destruction of Irish nationalism in a deliberate and calculated way. Newsinger, whose earlier work tended towards revisionism but latterly has raised major criticisms of it, now notes, “It is an essentially conservative project that seems almost always to endorse the moderate against the popular, the establishment against the rebel, evolution against revolution.”133 But two further points need to be made.

Firstly, the anti-revisionists often tend to overlook the problems with the traditional nationalist historiography, as if any nationalist history should automatically have legitimacy. They often fail to identify the tensions and contradictions within nationalism and the way in which nationalist history has been concocted to provide a sort of biblical story of the Irish race coming out of slavery, with Collins or de Valera cast as Moses, depending on which wing of the southern establishment was controlling the story-telling. Newsinger notes, for instance, that while the Fenian movement of the 1860s was viewed “with considerable hostility by the Catholic middle class and constitutional nationalists, once it had been defeated its struggles were quickly subsumed into a general nationalist history. . . Those aspects of Fenianism that challenged the Catholic middle class were forgotten and instead a sanitised memory of the movement was pressed into service, helping to carry this same Catholic middle class to power in an independent Ireland.” Dead revolutionaries were “used to sustain a constitutional enterprise they would have rejected when alive.”13