The aim of recent Irish historians has been worthy enough: to replace the old morality-tale of Holy Ireland versus Perfidious Albion with a less sentimental and simplified account. However, the more seductive writers among them tended to appeal to the old Manichaean mentality, choosing simply to invert its workings: whatever the nationalists had extolled, they tended to deride. Nationalism in Ireland, as in most other countries, was a broad and comprehensive movement, containing progressive as well as conservative elements. Compelled by the tacts of history to admit that nationalism often found itself in alliance with socialism, feminism and even pacifism, the historians tended nevertheless to characterize even cultural nationalism as Anglophobic and anti-Protestant. "To a strong element in the Gaelic League", wrote Roy Foster in the most influential and brilliant synthesis of this school, "literature in English was Protestant as well as anti-national". With conclusive eloquence, he deduced that "the emotions focused by cultural revivalism around the turn of the century were fundamentally sectarian and even racialist".4
The motives behind these rather unexpected assertions were of the highest: the desire of the historians was to invent a more ecumenical and inclusive definition of Irishness than the one with which many of them had grown up in the southern state. Denying doctrines of inevitability, they wished to restore to each moment of history the openness which it once had: hence Foster's claim that the 1916 Rising was not the outcome of the cultural revival led by Hyde and Yeats, so much as a discrete event brought on by the conditions pertaining during World War One. This was a classic "revisionist" denial of that Whig view of history which sees everything in the light of what followed. It was a salutary reminder that most protagonists are at the mercy of their immediate moment: but it can be taken too far. To remove a sense of linear causality is to deny oneself and one's readers answers to fundamental questions: Why did the English colonize, exploit and terrorize the Irish? In the name of what values did they put down the 1916 Rising? And why did they so fatally misinterpret the popular mood as to deliver Ireland into the arms of Sinn Féin? Because he remained incurious about the popular culture which often makes things happen, Foster was reduced in the manner of a nouveau romancier to chronicling cataclysmic events without apparent or adequate cause. It can be scarcely surprising that he should have found the Easter Rebellion "irrational". In such a version of history-without-agency, what seem like the impersonal laws of history are often no more than historians' laws, improvised to meet the needs of a moment.
It would be wrong to infer from this, as some nationalist critics of Foster have done, that his is a heartless, value-free practice.5 If anything, precisely the reverse is true: far from being clinical, his work is the outcome of a deep emotional investment by a patriotic Irishman who believes that the most useful service which he can perform for his people is the devaluation of a nationalism, some of whose disciples are still willing to kill and be killed in its defence. The fact that the rebellion in the north was primarily a protest against economic oppression and political injustice has not prevented the new generation of historians from a scrupulous consideration of whether any links in the chains of events which led to insurrectionary violence might have been forged in their professional smithies. Many of them – Roy Foster and F. S. L Lyons included – lived as Protestants in an independent southern state which was at times a sponsor of narrow-gauge nationalism and a Catholic triumphalism. These unattractive forces repelled them, as they distressed tens of thousands of liberal Catholics: many thus repelled concluded, against the weight of the evidence, that they must always have been present or at least latent in cultural nationalism. So the Anglophobia and sectarianism of the republic in the mid-century were "read back", in a curiously ahistorical fashion, into the writings and workings of the revolutionary generation. The same historians who had been taught to be sceptical of those, like Yeats, who saw every process in the light of what followed, now suspended that scepticism when it came to their own experience. Yeats was not permitted to "read forward" from the cultural risorgimento to 1916, but they could surely "read back" from the frustrations of their own lives.
For all their iconoclasm and for all their overdue revisions, the historians did not in the main challenge the Anglocentric account of the Irish past.6 Instead, they produced the familiar polar narrative beloved of their nationalist precursors, but on this occasion they viewed it more often from a British than an Irish perspective. Far from seeing the British presence in Ireland as a colonial or imperial exercise, they tended to present it as well-meaning, occasionally inept, but rarely malevolent – very much in keeping with the prevailing view of the role of the military in Northern Ireland. Indeed, one of the historians, Ronan Fannning, remarked with some asperity on the indecent haste with which the authorities in Dublin, confronted by the IRA at a time when membership of the European Economic Community seemed more pressing a concern than rehearsing the wrongs of the British, suddenly accommodated the new history. He remarked that ruling regimes always seek to control the presentation of the past in such a way as to buttress and legitimize their own authority.7 As it happened, the spread of free secondary education coincided with the moment when a revised history began to appear in school textbooks. A bitter debate ensued between the old-fashioned nationalists and the revisionists, proving little other than the fact that in Ireland the past is never a different country and scarcely even the past: instead it becomes just one more battleground contested by the forces of the present.
Most of the historians, like the British, remained fixated on a nationalism which they repeatedly deplored but could not transcend by any truly innovative methodology. Telling the old story from the other side's viewpoint was scarcely a breakthrough: more an attempt to trick out Tom Broadbent's benevolent imperialism in slightly updated gear. By refusing to countenance a post-colonial analysis, they colluded – quite unconsciously, of course – with the widespread nationalist conceit of Irish exceptionality: the Irish experience was not to be compared with that of other peoples who sought to decolonize their minds or their territory. In exculpating the British, they certainly did justice to some persons who had been unfairly demonized by nationalist historians, but they also passed rather too swiftly over instances of imperial guilt; and, in the process, they invented some new demons of their own. Patrick Pearse, for example, was no longer to be treated as a plaster saint but as a vulgar egomaniac: the consideration that it is not usual for egomaniacs to sacrifice their lives for a cause did not detain the new commentators, most of whom found it hard to imagine any set of values which might transcend the life of the individual. Yet the revisionist enterprise was genuinely useful: Pearse needed rescuing from his uncritical admirers, who had long ceased to read what he actually said, and the historians sent many back to the original texts, which surprised and delighted a whole new generation of readers. If nationalism was the thesis, revisionism was the antithesis: of its nature it was not so much wrong as incomplete. The dialectic needed to be carried through to a synthesis.
Joseph Lee's Ireland: Politics and Society 1912–86 brought that moment even closer. In rhetoric of high voltage, the author declared his agenda with commendable openness – Ireland has been cursed with those who want to "possess" land, jobs, prestige and bereft of those who can "perform" (entrepreneurs, creative social thinkers, a dynamic middle class).8 His work appealed to many cultural nationalists, who had no difficulty in endorsing his argument that the loss of the Irish language had a traumatic effect on Irish self-confidence. Yet explicit in Lee's study was an allegation not unlike that implicit in Foster's: that since the English left in 1921 things had only got worse. Lee's theme was the failure of economic nationalism – an ideal he judged to have been sapped by emigration, lack of enterprise, cultural introversion, and the absence of a critical intelligentsia. Readers were beguiled by the author's brio, by the patriotism which manifestly informed his rather devastating diagnoses, and by his willingness (so untypical of the academic) to offer prescriptions –
but it may well be that he overstated his case.
His comparisons were all with smaller European countries, which did not undergo the long nightmare of colonial expropriation and misrule, much less wave after wave of massive emigration. Had he widened his field of vision, he might have conceded that in many respects the Irish achievement has been remarkable: a great modernist literature, a caring community bound together by a high degree of social consensus, an economy which (for all its undevelopment) still features in the top thirty industrial democracies, a stable multi-party system with sufficient independence to pursue through a number of decades a distinctive foreign policy unbeholden to either superpower. Greece, the other former colony of the European Union, is much less developed than Ireland in most of these respects.
Karl Marx was right to describe Ireland as a crucible of modernity, for in at least two major ways it is arguably more advanced than Britain. It has recognized the need to come to terms with nationalism and has accepted a fully modern form of the state, with a written constitution that has gradually been purged of sectarian accretions. At the start of this century, George Bernard Shaw said that England was still too backward for a Home Rule movement; and, at the end, that remains the case, with English nationalism locked into an archaic multinational state that fails to recognize modern notions of citizenship or of rights. The extraordinary modernity of Irish thinking and writing deserves to be stressed, when too many commentators have emphasized only backwardness. Equally striking are the constant, usually successful, adjustments to an ever-changing situation. It would be hardly too much to say that the Irish, despite their reputation, are one of the least conservative peoples of Europe, to judge by the rate at which they have changed over the past century and a half. The need now is to understand the inner experience of those caught up in the process: and my belief is that literature and popular culture can help us to recover many voices drowned out by official regimes or by their appointed chroniclers.
The historians, with the best intentions in the world, rarely acknowledge that they write at the mercy of literature – that for each there is an appropriate form, which dictates a whole range of exclusions as well as inclusions. If Foster has written the story of his land as a nouveau roman, then Lee has chosen the jeremiad. Man, it would seem, is finally an aesthetic creature who will choose the most "elegant" model which seems to account for the facts – but literary studies may, somewhat paradoxically, serve to remind people of all those messy phenomena which escape such hopeful thematization. This is not to claim a higher truth-value for literature, merely to recognize that it can complete the picture and at the same time draw attention to what the framer chose to exclude. The myths debunked by revisionist historians were in some cases terribly false; yet, if huge numbers of people believed in them, then they also must be accorded their place as decisive agents of history. Moreover, the trauma of those who suffered and the exaltation of those who struggled deserve our accounting. To creative artists may have fallen the task of explaining what no historian has fully illuminated – the reason why the English came to regard the Irish as inferior and barbarous, on the one hand, and, on the other, poetic and magical.
Perhaps the greatest contribution made by Joseph Lee to Irish scholarship has been his insistence on the value of comparisons (even though most of his are limited to a European frame of reference). Only Raymond Crotty, in his analytic studies of agricultural economics in Ireland and the "underdeveloped" world, went further.9 Both men stood relatively isolated in a university system which lacked departments of comparative politics or comparative literature. As notable as this lack, however, was the unwillingness of most colleges in the republic to offer holistic courses in Irish Studies. These are widely and successfully taught on an interdisciplinary basis in Belfast, Coleraine, Oxford, Kent, London, Liverpool and in dozens of American, Canadian and Australian universities, but in Ireland the thinking still seems to be that academic rigour would be compromised by such approaches. The result is an extraordinarily insulated set of disciplinary activities, as well as a rather dishonourable suspicion of those few practitioners who have bravely pursued cultural studies in the widest sense. Yet the need for such ecumenical, even impure, practices is far greater there than in most other countries. Imagine the contribution to peace and reconciliation if every unionist child, through an integrated course of cultural study, learned something of the riches of the Gaelic tradition as mediated by such exemplary Protestants as Synge, Gregory and Hyde. Imagine also the potential if many children in the republic were to be challenged by a syllabus which asked them to study the elements of English Protestant tradition which might help them to repair the gaps in their own. An education which used the traditions of neighbouring peoples as a basis for constructing a critique of its own might in due time lead to real progress.
There have been sustained, at times self-lacerating, attempts at just such an autocritique in the republic: but these have been matched by no similar revisions in other places. The unionists of Northern Ireland, perhaps because they feel besieged, consider this a time less for self-scrutiny than for self-assertion, and so they have produced no coherent movement of revisionism – although individual contributions by Christopher McGimpsey and the reverend Martin Smyth have proved illuminating. Equally, the British analysis veers between the traditional "not an inch" of the pro-union conservatives and the rather uncritical "greener than green" sentiment of the labourite left. Unionists have yet to explain the meaning of their union with a Britain now filled with ethnic minorities and a multicultural system: in such a contact, might not the speakers of the Irish language in Belfast claim good treatment as a civil right rather than as a tribal challenge? There is reason to believe that the "union" in which many believe is with a Britain that is now a pre-war curiosity for historians.
The British, for their part, might ask themselves to spell out the implications of their continuing support for the union: they must attempt to explain how for fifty years one of the most civilized peoples of modern Europe maintained a one-party state on its very own doorstep. And they might consider whether the cost of that union has been heavy not just in terms of lives and money, but in the damage done to British democracy by a system of torture, supergrasses and spies. As the forces for a republican Britain gather strength and self-confidence, they may begin to ask whether the links between a triumphalist all-Protestant monarchy and the thinking of loyalist exremists are too close for comfort.
British socialists and radicals might come to question their own longstanding fixation on Irish nationalism, with its colourful array of poets, balladeers, desperadoes, and try instead to make an informed assessment of the deeper aspirations and implications of unionism. Since the days of Matthew Arnold, British liberals have offered mythical readings of the culture which their government is nominally opposing: perhaps it is time for them to conduct a pragmatic analysis of the culture of the northern majority which Westminster is still actually supporting. The link with an exclusively Protestant monarchy has not been an entirely happy one for many unionists, who are painfully aware of the use of that link to an openly sectarian politician like Ian Paisley: and the much-neglected contribution of Ulster Presbyterianism to the building of the United States might prove a better source of inspiration, and of overseas aid, in years to come. One possible explanation for the reluctance of many unionist revisionists to declare themselves may be the widespread view among republicans that Northern Ireland, being constructed on ritual discrimination, is unsalvageable: to reform it, they say, would be in effect to destroy it. Yet the emergence of a strong unionist autocritique might well be the most potent of all defences against such strictures.10
Equally, the citizens of the republic need to put some hard questions to themselves. Just how "Gaelic" is the self-image of a country which, within the past decade, has had a Minister for Education who could not speak the Irish language? And just how "Catholic" is a land which no longer produces priests in sufficient quantity to service t
he increasingly elderly and depopulated parishes of the major archdioceses?
Of their very nature, the problems of the north of Ireland cannot be solved by some bold, imaginative gesture: rather their harsh contours can be softened by a steady chipping-away at the lies fostered by simplified versions of history. Just how tangled the questions of identity have become is apparent in the fact that militant loyalist gunmen have at various times in recent decades threatened to kill British soldiers in defence of a union which – it is feared – the authorities in London might be about to betray. There could scarcely be a more vivid illustration of Douglas Hyde's thesis that Anglophobia was strongest among those who were most Anglicized: what was true of English-imitating Irish nationalists in the 1890s seems now to be true of English-fixated Irish unionists in the 1990s. Hyde took this hatred of England as a sign of lost self-confidence, of a people whose culture lacked an inner dynamic ever since their abandonment of their native language.
Inventing Ireland Page 79