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Interpretation of Irish history 1.6 Interpretation 1.6 of the new programme of study for history at Key Stage 3, Interpretation, requires students to come to grips with this most stimulating aspects of history by
a. Understanding how historians and others form interpretations
b. Understanding why historians and others have interpreted events, people and situations in different ways through a range of media
c. Evaluating a range of interpretations of the past to assess their validity. |
Interpreting Irish history Debate about the history of Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations has been so vigorous, at time so bitterly controversial, that it provides
• a range of examples of different interpretations
• opportunities understand why historians in particular have interpreted events, people and situations in different ways , and
• a chance to evaluate range of interpretations of the past to assess their validity.
Interpretations have been influenced by factors which affect historians everywhere, such as personal background and predilections, purpose of writing, academic training, availability of evidence and techniques of historical inquiry, the time and circumstances of writing.
However, debate has been particularly pointed in Ireland since it has questioned the Irish-centred and nationalist view of the past which dominated historical writing from the Famine to the 1940s.
Some subjects, such as home rule, proceeded on the normal lines of historical debate, but others, such as the Famine and 1916, became embroiled in 'the revisionist debate'. |
Irish examples - historians Irish examples - film Michael Collins (1996) 'Framing history. Neil Jordan's Michael Collins' by Luke Gibbons, History Ireland, Spring, 1997, pp 47-51* http://iisresource.org/Documents/Gibbons_Framing_History_Collins.pdf
'Troubles, ceasefires and peace?', Screening Ireland. Film and television representation by Lance Pettitt, Manchester University Press, 0-71905-270-X, pp 256-8 http://iisresource.org/Documents/Pettitt_Michael_Collins.pdf
'Latter-day Mother Irelands: The role of women' in Michael Collins and The Wind that Shakes the Barley by Pilar Villar-Argáiz, Estudios Irlandeses, Number 2, 2007, pp. 183-204 http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue2/Issue%202/pdf/MotherIrelands(PilarVillar).pdf | * The article concludes: 'By reworking the image of the gangster in the light of both recent developments in the genre, and the aura surrounding Collins, Jordan’s film has, in effect, lifted the crude, sinister associations off the stereotype of the ‘Godfather’, thereby depriving revisionist demonology of one of its favourite tropes. It is this, perhaps, more than any other factor, which accounts for the extraordinary animus directed against the film in the British press, and by revisionist critics and historians in Ireland. Like the best historical films, it forces us to reconsider not only the past, but also many of the platitudes which pass for political analysis in the present.' | General The best single discussion of changing film and television representations of Ireland is Lance Pettitt's Screening Ireland. Film and television representation, Manchester University Press, 0-71905-270-X. |
| Irish historical debate Over the past 160 years or so, the writing of Irish history has characterised by three broad perspectives:
• nationalist perspective, which was dominant from the Famine until after the Second World war
• revisionist perspective of professional historians who rejected the nationalist perspective and dominated from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s
• post-revisionist perspective of another set of professional historians who, from the later 1980s, have endorsed neither the wilder claims of the nationalist tradition, nor ‘the complacent platitudes' that succeeded them. | Nationalist perspective
From this perspective, the fundamental fact of Irish history was the inexorable rise of the Irish nation and the assertion of independence from England.
The tone was set in early writings on the Famine and the rise of revolutionary republicanism in the nineteenth century. Its ascendancy was confirmed by the creation of an independent Irish state by the revolutionaries. | Revisionist perspective
For others born in an independent Ireland and professional historians, students of the Institute of Historical Research in London, the British relationship is not paramount.
Moreover, they were disappointed with the independent Ireland that the nationalist struggle had produced - a dwindling population, economic stagnation and what were seen as the deadening the influence of tradition and Catholicism. For them nationalism was no longer a creative force but as ‘a potent home brew of atavisim, tradition and Catholicism’.
This tendency was further enhanced by the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland - a distancing from the republican, revolutionary tradition.
According to one critic,
‘For the revisionists, the Irish nationalist tradition, exemplified by militant republicanism, suffered from an addition to violence, derived not from an accurate analysis to Irish-British relations but from a flawed atavistic populism that worked as an evil catalyst for a psychopathic blood lust.’ | Post-revisionist perspective
Since the 1980s, other historians have been influenced by new economic and statistical techniques and the realities of the wider modern world with global interdependence.
This trend was encouraged in the 1990s by a new pride in Ireland with, for example, the advent of the Celtic Tiger and the IRA ceasefire.
Such have challenged the revisionist view and have endorsed neither the wilder claims of the Mitchelite tradition, nor ‘the complacent platitudes' that succeeded them. |
| The revisionist debate Why did the revisionists arouse antagonism?
At stake was the traditional nationalist understanding of the Irish past.
Opponents of revisionism were found everywhere, but they gained much credibility from the leadership of Father Brendan Bradshaw, an Irish Catholic history don at Cambridge University
Anti-revisionists argued that that the concern of academic historians to distance themselves from a nationalism identified with propagandist myth making and violence led them to produce a bland, ‘value-free’ history that has failed to do justice to crucial aspects of Irish experience, that emptied ‘the evidence of its traumatic content', and failed to capture the ‘catastrophic dimension' of the Irish historical experience.
Critics did not want value-free history, but advocated instead ‘present-centred history', which fully recognised the agony and ecstasy the Irish nation had experienced in its struggle for recognition and independence.
A lecture by Peter Berresford Ellis in 1998 underlines the depth of feeling the debate aroused: Revisionism in Irish historical writing. The New Anti-Nationalist School of Historians.
The title of another anti-revisionist piece in 2006 was even more pointed: Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers. | Are the charges justified right?
None of these charges need be accepted without question.
The more critical approach to traditional understandings of the Irish past evident from the 1970s arguably owed less to developments in Northern Ireland than to the new perspectives opened up by more extensive research, and by a greater willingness to view what were supposedly peculiarly Irish problems in a comparative context.
Nor is it self-evident that to write critically of the key assumptions of nationalism is necessarily to engage in counter-revolutionary polemic: in independent Ireland, it could be argued, nationalism has been for most of the past seventy years the official ideology, and historians who have drawn attention to its evasions, blind spots, and untested assumptions have only discharged the proper function of any society’s critics and thinkers.
At its best the campaign against ‘revisionism’ has encouraged a healthy revival of debate on important issues of interpretation. At its worst it has provided a bogus mantle of radicalism for what is in fact the refurbishment of traditional myths and preconceptions. | The Oxford Companion to Irish history edited by S. J. Connolly, OUP, 0-19866-240-8, 243-4 |
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