{"id":253,"date":"2016-03-20T17:48:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T17:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irishhistoriansinbritain.org\/?p=253"},"modified":"2016-03-20T17:48:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T17:48:22","slug":"revisionism-revised-by-revisionists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"Revisionism Revised \u2013 by Revisionists"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Jim Smyth<\/span><\/h5>\n

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In 2011, deploring the \u2018fundamental hypocrisy\u2019 of official Ireland\u2019s attitudes towards the 1916 rebellion, the (self-described) revisionist, and polemicist, Eoghan Harris, questioned the wisdom of any centennial \u2018military display\u2019; \u2019the republic has no right\u2019, he declared, \u2018to parade troops past the GPO\u2019. In 2015, however, he had switched positions. The \u2018defence forces should [after all] have a dominant role\u2019 in the forthcoming commemorations. How is this flipflop to be accounted for? Did Harris follow the purported reasoning of John Maynard Keynes:<\/p>\n

When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?<\/p>\n

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?<\/p>\n

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?[i]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps he had altered his conclusions because his information had changed \u2013 by way of the recently accessible Bureau of Military History Witness Statements, for example? In 1976 a Fine Gael-led coalition government banned public commemoration of the rising; today the leader of another Fine Gael-led administration is a self-styled \u20181916 man\u2019. What changed facts changed their minds?<\/p>\n

To answer those questions we should begin with 1966 and Conor Cruise O\u2019Brien\u2019s seminal dissent from the official celebrations of the rebellion. In the 50 years since then the \u2018history\u2019 of that event has mutated, with Soviet-scale shamelessness, according to, as historian Ronan Fanning\u2019s puts it, the \u2018political imperatives\u2019 of the times. Nothing epitomizes more the rocky road to 2016 than the fluctuations in the reputation of Patrick Pearse, a figure sacralised in the 1960s, ridiculed in the 1970s and beyond, and rehabilitated in time for the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of his execution (although his 1977 vintage biographer still thinks he was \u2018nuts\u2019[ii]<\/a>). The iconic image of Pearse stood to the forefront of the events of Easter 1966 which celebrated the proclamation of the republic in parade and pageant, the issue of commemorative postage stamps and post cards, and specially commissioned television drama and documentary, all set to the soundtrack of Sean O\u2019Riada\u2019s majestic Mise Eire. <\/em>Schoolchildren who took part in the festivities recalled them vividly, but looked back in some perplexity. \u2018My generation\u2019 notes the novelist Dermot Bolger, who was seven years old at the time, \u2018were perhaps unique in being left so quickly in the curious limbo of being taught certain songs at school one year and seeing them banned from radio the next\u2019.<\/p>\n

The reason for the abrupt silencing of inconvenient bits of the past was the eruption of the northern crisis in 1968-1969. Had he have had it his way \u2013 as he demonstrated when eventually he did get the chance \u2013 Cruise O\u2019Brien would have silenced them two years sooner. By glorifying the use of political violence by a \u2018determined minority\u2019 in the past, the state, he argued, sanctioned it, implicitly, in the present. Because of the unfinished business left over by partition appeals to the patriot dead \u2013 \u2018being taught certain songs at school\u2019 – incited and, to some minds, legitimised, armed struggle by living generations. In his essay, \u2018The Embers of Easter\u2019, published in 1966, O\u2019Brien contented that<\/p>\n

A few who were not lunatics, but brave and logical young men went to their death for Pearse\u2019s Republic, in whose attainability they had been allowed and even encouraged to believe. They saw clearly that the national territory was not being integrated by semantic exercises; they tried force, sanctioned as they believed by the example of Pearse and Connolly, and they died for the fantasy of a United Ireland at the hands of one or other of the governments which rule the Ireland of reality. The government in Dublin continued to propagate the fantasy while punishing those who acted on it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is the \u2018fundamental hypocrisy\u2019 of official rhetoric to which Harris refers. The brave young men to whom O\u2019Brien refers were IRA volunteers in the 1939 British bombing and 1956 Border campaigns. And the dangers of promoting heroicized versions of history were about to get much worse.<\/p>\n

For all its pretentions to intellectual detachment, its scholarly austerities, and attendant professionalization, Irish historical revisionism, codified in the late 1930s, has always had an (at the least) de facto <\/em>political agenda: to purge the historical record of the distortions and misconceptions produced by popular \u2013 that is nationalist \u2013 \u2018mythology\u2019. O\u2019Brien now began to push that agenda vigorously into the open. And as the conflict in the north intensified his critique of its ideological and rhetorical underpinnings on the republican side sharpened. In his 1972 book, States of Ireland<\/em>, he attributes much of the blame for the outbreak and escalation of the troubles to the incendiary influence of schoolbook history generally and to \u2018the cult of 1916\u2019 especially. Even unionist misrule \u2013 a rather obvious \u2018cause\u2019 of civil unrest \u2013 is largely explained in terms of the systemically sectarian, gerrymandered, northern state\u2019s understandable, if admittedly \u2018vindictive\u2019, response<\/em> to the threat presented by a disaffected Catholic minority. Thus, in O\u2019Brienland 1916\u2019s \u2018mystique\u2019 is modern Ireland\u2019s malaise \u2013 one which the good doctor intended to eradicate. Dr O\u2019Brien was a Labour minister in the 1973-1977 coalition government which prohibited the 1976 commemoration of the rebellion and banned Sinn Fein spokespersons from the airwaves. He personally planned to go further, by drawing up Nixon-style enemies lists, extending censorship into the classroom, and locking up off-message newspaper editors. In short, as he casually revealed to an incredulous American journalist, he proposed \u2018to cleanse the culture\u2019. Upon mature reflection, his admirer, Mr Harris, misses the \u2018moral clarity\u2019 of that bygone age.<\/p>\n

In several ways O\u2019Brien\u2019s analysis provides the template for contemporaneous and subsequent debunking of the Easter Rebellion. To those who accepted the thesis that the valorization of rebellion, blood sacrifice, and martyrdom, had been used by later cohorts of extremists to justify violence, it followed that the rebellion itself should now be delegitimised. That exercise had two basic elements. First, it was argued that the rebels lacked legal and moral legitimacy because they had no popular or democratic mandate (nor, in the Catholic theological cousin of this indictment, did they meet the requirements of a just war); and secondly, the whole bloody business was pointless anyway because Home Rule was on the statute books and would, in due course, have been delivered peacefully.<\/p>\n

Was it needless death after all?<\/p>\n

For England may keep faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rebellion has been characterized variously as \u2018an orgy of violence\u2019, \u2018a negation of democracy\u2019 and \u2018fundamentally delinquent\u2019; \u2018what right\u2019 asks Ruth Dudley Edwards, \u2018had the 1916 insurgents to start killing innocent Irish people in Dublin?\u2019 More precisely, as Liam Kennedy points out, before the volunteers took to the barricades \u2018the people of inner city Dublin \u2026 were not even consulted\u2019! (as if the ill reared rebels had dispensed with the rules of etiquette as set out in The Gentleman\u2019s Guide to Insurgency<\/em>).<\/em> Outrage expressed over the senseless carnage visited upon blameless civilians extends, of course, to the sufferings of unfortunates with crown insignia on their caps. Roddy Doyle who wonders about \u2018the British officer who decided it would be a good idea to execute the leaders\u2019, would \u2018love to see a proper depiction of him. And not as a beefy public schoolboy who has come to teach Paddy a lesson but as a human being, to understand just what sort of pressure he was under.\u2019 If, reasons Harris, the men of 1916 were heroes. \u2018Well then, what does that make members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police? Ordinary lads from working class districts who joined the police and suddenly some-one comes up and shoots them in the head\u2019.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, these humane sentiments call to mind the words of Breand\u00e1n \u00d3 hEithir\u2019s stirring anthem of inclusivity:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about a soldier
\nWho has carried history\u2019s can,
\nWho dodged Tom Barry and Dan Breen
\nThe gentle Black and Tan.<\/p>\n

\u2018Twas the curse of unemployment
\nThat drove him to our shore.
\nHis jacket black and trousers tan
\nLike a badge of shame he wore.
\n\u201cSubdue the rebel Irish
\nAnd shoot them when you can!\u201d
\n\u201cMay God forgive me if I do,\u201d
\nPrayed the gentle Black and Tan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Note: why does Doyle assume<\/em> that the officer was not<\/em> a beefy public schoolboy who wanted to teach the Paddies a lesson?)<\/p>\n

The other main objection to the rebellion is the Redmondite proposition, championed by former Taoiseach, John Bruton, that the constitutional settlement achieved, by force of arms in 1921, amounted to much the same thing, or even to a bit less, than what would have been otherwise obtained by the \u2018politically irreversible\u2019 and bloodless implementation of the Home Rule Act. Counterfactual speculation is unprovable. Plausible \u2018what ifs?\u2019, fashioned upon evidence-based assumptions can, however, illuminate the historical process by recovering the role, contingency, and complexity, of choice in human affairs. On the other hand, the seductions of politically-inspired wishful thinking, and the free play of imagination, can prove all too strong. Writing in the Irish Times, <\/em>retired diplomat Niall Holohan, considers it<\/p>\n

conceivable that, without the events of Easter week 1916, the admittedly sharp divisions which have so far long existed between the[,,,] two main traditions on the island could have been greatly reduced \u2013 and possibly resolved entirely<\/em> \u2013 solely by peaceful means and normal democratic procedures. \u00a0[italics added]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How nice that might have been<\/em>.<\/p>\n

During the 1970s the state, mindful of Provisional IRA claims on the legacy of 1916, attempted to shut down its own foundation myth. Meanwhile, likeminded revisionist historians and pundits sought to debunk it as undemocratic and unnecessary. But by the 1990s, as the IRA\u2019s \u2018long war\u2019 gave way to the peace process, political facts changed, opening up possibilities for rebunking the past. Redmondite hardliners continued to lament the road not taken, and as recently as August 2015 journalist Stephen Collins worried over \u2018whether the commemoration of violent events in the past can be used as a cover for those still wedded to violence as a political tactic today. Earlier this year in an address to the Fine Gael national conference Professor Fanning sought to \u2018dispel the sense of unease that seems to inhibit the constitutional parties from asserting their rightful claims to the legacy of 1916\u2019. More significantly, Redmonite mythology was silently abandoned in favour of a \u2018shameless\u2019 and \u2018unabashed celebration of the seminal moment in the birth of the Irish Republic.\u2019 The calculation behind that call to arms emerges later in the speech when Fanning asserts that the present day Sinn Fein \u2018has no roots whatever in 1916.\u2019 The state and the constitutional parties alone held the tittle deeds to that foundational event. The time had arrived, apparently, for revisionists to revise themselves.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> [ii] Ruth Dudley Edwards \u2018Start the Week\u2019, BBC Radio 4 (14 March, 2016).<\/p>\n

Jim Smyth is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, and author of\u00a0Cold War Culture: Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History<\/em> (IB Tauris, 2016).<\/p>\n

Image source:\u00a0http:\/\/img.rasset.ie\/0001f1bc-642.jpg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jim Smyth [full_width] [\/full_width] In 2011, deploring the \u2018fundamental hypocrisy\u2019 of official Ireland\u2019s attitudes towards the 1916 rebellion, the (self-described) revisionist, and polemicist, Eoghan Harris, questioned the wisdom of any centennial \u2018military display\u2019; \u2019the republic has no right\u2019, he declared, \u2018to parade troops past the GPO\u2019. In 2015, however, Continue Reading<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}