Irish history-writing after revisionism
Dr Brendan Bradshaw, Director of History Studies at the
University of Cambridge and reader in history at Queen's College,
gave a keynote lecture at last weekend's Desmond Greaves Summer
School in Dublin.
He told his audience that as the millennium approaches,
revisionism, so long favoured by Irish professional historians,
is being superceded. Younger historians are increasingly
following the lead of those of their seniors who adopted a more
affirmative practice, one more sympathetic to and in tune with
national sentiment.
In the 21st Century, Dr Bradshaw predicted, revisionism would be
seen as a feature of a particular phase of independent Ireland's
post-colonial development through which the community had passed
in the course of the previous century. Accordingly, he suggested,
there was a need to evaluate the rationale that underlay the new
practice now coming into vogue.
The key features of the new mode, he predicted, would be
threefold. These would stem from historians' consciousness of a
public role: their responsibility for enabling the Irish
community to `own' its own past as the condition on which it
could identify itself as a distinct national community in the
present, and could liberate itself from the legacy of prejudices
and anger with which the catastrophic dimension of Irish history
had burdened it.
The first distinctive feature of the new history, therefore, he
argued, must be its present-centredness, a capacity to address
the needs of the Irish community in the present, in contrast to
the past-centredness - `history for its own sake' - of the
Revisionist school.
However, before the historians could convey the historical
experience of previous generations of Irish people to the present
community, he or she needed to be able to enter into it for
themselves. Therefore the two other dominant features that must
characterise the new practice were qualities of imagination and
empathy, replacing the detachment and scepticism that marked the
old.
In addition, Irish historians must attend to the gaps in
historical research and writing which have come to the notice of
the profession in consequence of developments on the
international stage.
Women's history was one such, particularly apt in the Irish case
because of the feminine theme that had been central to the
culture of the Celts from earliest times. More pertinently, women
had played a notable and largely unacknowledged part in the
struggle for national liberation and in responding to the social
needs of the community through the ages.
Second, without disparaging the contributions of the great
historical figures of whom the Irish could justly be proud,
historians must engage more fully with the history of `the
people' as such and adopt a more populist - in the best sense -
style in accordance with the `subaltern' movement now gaining
ground among historians in countries such as India, undergoing
the same process of post-colonial maturation as ourselves.
Finally Dr Bradshaw urged the need to address a particular
challenge presented to Irish historians in virtue of the island's
precise circumstances in consequence of its historical evolution.
This was the necessity to address the consequences of the
island's location as one of the two constituent islands of the
Atlantic Archipelago.
Ireland's historical destiny had been worked out for good and ill
in interaction with the larger island of Britain. This `British
dimension' must therefore be fully appreciated both in its
positive and in its negative aspects, a dimension that has
featured as part of the island's historical experience from the
coming of St Patrick, and indeed before, to the `unfinished
business' of the peace process of the present time.
Brendan Bradshaw's seminal article, `Nationalism and historical
scholarship in modern Ireland,' criticising neo-Unionist
interpretations of modern Irish history in the journal Irish
Historical Studies a decade ago, is generally regarded as marking
the beginning of the reaction amongst Irish historians against
the ideological excesses of the so-called `revisionist' school.
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