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The historical debates on the Great Famine and the Irish Revolution reflect the Evolution of Irish Historiography since the 1930′s
Fuelled by frustrated patriotism and the deeprooted influence of the Irish Diaspora in the New World, Irish Nationalism after the Potato Famine adopted a view of history that was at odds with reality. Furthermore, the practice of history in Ireland has traditionally been merged with oral tales of the past (certainly to a far greater degree than has ever been the case across the Irish Sea), which leant Irish historiography a romanticised view of the historical narrative of the reallife events that inspired it. The combination of these two external factors created a form of Irish history that was, after the second half of the nineteenth century, a potent mix of literature, folklore and propaganda with the result that fact often made way for a more apt form of fiction, unchallenged until the advent of revisionism after 1930. As R.F. Foster succinctly puts it, “rather like generals always fighting the previous battle, cultural revolutionaries rarely get the revolution they expected.” R.F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (Penguin; London, 2001), p.20
Inspired by romantic writers such as Yeats, Irish historians commentating at the turn of the century, were highly critical of the sluggish relief tactics of the British Government in response to the failure of the potato crops in 1845. ‘Famine’ was renamed ‘starvation’, with the accent firmly on the allegedly deliberate nature of the event, and it was taught in republican schools as the only correct version of events. Moreover, nationalist academic research appeared to prove the most damning charge levelled against the British, namely that there was indeed large food stocks available in England that were kept away from starving Irish mouths. The selective use of primary sources, however, ensured that revisionist theory, when it emerged later on after the 1930′s, was more concerned with evaluating all of the source material, rather than concentrating only on those facts that underpinned the nationalist republican political ideology. Throughout the dissection of modern Irish history, even after the 1930′s, those voices that dared to question the validity of the term ‘starvation’ were deemed traitors or British sympathisers. Indeed, for many years, only those historians who shared the Nationalist viewpoint would receive patronage for their work: this was the historical compromise that mirrored the NorthSouth, ProtestantCatholic divide in Ireland during the twentieth century.
Apart from a growing antipathy towards the English, Irish nationalist history likewise judged the collaborators harshly in their reconstruction of the memory of the famine. “If the Irish people behaved like slaves rather than men during the famine, as Reilly and others claimed, much of the blame, according to revolutionary nationalists in later years, belonged to Daniel O’Connell and his successors in the leadership of constitutional nationalism.” J.S. Donnelly Jr, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Sutton; Stroud, 2001), p.240 This was a key development in Irish historiography as – for the first time – the realisation occurred that Ireland might never be free unless she completely severed ties with the ‘wicked stepmother’, England. After the 1930′s, the equation of patriotism with antiEnglish sentiment further cemented the republican ideology in Ireland.
This burgeoning feeling of national unity in Ireland was the impetus behind the Revolution, which began with the Easter Rising in 1916. The event proves how, within three generations, Ireland had been transformed from a rural colonial outpost into a modern nationality, contrived from adversity, history and a unified sense of suffering brought about by foreign aggression. Yet historiography concerning the Revolution is tainted with the same politicisation that beset the various alternative histories regarding the Great Famine. “The vast majority of books covering this period make the assumption that the military efforts of the Irish Republican Army, combined with the political activity of Sinn Fein, were the key mechanism by which the Irish people struggled against British rule.” C. Kostic, Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy, 19171923 (Pluto Press; London & Chicago, 1996), pp.12
The Irish Revolution exposed the mistakes of nationalist historiography that related history so intrinsically to ideology. Whereas the nationalists saw the Rising and the subsequent Revolution in a discernibly Marxist sense (‘revolution from below’), the truth behind 1916 lay, according to Tim Pat Coogan, elsewhere. “The 1916 Rising was both profoundly important and profoundly unnecessary. Widely and rightly hailed as a high water mark of the Green or Catholic and Nationalist tradition, it was in fact triggered off by the Orange and Protestant tradition and its British allies.” T.P. Coogan, 1916: the Easter Rising (Cassell & Co; London, 2001), p.6 As has been remarked many times since the birth of revisionist tradition in the 1930′s, very little in modern Irish history occurred outside of the context of English neoimperialism. Thus, one can see why nationalists felt the need to tamper with historical fact – in a bid to airbrush the role of the British as historical catalysts for cultural change out of the picture completely. Historical events such as the revolution therefore gave nascent Irish republican politics a nationalist slant that it could not acquire via any other academic means.
Nationalist interpretations of key events found its antithesis in the persistent studies of a group of historians who were of a wholly different political ilk. The revisionists set about writing the ‘forgotten’ side of modern Irish history but it should be noted that revisionism was only able to begin to challenge the dominant assumptions of nationalist history after the 1930′s, when there had been time for the dust to settle after the Civil War. As Fitzpatrick attests, “the effect of civil conflict in both Irish states was to enhance mutual suspicion and consolidate partition.” D. Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands, 19121939 (Oxford University Press; Oxford & New York, 1998), p.137
More so in Ireland than in any other contemporary European country, historiography in Eire was divided along staunch, uncompromising political lines. To be a nationalist was to support the theory of the Potato Starvation, while to be a British loyalist was to advocate the natural element to the 1840′s crop disaster: the Potato Famine. The Revolution added another layer to the post1923 Irish historical landscape. Henceforth, a historian that praised the heroes of the revolution was at once a republican and a Catholic; likewise any historian that embraced revisionism was seen as a Protestant Imperialist. In terms of theory, therefore, the greatest victim within the broader Irish historical discourse was history itself as the revisionists, likewise, could not be trusted to deliver a wholly unbiased version of key events, as Kinealy explains. “Fundamentally, the concept of a valuefree history, whilst noble in its intentions, is flawed in its execution. In striving for objectivity, that very purpose itself violates the concept, as the quest reflects the writer’s own value system and is set in the context within which the historian is writing. Hence, ‘revisionism’, in its attempts to demythologise Irish history in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and its conscious debunking of ‘nationalist myths’, imbued Irish Famine revisionists with a particular set of alternative values, which coloured their judgement on the sources and material.” C. Kinealy, A DeathDealing Famine: the Great Hunger in Ireland (Pluto; London & Chicago, 1997), p.2
With late twentieth century Irish historiography split along familiar, deeply political lines, it appeared as if the debate surrounding which two of these opposite histories would prevail might never be settled. However, an article by Brendan Bradshaw appeared in the Irish Historical Review in 1989, highlighting the discrepancy that he detected between both revisionist and nationalist history, and the true historical facts. In essence, Bradshaw began a third phase of twentieth century Irish historiography that was built upon the premise that the revisionists were not revisionist enough, while reiterating the point that the output of the zenith of the nationalist years was long ago stripped of its historical credibility – as secondary source material at least.
A new wave of progressive historians have therefore dominated the historical literature concerning Ireland since the 1990′s with history as fact (rather than history as ideology) returning to the uppermost of the attention of this new brand of Irish authors. Ironically, the very alternative histories that were put forward first by nationalists and then by revisionists have since fallen into the realms of primary historical source material themselves, as the case of modern Ireland is consistently highlighted as an academic warning pertaining to the effects of too close a symbiosis of ideology and historiography.
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