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March/April 2022 39Fine Gael commemorating Griffth and Collins at Glasnevin cemetery, 2016Fianna Fáil commemorating De Valera, Ennis 2021Sinn Féin commemorating Wolfe Tone, Bodenstown 2019All the nationalist parties misappropriate history, immaturelyImmationalismPOLITICSFianna Fáil and Fine Gael deny any historical analogy between their own party histories and the process which Sinn Féin/IRA are currently going through to make the transition from political violence to fully peaceful democracy; and Sinn Féin confuses the inspiration nationalists have drawn on from preceding generations of revolutionaries with institutional continuityTHE REPEATED vandalism of a necrology wall in Glasnevin Cemetery shows that Ireland has not avoided the paroxysms of iconoclasm that have tormented British and American cultural activists since 2020. There is an important diference in as much as the wall in Glas–nevin Cemetery was not a public monument. In a civilised society it should be reasonable to expect that a monument to the dead in a cemetery, of all places, might be exempt from such attempts to erase history.The listing of all those who died during the Irish War of Independence is proving contentious 100 years after the event. Ireland seems eager to move on from the event as quickly as possible. We adopted a new urban nomenclature to purge selected Irish place–names of their British associations: with Sackville Street being renamed O’Connell Street; Gloucester Street changing to Sean MacDermott Street; and King Street becoming MacCurtain Street. We also enacted a perfunc–tory programme of cultural defenestration for the most egregious representations of royal authority. However, very quickly, semiotic purity yielded to convenience and, rather than remove every ofensive symbol of the crown, it was simpler just to paint them green – think of the royal mono–grams on many surviving Victorian or Edwardian cast-iron post boxes.Unfortunately, such relaxed historical sensibilities were not, indeed could not be, reproduced in Northern Ireland. There, one literally cannot turn a corner without being confronted by contentious murals, fags or symbols that are as much intentionally ofensive as commemorative.Sadly, Glasnevin is only one of an increasing number of signs that the animus prevalent in such matters there is beginning to infect the use of his–tory in the Republic. As a result, in Ireland, the populist history is being misused increasingly for petty political gains with disastrous consequences for our national identity and social cohesion. When Professor Jane Ohlmeyer exercised her professional expertise and experience as a historian to explore the nature of the Irish experience of British imperialism, one hysterical key–board warrior felt her work amounted to an ofence under incitement to hatred legislation and should be investigated by the Garda as such. Simi–larly, the two measured and considered interventions that President Higgins By J Vivian Cooke
40March/April 2022made about Irish history this year were met with equally ludicrous overreac–tion and manufactured outrage. Clearly, there are large parts of the public which have no appetite to broaden their understanding of Irish history if that entails the slightest devia–tion from a pre-existing narrative from which they draw comfort. However, mature societies confront exactly those difcult parts of their history to allow themselves self-awareness. Time and again, we have seen recently that Ire–land continues to lack the necessary intellectual bravery to do this. Of course, in this we are not alone: one need only look at how French historians continue to struggle to account for their wartime collaboration or the Algerian War of Independence or indeed Britain’s perception of its role in World War II. The neglect of history as an academic discipline within our education system has allowed a populist form of history to take root. It is a variety of history that strays from the academic rigour demanded of professional his–torians and, even more worryingly, it leads to a misunderstanding of actual history itself. It is useful in this context to consider the diferent uses that can be made of the term ‘History’ as: actual history as things that happened in the past; academic history as the systematic study of things that hap–pened in the past and; populist history as collective memory of historical events and how those memories are reproduced through various cultural representations. Unfortunately, some populist history has become untethered from aca–demic and actual history. Populist history tends to be mesmerised by narrative arcs that can be sketched only by treating actual history as artif–cially discrete incidents, at the cost of ignoring important aspects of establishing context and arriving at balanced judgements. Each of the dif–ferent mediums of cultural representations through which populist history fnds expression imposes specifc sets of constraints on the capacity for nuance and the degree of accuracy it can achieve. Actual history has a dif–ferent relationship with a Hollywood historical blockbuster from that it has with a BBC documentary. Ron Chernow’s treatment of the life of Alexander Hamilton has a relationship with the actual history that is very diferent from that in the representation ofered by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Populist history has a legitimate function in creating common historical memories that act as shared points of culture that bind nations together. At its best, populist history can spark people’s interests in actual history or be an introduction to academic history, so that people can broaden and deepen their engagement. Sadly, too often, engagement arising from populist his–tory only results in the regurgitation of the half-digested gristle and bone of actual history. While delivering the 1961 George MacCaulay Trevelyan Lectures, E H Carr colourfully noted the selectivity of history: “(facts) are like fsh swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fsh in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fsh he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants”.The essential skill of the historian is to sift through all the things that occurred in the past, most of which are trite, quotidian and insignifcant; to identify those things in the past that are signifcant and to provide a compel–ling explanation for the trajectory of events as they unfolded. In the same History can hold us backWhen Professor Jane Ohlmeyer exercised her professional expertise and experience as a historian to explore the nature of the Irish experience of British imperialism, one hysterical keyboard warrior felt her work amounted to an offence under incitement to hatred legislationyear as Carr’s lecture, John H Arnold noted that: “(T)he past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, fnding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom”.Unfortunately, each of our political parties plucks individual totems from history. Fianna Fáil have De Valera though not everyone wants him, and Sean Lemass; Fine Gael have Michael Collins; Sinn Féin have Bobby Sands and Labour have James Connolly. More than drawing inspiration from these fgures they are made into phy–lacteries to be publicly venerated by the faithful on each party’s political feast day. The efect is to reduce these fgures from fully rounded individu–als operating in complex historical circumstances to mere mascots. Commemoration ceremonies are a performative writing of history. This is why decisions to attend, or not to attend, specifc events are as much state–ments of current party afliation as genuine historical remembrance. Rival party-orchestrated events in Bodenstown are acts of appropriation of his–tory which dragoon historical facts and individuals into the lore of one party and assert exclusive ownership of them. The centenary of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty was conspicuous by Fine Gael’s attempts to claim a share of the ownership of the event from those who have, for so long, claimed squatter’s rights to that part of our history. Leo Varadkar’s speech at a Fine Gael event on 7 January proves his determination to compete with Sinn Féin in the realm of Irish history as much as in elections.Party-political versions of make history a tool to divide society into antag–onistic political tribes. Selective readings of history give rise to competition between equally fawed and incommensurable histories that allows parties that exaggerate normal political diferences to the level of betrayal, even treason, and allows politicians to question the authenticity of the Irishness of those with whom they disagree. Populist history thereby further distin–guishes itself from actual and academic history by becoming an agent of afective polarisation rather than the grounds for asserting inclusive com–munity growing from our conjoint past. According to A E Houseman, for a historian, “accuracy is a duty not a virtue”. But, too often party political competition dictates that historical complexities are elided and uncomfortable truths are ignored: the current Irish state owes its very existence to political violence including murder and assassination; that, while the Easter Rising was in progress, was deeply unpopular and unrepresentative of the views of the nation which, at that specifc time, was neither Republican nor socialist. Nonetheless subsequent events gave the Rising a legitimacy that was no less valid for being con–structed post hoc.Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael deny any historical analogy between their own party histories and the process which Sinn Féin/IRA are currently going through to make the transition from political violence to fully peaceful democracy. Similarly, and for its own political reasons, Sinn Féin prefers to confuse the inspiration nationalists have drawn on from preceding genera–tions of revolutionaries with institutional continuity.The past is the only frame of reference by which we can interpret both the present and the future. History, according to EH Carr, should be understood as “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past” in which “we view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present”.Sadly we in Ireland lack the maturity to have a truly honest national con–versation about our past.

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