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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
March/April 2022 39
Fine Gel commemorting Griffith nd Collins
t Glsnevin cemetery, 2016
Finn Fil commemorting De Vler, Ennis 2021 Sinn Féin commemorting Wolfe Tone, Bodenstown 2019
All the nationalist parties misappropriate history, immaturely
Immationalism
POLITICS
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; and Sinn
Féin confuses the inspiration
nationalists have drawn on
from preceding generations of
revolutionaries with institutional
continuity
T
HE 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 dierence 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 oensive 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, flags or symbols
that are as much intentionally oensive 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 oence 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
40 March/April 2022
made 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 dicult 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 dierent 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 artifi-
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
finds expression imposes specific 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 dierent from
that in the representation oered 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 fish 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 fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors
being, of course, determined by the kind of fish 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 insignificant; to
identify those things in the past that are significant and to provide a compel-
ling explanation for the trajectory of events as they unfolded. In the same
History cn hold us bck
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
keyboard warrior felt her work amounted to an offence under
incitement to hatred legislation
year 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, finding 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 figures they are made into phy
-
lacteries to be publicly venerated by the faithful on each party’s political
feast day. The eect is to reduce these figures 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, specific events are as much state-
ments of current party aliation 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 flawed and incommensurable histories that allows parties
that exaggerate normal political dierences 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
aective 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
specific 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.
