2016 was inevitably an outstanding year for the history industry as publishers, writers, and those elements of the intelligentsia that love a good commemoration got to work on the Easter Rebellion’s hundredth anniversary. The Irish people have an interesting relationship with their own history. It is, like their relationship to Catholicism, frequently the subject of fervent debate, at certain period followed slavishly as orthodoxy, and on other occasions the subject of shame. In the more modern Ireland that began to emerge from the 1960s a new revisionism took hold about the history itself. Revisionism itself became a pejorative term as scepticism about our history joined forces with those who would be sceptical about the benefit of Catholic Ireland. In the 1970s liberalism, secularism and scepticism about nationalism ascended. The first historical-revisionist tract was produced by a Jesuit priest named Fr Francis Shaw. His scepticism about 1916 was so overt that it was thought best to delay publication for six years as the country was, in 1966, fervidly commemorating Easter Rising anniversaries. Fr Shaw’s revisionism seems mild by the yardstick of today – he blamed 1916 for the division of Ireland, the Civil War and the fact that little or no commemoration was possible of those who gave their lives in World War I. Eunan O’Halpin and Guy Beiner take us through the various commemorations in Irish life in their essay ‘Remembering and Forgetting’ as a final input to the exhaustive and very stimulating ‘Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland’. What this book reminds you of is the timely and regular nature through which historians not only review earlier conclusions but also attempt to put a new narrative account on what has previously been thought of as undisputed territory. it is noteworthy that one of the best-selling books on the 1916 centenary celebrations was a book about how children were treated though the week-long rebellion. The editors of the Cambridge Social History, Mary Daly, Professor Emeritus of Modern History at UCD, and Eugenio Biagini, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge, are quick to point out that social history is not just history with the ‘politics’ left out. That said, they are robustly critical of an over-emphasis on political, constitutional, and institutional histories of Ireland. “Our emphasis is on economic and social change, our focus on people and cultures, instead of institutions and political ideologies”, they assert in their introduction. The book suggests a purposeful placing of Irish history in the context of wider European and global events. This is challenging stuff but with 40 distinct contributors cover ground of interest to both academic and general readers. The wide-ranging topics include previously taboo subject matter like sex and class in Ireland. Thankfully, as historian Joe Lee acknowledged in his Irish Times review, this is not a textbook. More than half the contributors are based outside of Ireland, which again shows a purposeful focus on diversity of thought by the editors. Lee has said of this book that the historian’s delight is a reviewer’s nightmare. The book is not a rainy-day read. One of the great tragedies of recent Irish scholarship is the number of posts in economic and social history that have either fallen vacant or simply just not been continued. It is to be hoped that Irish universities and corporate philanthropy will re-discover the benefits of social and economic history and invest in it. My own view is that local history, as well as social and economic history, deserves investment to counterbalance the overarching political narrative. Amongst the essays included here is one by Terence Dooley, Professor of Modern History at Maynooth University, on the fate of the Big House, the preserve of the ascendancy class and a symbol of an Ireland that is now essentially gone. Dooley deals both with the social destruction of that class but also the physical destruction of its physical heritage. This still makes for sad reading, in particular, when one looks at the Department of Finance’s memorandum in 1929, declining to take Russborough House in Wicklow, one of Ireland’s greatest houses, into state ownership because it was only of interest to “connoisseurs of architecture” and had never been associated “with any outstanding events or personalities in Irish history”. Despite the obvious neurosis that afflicted the early state with regard to the Big House there should surely be now an argument for a much more comprehensive policy to preserve heritage properties of every description, if only to assuage tourism’s endless search for new venues and more enchanted and more promotable ways. Henry Patterson, Emeritus Professor of Irish Politics at Ulster University, takes up the challenge of Irish working class experience and why, despite the best efforts, this did not translate into support for the Irish Labour party. He quotes UCD economist Cormac O’Gráda as acknowledging that by 1939 Fianna Fáil had become the party of the working class. Even the 1970s were never socialist. Moreover, unsurprisingly the recent displacement of the Labour party has been at the hands of a resurgent Sinn Féin which is reaping an electoral harvest and an indelible presence in working-class areas, from peace in our time. Patterson (‘The Irish Working Class and the Role of the State, 1850-2016) acknowledges why working-class politics made so small an impression on Irish life, pointing to the obvious conservatism and anti-communism of the Catholic Church and the fact that James Connolly threw in his lot with nationalism as a progressive force in Irish life. The other reason that class consciousness never took hold in Ireland is probably the existence of the Big House and the ascendancy class. The fact that the ruling class in Irish society were not drawn from the majority Catholic population meant that for several hundred years radicals had no class enemy to tilt at but the ascendancy. Jennifer Todd, Professor of Politics at UCD, and Joseph Ruane, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at UCC, make a timely point (‘Elite Formation, the Professions, Industry and the Middle
