Aubane versus Oxford: a response to Professor Roy Foster and Bernard O'Donoghue

ISBN 1 903497 08 6

Aubane Historical Society, Aubane, Millstreet, Co. Cork. CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Jack Lane 5

AISLING FOSTER AND HER LITERARY EFFORTS Julianne Herlihy 8

REVIEW OF ROY FOSTERS BOOK: "The Irish Story: Telling Tales and making it up in Ireland":- 1. Different worlds 11 2. Revisionism - its origins? 18 3. Where are we going? 24 4. Enter Bernard O'Donoghue 29

Brendan Clifford

STICKING TO THE PAST

Thomas Bartlett 36

VARIETIES OF IRISHNESS

Bernard O'Donoghue 39

ROY FOSTER - FEAR NA MEARACAN, (THIMBLERIGGER)

Seoirse O Luasa 40

INDEX 42

4 INTRODUCTION

"Aubane versus Oxford: a response to Professor Roy Foster and Bernard O'Donoghue"

e were rather surprised to see a declared herself to be Irish; an Irish writer for number of references to the Aubane the most part but she pretended to be a social W Historical Society in Professor Roy worker when she tried to deceive Archbishop Foster's recent book, "The Irish Story: Telling John Charles McQuaid. Tales and Making It Up in Ireland." (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, £20). Foster is the When the job was done, and she no Carroll (builders) Professor of Irish History longer had an interest in the country and at Oxford University and the doyen of the putting on a facade, she sold her house, revisionist school of Irish history. Bowenscourt, knowing it would be destroyed.

None of the references were She probably believed, like her friend complimentary and included accusations of us Virginia Woolf, that it was really only "a stone being 'shadowy', 'eccentric', keeping Elizabeth box". It meant absolutely nothing to her when Bowen 'front North Cork sensibilities', it had served its purpose. She died expressing misrepresenting her activities during the war her hatred of Ireland and all things Irish. All when she was, according to Foster, "warmly this is straightforward and perfectly defending neutrality, as an Irishwoman, despite understandable. The only mystery is why so the Aubane Historical Society's accusations of many Irish people today among the chattering espionage for a foreign power". But the main classes insist on treating her as Irish. criticism, and what really upsets Foster and others, is that we said Elizabeth Bowen was We did not avoid publicising Ms. English in our 'North Cork Anthology' Bowen or suppress information about her.. We published in 1993. gave extracts of her writings in the Anthology and these were probably the first that almost When it comes to what nationality a anyone in North Cork had read of her work. person is we take the straightforward view that Ms. Bowen was a totally unknown quantity in it is what a person says and does that counts. I the area of which she is supposed to be think it is the Americans who have a saying that representative. if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and does all the things that ducks do This was confirmed recently in the then it is almost certainly a duck. That is our autobiography of one of her most enthusiastic approach to Bowen. devotees, Donncha O Dulaing, who comes from within a stone's throw of what was the Bowen It is not for anyone to impose a demesne but had never heard of her until a nationality on a person. Bowen described how Professor in UCC suggested that he, as a she felt she had come home when she moved to mature student, do a postgraduate thesis on England as a young girl and exulted in that her. (Perhaps we will discover the thesis some feeling. She volunteered to spy for the British day). Government during the Second World War in Ireland and in a series of secret reports kept the We went further in enlightening our British Government fully informed of feelings readers, publishing all her spy reports that we in Ireland about the war and how carefully an could locate, which none of her admirers have invasion would have to be handled if it proved done, even though they are very interesting necessary. She may have been involved in other historical documents written during her finest activities as well but by the nature of things hour. (Ms. Bowen could write fact and fiction this is not easy to establish. with equal skill). This is hardly the behaviour of people who are preventing people knowing To do this work effectively she needed, about Ms. Bowen. If we could get more of her like all good spies, an effective cover, and she reports, possibly hundreds all told, we would

5 gladly publish them all as useful historical There is nothing in these secret reports material. that she sent to Whitehall, or in any other published writings, to suggest that she ever Foster says that during the war she was wavered in her absolute allegiance to the not working for a foreign government. In other sovereign authority of the British Government. words, according to him, she worked for the real government of Ireland, the British At the end of the war, Churchill, her Government. This will come as news to many hero, re-asserted Britain's right to occupy people who were under the impression that the Ireland if it needed to. If he had decided during Irish Government and the Dail were in charge the war that an invasion of Ireland was of Ireland before, during and after the war. But necessary, and if Bowen had chanced to be in Foster knows better. I wonder what he thinks Ireland at the time, can there be any serious the War of Independence was all about? doubt about whose side she would have been

We are described as being 'shadowy' yet Foster gives our full, correct, address. We The Irish public, quite rightly, did not are on the phone, on the Internet and on email believe the yarn that Britain had gone to war and I would say we are at least as easy to for the sake of humanity, or to help the Poles contact, and get to know about, as Professor (whom they had left in the lurch after leading Foster. This is our 36th publication and them on with an offer of military assistance), or shadowy people arc not usually so keen to set the Jews, or anyone else. And Bowen didn't out their store as often or as fully and as really believe any of these things either. She publicly as we have done. supported the British Empire at war because it was the British Empire, and it was at war, and A few years ago Mary Ellen Synon got she was British. upset about the same issue regarding Bowen as Professor Foster does and she simply picked up She had no conscience about the the phone and gave us a piece of her mind. The deceptions she practiced in order to find out compliment was returned. If Foster wanted to what various people in Ireland were thinking. check up on how 'shadowy' we are, he should Spies don't. People arc aiming to an end for have copied Mary Ellen. Whatever her faults, them and their state looks after their conscience Mary Ellen had that upfront, in-your-face, for them. American style and it was a very refreshing experience in comparison with the Foster style of sneers and snide remarks - which I suppose James Dillon was the only TD who could be called the Oxford style. advocated an Irish alliance with Britain at war - which in practice would have meant Ireland making itself available to Britain as a base for As for misrepresenting Bowen's military operations, because Britain had activities during the war, readers can read her prevented Ireland from building up an Army secret reports and see if they constitute spying during the 1920s and 1930s. But Dillon was or not and whether or not she favoured rather simple-minded in his understanding of neutrality and whether she included herself in Britain, and many years later was mortified the categories of Irish she described. She was when he discovered that Bowen had befriended simply describing the reality of the firm him on false pretences and that he had been conviction of everyone here - except James duped by a British agent. Dillon and a few others - that neutrality was the right policy for the country. Are we eccentric? That is a subjective She reported that hard fact to the judgment, or just vulgar abuse, and not really Ministry of Information in London. Her job - subject to rational analysis. A lot of our the job that enabled her to move back and forth readers have certainly considered us eccentric freely despite severe wartime restrictions for bothering our heads with Foster and the was to provide Whitehall with accurate other revisionists and wonder what is the point information about the state of public feeling in of doing so. But Foster and his school have Ireland so that it might make a realistic overwhelming influence over all that is calculation of the risks involved in re-occupying produced in academia here and in the UK the Irish ports. And that is what she did. on Irish history and on all the media output concerning the subject as is shown, for example, a limited audience as that of 'Oxford To-Day'. by the ecstatic reviews his book received right Let's not be, dare we say, shadowy, when across the media. For what it matters, this does dealing with these matters? have an impact even though it may be difficult to quantify, but we regard it as worth noting, This publication contains contributions at least. from several different authors:-

Surprised as we were by the extent of Julianne Herlihy shows how the Foster's abusive remarks we were even more revisionist academic cabal puffs up the work of surprised, and disappointed, to see Bernard their literary friends in "Aisling Foster and her O'Donoghue joining in with the revisionists by literary efforts", which starts this collection. praising Foster effusively and saying that:- Julianne looks at Mrs. Aisling Foster's literary "His greatest scorn (and he can be witheringly works, how they are reviewed and the scornful) is reserved for those who disqualify attitudes underlying them. writers such as Elizabeth Bowen from 'Irishness'". Brendan Clifford reviewed Roy Foster's book over a period of months in a series of four Foster made it very, very plain it was us articles in the Irish Political Review (IPR) and he was scornful of, but Bernard for some these are put together here for the first time. reason does not refer to us by name - even though we are the unmistakable target. Foster Seoirse O Luasa did some detective treats us with contempt but maybe we are work in tracking down one of Professor beneath contempt for Bernard and therefore Foster's thoroughly misleading references that unmentionable. sought to discredit the sources of early Irish history by giving the totally opposite His review is reprinted in full on page interpretation to what was intended by the 39 as it is not likely to be generally available author that he (Foster) quotes. One could having been published in the in-house magazine hardly imagine more disreputable behaviour for Oxford graduates, "Oxford Today, the from a Professor of History. University magazine", Hilary issue, 2002. This is not sold to the general public, except by But such behaviour will come as no subscription. It is odd that, despite his obvious surprise to anyone who takes a close interest in strong feelings about our view of Bowen, it has Mr. Foster's works. After all, he is engaged in taken him 9 years to comment on it and then he propaganda and abuse of the truth therefore does so in such an exclusive publication and by comes naturally to him. Seoirse's article is such indirect and convoluted means. translated by Molly Stack and reprinted from 'Feasta'. I was struck in particular by Bernard's praise for Foster's view of the 'symbiotic' In case readers feel we are a little biased relationship between the English and Irish in when it comes to the Oxford-led literary set - or Irish history. to academia in general - we have reproduced a review of Foster's book for The Times Literary For a person who comes from Cullen, Supplement by Thomas Bartlett, an UCD the land of the O'Keeffes, close by that of the academic who is an authentic historian. McCarthys, McAuliffes, O'Callaghans, etc. etc., Readers can compare it with Bernard is he really serious in asking us to believe that O'Donoghue's laudatory, sycophantic review in the confiscations, terrorising, outlawing and 'Oxford Today'. destruction that constituted the real historic English-Irish relationship, illustrated so well by Finally, I should add that since Foster the fate of those clans, was symbiotic, that is, drew his readers' attention to us we have been mutually beneficial? - that the relationship was surprised - as I am sure he would be - by the actually good for these Clans and the rest of us? people who have been in touch with us with It's the same as trying to claim that there is a views and information about him and his work symbiotic relationship between the Israelis and and for this we are most grateful to him. the Palestinians to-day. Perhaps he will elaborate his case for this symbiosis, but let's Jack Lane, June 2002. hope he will not confine his elaboration to such Email: [email protected]

7 / AISLING FOSTER AND HER LITERARY EFFORTS

n many ways the Irish revisionists are reprint and as true in its resonance as the conducting a war against Irish culture. McCourts are doubtful)" (ibid). IThey have constituted history and literature into a battlefield where, as in any war, the tendency is not to be too critical of A Conference And An Interview fellow combatants. The important thing is the comradeship within and a deadly If the work of Aisling Foster hostility without. Because many positions represents the 'right' way to approach Irish of influence have been obtained, an literary life, it is worth having a closer look intellectual closed circle has been created, at it, in the context of a lecture she gave at which means that those who would feel the Centenary Kate O'Brien Weekend in some unease at some of their dogmatic and 1997. The event was entitled, 'Secret prejudiced conclusions have no choice but Histories; Hidden Lives', and was opened to condone them, that is, if they are on 21st February by Her Excellency, (the interested in keeping their places in the then) President Mary Robinson, and it ran academic and literary rat-race. till the 23rd.

Thus we have Professor Roy Foster's Mrs. Foster titled her paper glib dismissal of the books of the McCourt (delivered in the Limerick City Gallery), brothers and of Alice Taylor with hardly a 'Missing From The Picture: Family whimper from the Irish literati. Indeed, Memories And fictional History'. Taking Owen Dudley Edwards describes Foster as questions afterwards, a very nervous Foster "... an Irishman radiating learning, was questioned about her thesis. A man in challenge and glee." (The Scotsman the audience, stating himself to be a 12.11.01). professional from Cork, and the son of a professional, thereby approximating to the In this battle of ideas the revisionists stated professional background of Aisling are very clear as to who their friends and Foster's parents, declared that the Ireland enemies are. The latter are those who want that he experienced in no way equated with to abstract Ireland from the globalist the impressions reported by the speaker. imperial mindset, or even those who Others agreed. Then, a well-known describe sympathetically aspects of the Irish academic from Cork University bluntly told story which have run counter to that Mrs. Foster that her Ireland was "pure outlook. And, if the latter are mercilessly caricature" and effectively demolished her trashed on any excuse, the friends are arguments. At that point, the Chairperson puffed up with seemingly objective analysis. stopped the proceedings and the audience was invited to break for coffee. In the Scotsman review of Foster's The Irish Story quoted above, Edwards I came across Safe In The Kitchen, rubbishes the unassuming autobiographies purely by accident in the remaindered of the non-academic McCourts as "black section of a bookshop (a location so jeered spots", whilst boosting the writing of Mrs. at by Foster himself). It was published in Foster. Speaking of the McCourts, he 1993 and dedicated 'to Roy'. But I cannot, says:-"There are infinitely better novels of unlike a mischievous Dudley Edwards, mid-century Ireland, certainly, as Foster advise readers to obtain a copy. I couldn't well knows since his wife Aisling, wrote one: read it, it was so abysmal, derivative and Safe In The Kitchen (urgently in need of cliched. Later I came across an interview to UCD, and met Roy, a student in Trinity Mrs. Foster gave to Patricia Deevey in the and "it went on from there ... there was no Sunday Independent. In it, Aisling Foster looking back". acknowledged that her 'novel' is part memoir, part history. The character Rita There follows some fluff about O'Fiaich is married to Frank, "Dev's right wanting to live together, but "there was hand, ensuring that Holy Mother Church such upset in the family that we just said: and the Irish language are the foundation 'Oh sod it. We'll get married. Fine. If stones of the new state". that's what you want!'" And this after just telling us of her liberal-minded parents Deevey tells us that:- "From the mid who suffered under the diktat of Mr. de 50s through the 60s Aisling O'Connor- Valera! Mrs. Foster said that, even though Donelan went to school and art college, and she didn't believe in marriage, she did it 'benefited' from the work of men such as for her family, even though "it was on its Frank O'Fiaich. Her parents, Dermot and way out". She and Roy have two children. Nuala, both doctors, didn't approve of narrow nationalism. The nuns pumped it While researching for the book, she into their girls: what would you be doing "started to engage" with her historian with that auld classical music when we husband. To be fair to her, she claimed she have our own fine music? Like in the old was "a complete ignoramus", but then Eastern Europe". destroys her admission by saying that this is in comparison to Roy. He also, she tells Foster outrageously went on to us, "once started a novel but now says he "muse":- "So you just knew what to say couldn't write one". She thinks he could, and to whom, and you knew not to confuse saying loyally, "I hope he does because that boundary. Over the archway, at the he'd be very good". entrance to her primary school in Templeogue, there was a statue of the I contend that anyone reading Roy Blessed Virgin set in concrete. The girls Foster's history would also regard fiction were meant to genuflect when they went to be his metier. under the arch. And, if the nuns saw her not genuflecting, she'd spend "the rest of the morning in the chapel begging for Aisling As Reviewer forgiveness as a punishment". Aisling Foster reviewed Across The I challenge Aisling Foster on this River, a novel by Alice Taylor (who got an nonsense, as she was so authoritatively undeserved drubbing from husband Roy in challenged in Limerick. I put it to readers The Story Of Ireland) on 22nd July 2000 in that the nuns, in common with other the Irish Times. For sheer arrogant religious orders, insisted in schools all over patronising, it would be hard to beat her Ireland on deference and respect for opening sentence: "Alice Taylor's readers statues, but genuflection? Such an may not look for guidance on the literary idolatrous practice would never have been pages of major newspapers". And this is tolerated, and it says a lot about Foster that under the headline: 'The Good, The Bad, she would make such a ludicrous claim. Of And The Simple'. course, it also says a lot about the quality of reporting in this newspaper, but then Sir In her review, Ms Foster's lack of Anthony's Independent has become decency is again driven home when she synonymous with such tabloid standards. reminds her Irish audience of the meaning of "simple", explaining that it, "after all, Mrs. Foster goes on to tell us that has another meaning in Ireland: mildly she dropped out of her art college and went retarded". This is offensiveness of the

9 basest kind, and what perplexes me is that prejudiced, so let*s look to a British review she got away with it while Mary Ellen for an assessment of his first novel. It was Synon lost her journalistic career on in The Spectator of 17th November 2001: similar grounds. Could it be that it was because the latter wasn't writing for the "TOO MANY SHOCKS FOR COMFORT. Irish Times? The best-written newspaper in the Republic of Ireland is the Irish Times and one of its I would invite any interested brightest ornaments is Kevin Myers. As a readers to contrast Mrs. Foster's treatment writer of fiction, however, he is unexpectedly of Alice Taylor with her review of Banks reproachable. In Banks of Green Willow, his Of Green Willow, by Kevin Myers. This first novel, there are grievous excesses. Like appeared in the Irish Times, 10th many other first novelists, he seems to strain November 2001, and readers were apprised to exhibit cleverness. He overloads the story of Myers's "thoughtful arguments about with shocks." race, identity and personal responsibility", which helped to produce a "gratifyingly After wittily summarising and unpredictable, roller-coaster compulsive trashing the melodramatic plot, the and haunting novel". reviewer, Patrick Skene Catling, says:-

In venerating the Myers' effort, "Love is shown to endure the slow agony of Aisling Foster was consonant with the cancer. There is a lengthy passage of verdict of the rest of the West British scatological comedy about noises heard from coterie in Ireland. Indeed, the Irish Times, a loo, described without Rabelais' subtle which hosts the Myers' column, not only delicacy. The dialogue is a series of gave Myers the uncritical Aisling Foster caricatures. Americans keep saying 'sure' review, it carried a news report and 'real' as an adverb; the Irish say 'eejit' strengthened with a photo on 31st October and 'at all at all'. If 'fuck' and 'fucking' 2001, and an illustrated Weekend story on were deleted most of the characters would be 3rd November, with a photo-interview in tongue-tied and the novel would be reduced the magazine section on the same date. For to a novella. The only person who gives an impression of civilisation is a lesbian good measure, Myers was also give a book professor of French who lives in a mansion to review on that day, which carried the in Louisiana and drinks Grand Marnier. customary plug for the latest book of the Overall, as in a wartime Bosnian village, the reviewer! Anyone working for the Irish novels' air is sweet with the scents of Times can expect privileged access to decay', in which 'flies joyously chant their publicity for their extra-curricular efforts, busy anthems'. I predict success on both but I have never seen the boat pushed out sides of the Atlantic." so far for anyone else. But then, Myers has a special role in promoting the Irish Times If anyone doubts that a closed circle outlook on life. dominates Irish literary and academic life which is pursuing an alien political agenda, It might be argued that Myers' I suggest that they read over this review of work deserved all this positive attention, Kevin Myers' novel in The Spectator and whilst Alice Taylor's did not. But that is a compare it with the treatment the same naive view. Taylor is popular and sells book is given in Irish papers. The facts huge quantities of books because she is speak for themselves. recalling a past which is not long gone, a North Cork in which communities were vibrant, and lived with a strong cultural inheritance which she is particularly good at recalling. But how should we assess Julianne Herlihy (IPR, May 2002) Myers? My view might be dismissed as

10 1. DIFFERENT WORLDS

"The Irish Story: Telling Tales And Making It Up In Ireland" by Roy F. Foster (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2001)

e were not sent a review copy of resentment or envy about it. And that is this book, on its publication in what gives it its authenticity and fluency WOctober 2001. Fortunately we and carries it beyond the hit-and-run style were able to buy it cheap, when it was of the rest of the book. Smart-Alec is given remaindered at Waterstones in Cork in a rest in these pages and we encounter the November 2001. real person—the author who has been massively outsold. This is the first book of Foster's that I have read. Reading his comments on But there was more than that. So I Young Ireland in his general history a few asked around and found that Mrs. years ago, I got the impression that he was a Professor Foster, who had unrealised storm-in-a-teacup controversialist and that literary ambitions, regarded herself (being a a body of material had somehow come into well-off middle-class Catholic) as an his possession, which he did not know how authority on the awfulness of rural Ireland, to make worthwhile use of. I bracketed him where life was scarcely worth living (See with the hit-and-run history-writers that I Chapter 1). And along comes "little Alice wasted a lot of time on thirty years ago, Taylor... saving the hay and milking the before realising what they were. Reading cows and quenching the lamp"—and an entire book has confirmed that exuding a smug sense of bourgeois well- impression. being about it all—and the book buyers of modern Ireland lap it up. I can well But there is one piece of writing here understand how it was more than pampered which is heartfelt. It is the chapter called flesh could bear. Selling Irish Childhoods, which is a tirade against Alice Taylor and Frank McCourt. But more was in store—the It is extended to include a book of "jawdropping success" of "Angela's reminiscences by Gerry Adams, but loses Ashes", its paperback edition "garlanded authenticity there. Adams' book belongs to with pages and pages of ecstatic review- a different order of things, being a minor quotes"— "It may seem rather like party- item in a major piece of statesmanship. pooping to ask what this kind of bilge actually means (which is less than When writing about Adams, Foster nothing)". And this dreadful best seller is describes the Republic as a "stable, about the awfulness of life in urban Ireland. homogeneous and politically sophisticated Foster's language here is highly personal society", which has discarded its traditional and intentionally offensive. We are told, for concerns. But, when writing about Taylor example, that McCourt's brother published and McCourt, he describes it as having an "a much touted" autobiography. Tipsters insatiable appetite for pap and bilge about with inside knowledge tout, as do its past. prostitutes' agents, police informers, and black marketeers who corner the market in The overkill in his treatment of these tickets for football finals. memories of childhood is so extravagant that I felt it could not be explained by even The tout is a form of low life who the most overweening attitude of sells above their value things that ought not intellectual or aesthetic disdain for mass to be sold, that ought to have no commercial culture. There is a powerful feeling of value placed upon them, or that should be sold directly to enthusiasts with the life constricting, but because I could not minimum of commercial mediation. The stand the intrusion of the city form of chapter is entitled, Selling Irish Childhoods. religion—modernisation?—in the early fifties. The selling of childhood is a time- honoured English activity, both sexual and I did not see Dublin until seven or literary. I suppose it is something new in eight years after I had left Sliabh Luachra. Ireland, at least for the Irish. I have read It was as I imagined it, only more so. I many English memoirs of childhood, but would have stifled there—and no doubt none of these Irish ones. acquired the bitter after-taste that is Foster's litmus test of Irish authenticity. When I made a selection of Cork Free Press articles for Aubane many years I have not read even an extract of ago, I remarked in the Introduction that Angela's Ashes. But it has been told to me. North Cork was not an autobiographical (I got the habit in Sliabh Luachra of having sort of place. Alice Taylor has proved me books told to me by people who were well wrong. But she comes from ten miles to the able to tell them.) Nor have I read the east of me, on the eastern side of controversy about it. But I have heard Newmarket I think, which is just beyond people arguing about it. I know it is about the fringe of Sliabh Luachra. It was always life in the Limerick slums, and that some my impression that, when you went east of people find that it is told in an uplifting Newmarket, you went into a different kind of way, while others just find it country. depressing.

Nevertheless, judging by a Foster quotes a paragraph, and newspaper extract from To School Through comments:- "Simultaneously, in a parallel The Fields that I read, the cultural universe, little Alice Taylor is out there in egalitarianism that I took for granted the countryside saving the hay and milking extended into her area. And what she the cows and quenching the lamp. It would described—detail and atmosphere—was all come as something of a surprise to her. accurate as far as it went. But, then, De Yet for the reader, the slum is as Valera's much ridiculed vision of Irish life unsatisfactory as the farm, and for similar never struck me as ridiculous. The reasons: equally played on one note, philosophical and sexual dimensions of without depth or nuance, and with a beady Sliabh Luachra life are missing from both eye fixed on the audience throughout" of them but, insofar as they go, I wouldn't (p.168). I wonder where Foster's eye is quibble about them. fixed while he is producing his commodities? Foster comments:- "Alice Taylor deliberately ignores the bitter after-taste I have no doubt that Angela's Ashes that pervades, for instance, Brian Friel's did come as a surprise to Alice Taylor, with play, Dancing at Lughnasa, ostensibly set in her experience of the life of the townlands, that prelapsarian world" (pl65). (It must and of the villages and small towns be impossible to think, if you must always hegemonised by the townlands. So what? sneer as well.) She described her life and McCourt described his—and they did it with a I saw Friel's play. It did not depict literary/commercial success that infuriates the world I lived in. Nor did Patrick Foster. Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn. Nor the Squinting Windows. But, then, I lived in I was briefly in Limerick when I was the open sociability of the townlands. And, twelve or thirteen and it gave me a horror when I left, it was not because I found rural of city life. I went back there many years later (early 1970s) to do a series of meetings there is any substance at all behind his and debates for Jim Kemmy on the 'two affectations he must know that it is misused. nations' theme, and to try to get through to the blindly nationalistic middle class of Could it be that what galls him about those years (Eoghan Harris being one I Alice Taylor is the smug self-satisfaction she remember debating with) that the Ulster exudes, the total absence of any feeling of Protestants would not roll over in the face social inadequacy—the sheer bourgeois of a display of force, and that an alternative quality of it? And the fact that it comes approach required the repeal of Articles 2 from rural Ireland, from the culture of the & 3 of the constitution as a preliminary townlands which shrugged off the imposed step. That second acquaintance with gentry four generations ago and which have Limerick confirmed the impression made never since felt that there was anything by the first—that city life was barren. I am missing. told that Limerick has changed greatly in the past twenty years, but I only know it as The townland is the Irish it was then, and I have not read Angela's counterpart of the classical Continental Ashes because I feel I know enough about it town. Throughout most of the twentieth as it was then. century there was a daily assembly of the citizens of the townlands in the form of a West Belfast and the 'ethnic' region visit to the Co-op Creamery. Until very of London, where I have found life recently the republican spirit of the tolerable, are exceptions to Anglo-Irish city townlands hegemonised the urban middle life (the Irish form of city life being only the class. But now some elements have broken English form). The word "bourgeois" is free of rural influence. They have become a misapplied to the English city and its Irish "politically sophisticated society" (in offspring. The Reformation and the Foster's words). And their inherent sense Puritan Revolution destroyed bourgeois life of inadequacy (as a mere middle class) is in England, making socialist development driving them to seek another hegemon to problematical. (English socialists, looking confer value on them. And who else is there at some German towns in the early 1900s, but the Queen? had difficulty in warding off the conclusion that they were socialist already, even "...the McCourt oeuvre, apparently though the governing parties were trading on misery, actually sells on bourgeois, the arrangements for living synthetic moral uplift... As with Alice being so sociable.) Taylor, this partly relies on a determinedly unreal approach to present-day Ireland, The English, and Irish, bourgeois is and an oddly distanced view of the only middle class. It is an ersatz- Northern troubles" (pl74). Which brings bourgeoisie—a term I suppose that will only us to the Aubane Historical Society. "Why have meaning for people who remember the Angela's Ashes is not and never will be [!!] pretend-tea made from dried hawthorn 'a classic memoir' (pace the New York leaves that was devised during World War times) is because the author lacks an 2: it was called ersatz tea. And the ersatz- internal self-editor" (pl68). bourgeois is no closer to the real thing than the ersatz-tea was. And pace Foster's story-telling, why was there not a sub-editor to advise him In England the middle class still has that he was making a fool of himself over at least the semblance of an aristocracy to the Aubane Historical Society when his make sense of it. But what sense does a internal editor fell down on the job? This middle class make in Ireland, where it has obsession does Aubane no harm at all—au nothing socially different from itself above contraire, mon ami—but surely it is infra it? Foster uses the word 'bourgeois', but if dig for a famous Oxford Professor.

/ 13 Aubane would have taken no notice we?—that Professor Foster took no part in of him if he had not taken notice of it. If his that commemoration. affectations were not affectations, it would surely have been beneath his notice. And he We assume that Aubane was taken knows this, because he admits that "it might up by Foster as the horrible example of seem parochial to raise the matter at all" rural Ireland, and perhaps as a whipping (p149). Sub-parochial in fact. Aubane, a boy for some professional colleague whom it townland at the foot of a mountain, is a would be injudicious to name. The outcome small fragment of a parish which you will is that he enhanced the prestige of the not find on any map. But he can't help it. horrible example beyond anything it had He knows we're rubbish, but he can't let go. ever aspired to. And we gather that it was It's like the Puritan and the slut. fear of Aubane that decided him not to have a launch of his present book in Dublin— * because you never knew where they would turn up next. Professor Foster turns out to He says of the North Cork be a controversialist who cannot stand Anthology:- "Bowen excluded from north being controverted. Cork sensibility because of her ancestry, her part-English residence and her work I was given a vivid account of an for the British government during the exclusive Bowen meeting which he Second World War". addressed in Dublin a couple of years ago. Time was allowed for compliments and In an extensively referenced book no questions. David Alvey, whose way of reference is given for these assertions, all of speaking is neither culchie nor gurrier, which are groundless. She is not excluded. began by thanking him for his address. People from all strands of the thoroughly Foster came forward from the lectern, mixed ancestry of North Cork are in the opening himself up for the reception of Anthology. Her being a spy would have praise. (The description I was given put me been a reason for giving an extra-large in mind of a line in Tennyson about the helping of her, if her Irish posture had been ocean baring its bosom to the moon). anything more than a pose adopted for espionage purposes during the war. But, when Alvey went on to question him about Bowen's espionage activities and In the autobiography she wrote his dismissal of Corkery, he retreated towards the end of her life she described behind his lectern, his arms crossed herself as English. We included her defensively in front of his body in a physical nevertheless to let people find out whether warding off of ideas. And the Chairman they had a taste for her kind of literature, closed the meeting on the plea that the knowing that she was unknown beyond the Carroll Professor had a pressing immediate confines of the former Big House engagement elsewhere. that she had owned. We were ourselves entirely unaware of the Bowen industry I went to a weekend conference on that was developing and that we touched on Hubert Butler in Kilkenny a year ago. a sore spot. Foster gave an opening address, not followed by a discussion period, and then The Bowen industry peaked a year disappeared from the Conference. There or two ago with various commemorations was one memorable moment in his and with a film of The Last September that Address—the relish with which he flopped. One of the main items on display described Mrs. Butler's ruling class put in the Dublin commemoration was down of an uppity native who had come facsimiles of her spy reports provided by around collecting for a political party:- "I Aubane. We were surprised—or were know who you are, Jim Connell. Take that

14 cigarette out of your mouth when you are When Mary Ellen Synon, in her speaking to me." investigative reporting of Aubane, encountered Jack Lane, she was appalled Sinn Fein included the Big House in by his Renanism—not that she knew that's its political rounds, and the Big House what it was. Renan's view was that people rebuffed it in the way it felt appropriate for are what they think they are in this respect. preserving the social chasm between If Bowen, when she no longer had an axe to Ascendancy and natives. The incident grind, said she was English, and described shows how the Ascendancy remained true how on her first visit home she soaked to itself in the era of democracy. (The onset England into herself like a dry sponge of democracy in the form of the 1918 immersed in water, and gave a litany of her election is something which readers of sacred place names a la T.S. Eliott—Hythe, Foster's histories might easily miss). And New Romney, Dungeness etc.—that was seeing the relish with which Foster related good enough for us. She had played her the incident told me more about him than I part as an Irish writer in the service of could ever have gathered from his books. Churchill's war, but she never lost track of what she was.

But this was not enough for Mary Foster describes the Aubane Ellen. It seemed that in her view there had Historical Society as "shadowy", and yet he to be an objective nationality, (otherwise gives its address. He says the membership there was anarchy), and that an individual is "allegedly in single figures", which means therefore might be entirely mistaken about he has read the article about it by Mary his nationality. She declared that Aubane Ellen Synon, the Bowen enthusiast whose was motivated by racism when it said journalistic career fell apart very quickly Bowen was English—and her newspaper after she decided to put Aubane in its place. column disappeared within a couple of And he says, "the anthologist also describes weeks—but I wondered how the idea of Bowen's biographer Patricia Craig as objective nationality, regardless of the English, though she was born and bred in opinion of the individual, could be Belfast". He doesn't say where in the sustained, if something like race was not Anthology Patricia Craig is described as posited as its ground. English, or as anything else. In fact she is not mentioned in it at all. But, if she was, In any case, we operated with the detail of her being born in Belfast would Renan's voluntaristic test of nationality, not necessarily make her Irish, unless the and not with Herder's (whose name is word is used in a purely geographical sense. frequently dropped by revisionists who are otherwise perfectly innocent of German Jack Lane and myself are named by philosophy). Renan was writing mid-way Foster as members of the Aubane Historical through the process by which the miscellany Society. Over thirty years ago we went of peoples in France was integrated into a against the stream of things in the Republic functional nation. The nation developed (Dublin 4 included) by making out a case through willing participation in it by for the Ulster Protestants. We published peoples whose antecedents were diverse, the 'two nations theory' in September 1969, even in the matter of language. Renan it being specified that both nations were therefore stressed the voluntary character Irish. We were not trying to tell the Ulster of the nation. Protestants what they were. We were saying what we understood them to be in The case in Germany was altogether their own view. And we took the politically different. The Germans were there already. operative definition of a nation to be German culture flourished across the forty Renan's. petty kingdoms. Traditional German life was endangered by the growth of powerful all with the actual situation in the North, Imperialist states in Britain and France. and I cannot recall a single gesture of The German national movement had the support that we ever got from them when purpose of forming the Germans into a state we were being caricatured as Orange capable of resisting the pressures of the Unionists. Our engagement with the North powerful states by which it was surrounded. must therefore have appeared bizarre to Herder and Fichte therefore saw the nation them. "Little Alice Taylor's" oddly in terms of things which already existed, distanced view was the norm for all of them. and which had been there for many We certainly thought they were all odd in centuries. that respect.

In 1969, applying Renan's standard, When I first heard, from Professor we said that an all-Ireland nation did not Bew, that an extensive re-writing of Irish exist. The prevailing view in the Republic history was being undertaken, I assumed —the view of everybody but ourselves—was that the political history of the overthrow of that an all-Ireland nation did exist, even Redmondism in Co. Cork long before 1918 though some of its members had the (on the grounds that it was set on mistaken idea that it didn't. If, in those establishing Catholic Ascendancy in the days, we had known that somebody called name of nationality) would finally be Patricia Craig had been born in Belfast, I written. If it had been written, the suppose we would have assumed that she engagement of a North-west Cork townland was Irish, but of the other Irish nation. with Belfast politics would not have These days I would not be so presumptuous. appeared bizarre. But it wasn't written. It The two Irish nations theory was rejected in didn't suit the revisionist agenda of the most decisive manner by the other glorifying Redmondism and glossing over nation. I suppose it must be twenty years his sectarianising of the national movement. since elaborate and skillfully executed murals appeared in East Belfast, proclaiming, "No Irish Here!" The methodology of the revisionist operation is invention. If the facts don't fit When the most vigorous elements of the agenda—as they usually don't—suitable the Protestant community, those who facts are invented. determined its social conduct, declared that they weren't Irish, I wasn't going to argue "It was an axiom of the Catholic with them. They also declined to be British, Bulletin that in ancient Gaelic society, the when we tried to democratise Northern poorest rural families sat around the fire political life within the politics of the state. discussing scholastic philosophy", Foster says on page 43. So you ferret out the Perhaps it is because Aubane does reference for this interesting statement, and not share Alice Taylor's "oddly distanced it says, "See my Paddy and Mr. Punch, page view of the Northern troubles" that it 15". So you get Paddy etc. and find on page appears shadowy to Foster. I never noticed 15:- "Thus the Catholic Bulletin, that he, or any of the other establishment bemoaning modern times in 1925, reflected academic revisionists of the South, had any Mrs. Green's vision when it remarked, 'It is more engagement with the problem of very different in Ireland now to those old establishing a basis of settlement in the days when the poorest Catholic family North than Alice Taylor had. would, on assembling in the evenings, discuss scholastic philosophy and such They exploited a growing uneasiness subjects'. And in the same year the same in the South about the North for the journal recommended Daniel Corkery's purpose of subverting national history in Hidden Ireland to 'G.W. Russell and his the South, but they had no engagement at clique'..."

16 A single reference number is given human race. Probably the set-backs in for both of these quotations. It says, civilization which have occurred have been "Catholic Bulletin, February and June through the gradual dying out of the 1925, quoted in Margaret O'Callaghan, superior races like the Greek and Roman. I Language and Religion... M.A. Thesis venture to believe that the English Race, UCD... 1981". This indicates that the quote judging by its history and its performances, about scholastic philosophy is in the is one of the superior races of the world: at February 1925 issue of the Catholic any rate as an Englishman I am concerned Bulletin. I have looked through that issue with the English race and the well-being of and failed to find it, though I found the the British Empire, and so far as I can quote about Russell, which Foster allocates judge the failure of the English race and to the June issue. Empire would be a grave disaster."

I thought it was a strange procedure He cited Canada as an instance of not to give the reference for the Catholic the danger presented by the greater fertility Bulletin's "axiom" in the book in which the of inferior races. The English stock there statement about it was made. But I was not was only holding its own with the help of surprised that it was Foster's procedure, as topping up by immigration, and the natural I had followed up some things he had said tendency was for the inferior French race to about Young Ireland in another book.* It increase at the expense of the superior appears that Foster had not read the English. The Bishop called on the Catholic Bulletin which he ridicules, since Government to do something to ensure that, he quotes it from a Thesis. That Thesis is "those who are most fitted to survive" did not available to me at present, but hopefully not decline. He said that, "unless the it will become so. Meanwhile, here is an present tendencies are corrected, the result item from the Catholic Bulletin containing will be disastrous to the English race and the reference to Russell, which Foster the English Empire". There was a quotes at second-hand. It is from that same "Christian duty of care for the well-being of editorial, and provides the ground for a the race". realistic comparison of English and Irish opinion in 1925. Hitler's Mein Kampf had not yet appeared when this Christian Imperialist The Catholic Bulletin gives an racism was published in London. And the extract from a letter in the London Times Bishop was perfectly in tune with by the Anglican Bishop of Gloucester on mainstream English opinion. 12th January 1925. I have looked it up in the Times and found it accurately * referenced. The Letter is prominently displayed, under the headline, 'Population Foster gives an account of the Of The Empire: Maintaining British intellectual origins of revisionism which I Stock'. had not known about. I was greatly surprised by his suggestion that its origins The Bishop dissented from alarmism were intellectual. I will take a look at them about the world becoming too full. There in the next chapter. was still plenty of room:- "Nature is quite capable of taking care of herself. The real * "Spotlights on Irish History" problem is whether the nations that survive will be the superior or inferior races. That is the important thing for the future of the Brendan Clifford (IPR, Dec. 2001)

/ 17 2. REVISIONISM - ITS ORIGINS?

ady Antonia Fraser, an offspring of Still, I do not dismiss the instructed the Longford stable, is one of the conscience as contemptible. It is necessary Lheavyweight English intellectual to the formation and operation of powerful writers of the past generation. She has states. Such states are the keepers of written biographies of Cromwell and Mary conscience for their individual agents. It is Queen of Scots. She contributed to The only when a state is destroyed in war, and Irish Times "Books of the Year" feature on its servants are held accountable before the 1st December 2001 and said: "I admire R.F. victorious enemy state, that they acquire a Foster's The Irish Story... enormously... I bad conscience about having had an cowered at the memory of enjoying—if that's instructed conscience. Therefore the the right word—Angela's Ashes as a result of instructed conscience still flourishes in the Foster's essay on the subject". English state.

Since it is all-important to feel the Instructed aesthetic sensibility is an correct feelings, rather than merely feel the entirely different matter. Lady Antonia's feelings that you feel, I assume she will read taking of instruction from Foster, and Angela's Ashes again with an instructed denying her own authentic response on the sensibility and will feel contempt for it. strength of it, is contemptible in a person of her pretensions. I have heard her I knew about the instructed chattering pleasantly on the radio and conscience through having read a great deal thought I might read one of her books. She of Ascendancy Protestant ideology of the has now saved me the trouble. If her palate 18th and 19th centuries. It was held to be a needs instruction on how to taste Angela's justification of the Penal Laws that Ashes, how could it possibly cope with that Catholics allowed their consciences to be intimate blend of art and politics called instructed by priests, instead of having Mary Queen of Scots? them spring out of the Bible without human mediation. Catholics could not be trusted to Foster gives an account of the origins be subjects of the Crown because they were of revisionism. (I was preoccupied during subjects of the Papacy. the 1970s and 1980s with an attempt to shift the ground of Northern politics towards the But, when the Crown formed an British party structure, so I missed the rise alliance with the Papacy, the contrary of Revisionism, and cannot say whether complaint was made—that Irish Catholics Foster is making it up): did not see right and wrong in accordance with Papal instruction to be good subjects "...revisionism 'began', or was of the Crown, but acted in accordance with identified... somewhere between the death some wild conscience of their own. of the Pope and Thin Lizzy's first LP: We were the generation of Irish historians As I became more familiar with formed by that intellectual development, English life, I saw that the instructed and also excited by the advances in conscience was a phenomenon of Protestant historical analysis in France and America, conduct much more than of Catholic especially during that decade. We wanted conduct, and that the famous to apply them to Ireland. Could approaches Nonconformist Conscience was stereotyped, to Irish history be illuminated by Eugene hidebound and authoritatively induced, Genovese's reconstruction of American while the Whiteboy or Fenian was a free slave culture, or Theodore Zeldin's petit spirit whose conscience sprang directly histoire, or Eric Hobsbawm's political from his existence. reading of Sicilian banditti, or Eugene Weber's analysis of how peasants turned published recently by the Aubane Historical into Frenchmen..." (p27) Society. Eoghan Ruadh joined the British Navy to escape chastisement for a seduction, No hint is given as to the Irish and his ship took part in Admiral Rodney's relevance of any of these writers, and it is defence of British slave-labour camps). far from obvious. Genovese, for instance, wrote on the difference between British and Foster gives no reference for American slavery. The difference itself is Genovese, though I doubt that one in a self-evident at first glance, but Genovese hundred of his devoted readers would have wrote an interesting, jargon-free book any ideas associated with the name. And I about it: Roll, Jordan, Roll. British slavery cannot see much scope for a cultural was conducted in great slave-labour camps hegemony history of landlord/tenant with overseers, on islands where the slaves relations in Ireland. O'Connell may have constituted the great majority of the approved of landlordism as an element in population. If a Nazi slave-labour system an economic system, but, by his campaigns, had got going, it would have been of the he scotched whatever possibility there was British kind. The British slaves did not of developing the rural population as a participate in a common society with the peasantry hegemonised by the gentry. slave-owners—although Maria Edgeworth made up a truly dreadful story in which "Theodore Zeldin's petite histoire" they did. But, in the American South, the was no more appropriate as a model for slaves were distributed in small units Irish Revisionism than Genovese's book. It throughout a society in which slave-owners is the kind of thing that might have been constituted the great majority of the produced in Ireland if there had been a population. In the British slave colonies, literary tradition deriving from Canon neither the slave-owning minority nor the Sheehan, or George Moore, or Gogarty. slave majority reproduced themselves. Zeldin wrote, with a light touch and no Both had to be continuously topped up, methodological display, about the history of from Britain and Africa. In America both conversation, love, sex and individuality. In the slave-owning majority and the slave short, he wrote about life as it is minority reproduced themselves. experienced through the forms developed in France and Italy. This kind of writing is There is no British Uncle Tom possible only through a merging of literature that I know of—apart from information and experience in a reflective Maria Edgeworth's story about The style. It is the kind of thing that our Grateful Negro. revisionists could not even aspire to. And, judging by some eminent revisionists that I But it is evident, even from the anti- knew at the outset of their careers, they slavery novel about Uncle Tom, that the would not aspire to it. They were slaves formed part of a common society methodological eggheads, who set aside with the slave-owners and that their experience theoretically and could only conduct was heavily influenced by inter­ think of culture as an ideological state relationship with the slave-owners. apparatus. Life, as written about by Zeldin, Genovese, as far as I recall, presented this existed out there in the great beyond of as a practical example of what Gramsci popular illusion as far as they were meant by cultural hegemony, and it is one concerned. of the very few pieces of Gramscian writing that I have ever found interesting. (An Gogarty and George Moore have extract from it will be found in a historical been all but forgotten. I assumed until comment on Eoghan Ruadh recently that Gogarty's "red-headed whore O'Suilleabhain and his times, which I wrote from Ringsend", which I knew in Sliabh for the collection of his Aislings to be Luachra, was part of Dublin culture, but I

19 find that it is virtually unknown there, and Empire and Commonwealth and was that Gogarty is only a remote name. And therefore under the authority of the British Moore seems hardly better known, though Crown. It is certainly the case that he is mentioned more. Whether they were Churchill asserted in 1939-40 that the Irish interesting conversationalists I do not know, state was not sovereign, and was not but both of them were superb writers in lawfully entitled to remain at peace with conversational style, with no limits on what states with which the Crown was at war. was grist to the mill. On Foster's neo-Churchillian view, the set­ up in Ireland could be treated as a region of I grew up in a conversational backward provincialism which the culture. Maybe, when I was trying to figure sovereign British state is still in the process out what enabled native Ireland to survive of assimilating. Certain Irish illusions have all that was done to it, I should have added been humoured as a holding operation. But conversation to music as a vital element. the time has now come to say frankly that But there are things which you take so Irish history, insofar as it relates to the much for granted that they escape your formation of an Irish state, is bilge: that is notice. Foster's message.

I took no particular heed of Gogarty A Weberite history of Ireland would, until I found he wasn't there any more. His presumably, be called, Culshies To removal must be chalked up to Revisionism. Britishers. But it would be counter­ Likewise that of George Moore, both in his productive to write it just yet. conversational writings and his novels. And Canon Sheehan, of course. So forget about (There is, of course, British Ireland. Zeldin. The Six Counties, freed from the burden of Southern backwardness, have been alone Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen with the British state for eighty years. And tells a story of how rural, provincial France the British state has failed undraw them was forged into a nation by the state into its political and cultural life, in the way between the Revolution and the Great War, the French state did with half-a-dozen and how savages were civilised in the difficult regions in the 19th century. process. It is a true enough story, provided Indeed, it repelled them from its inner life, that you don't quibble about the equating and they are undoubtedly less British today of civilisation with the uniformity of the than they were in 1914. If the French state capitalist nation state. But I don't see what had treated the regions of Brittany, Oc, use it has as a model for a history of Savoy etc. as the British state treated the Six Ireland. Everything is reversed in the Irish Counties—governing them, but excluding development. The nation developed against them from its political life—then the story the state. The state, unable to develop the of Peasants Into Frenchmen would not be sense of uniformity which it required for there to be written). Imperial purposes, tried to thwart the sense of nationality that was developing against it. Which leaves us with Eric The dynamic of Irish national development Hobsbawm, the bright star of British was popular, not statist, and was rural Communism, the brilliant intellectual rather than urban. survivor of the Marxism that led nowhere. Over 20 years ago he wrote a famous article But perhaps I am missing the point. called, The Forward March Of Labour Foster maintains that Elizabeth Bowen was Halted, in which he did not reveal that his not a spy, even though she was a secret party had played an important, perhaps gatherer of information about Ireland for decisive, part in halting it. He reprinted it the British Government during the War, ten years later in a collection entitled, because Ireland was a member of the Politics For A Rational Left: Political Writing 1977-1988, but still did not mention Hobsbawm has also written the event which halted the forward march extensively about nations and nationalism. of Labour. Anybody reading it today in the About 30 years ago, naturally enough, he hope of discovering what went wrong would addressed a meeting about Northern not find out from it that a Royal Ireland. It would have looked odd if the Commission proposed in 1977 that a system leading Communist intellectual, whose life of Workers' Control should be established had been spent in theorising revolution, had in the management of economic enterprises. not spoken about an actual war going on The proposal was that the workers in an within the state where he had become part enterprise should, in the first instance, have of the Establishment. His approach was equal representation with the shareholders refreshingly frank. He said he was a in the Board of Management. The cosmopolitan European intellectual and Communist Party, which had immense that nations were a mystery to him. It put influence in the Trade Unions, collaborated me in mind of Kant's admission that nature with the representatives of the shareholders appeared to him as "a chasm in thought". and the Left of the Labour Party, led by Neil Kinnock, to oppose that scheme as a Kant was saved from systematic sell-out, and it was stifled at birth. ahumanity by Rousseau, who led him to a fruitful imaginative engagement with the But the existing state of affairs could human condition. But Rousseau, the spoiler not continue. Trade Union power was too of Enlightenment simple-mindedness, has great to continue as an obstructive force in been conjured into the great obscurantist the production process. Two years after the ogre of modern times (denunciations of him Trade Unions refused to become the equals by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Eoghan Harris of the shareholders in management, and David Trimble being merely echoes of a Thatcher was elected on a programme of British fashion). And, to an overdeveloped breaking their power. And the socialist and streamlined Marxist, Kant could not movement collapsed at her touch. appear much better. So Eric Hobsbawm and the world parted company. And he has What parallel universe was kept on expressing his bewilderment in Hobsbawm living in, that led him to omit learned volumes, which are greatly admired this event from his account of the halting of by former students whose influence on the Labour? The dead-end world of omniscient world is nil. Marxism, which knew what its manifest destiny was and would tolerate no other. Our policy in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s did not require Having fallen down on his proper any sense of affinity with nationality. It was job, he turned to displacement activity, and to establish common ground between has written extensively about peasant Protestant and Catholic by drawing them bandits and nations. His main book about into the party-politics through which the bandits, Primitive Rebels, has a number of democracy of the state functioned. Why did chapters on Millenarianism. The greatest Hobsbawm not support that movement outbreak of Millenarian hysteria in the 20th (whose presence at British Labour Party century happened in England in 1914, its Conferences over a period of 15 years adherents being the cream of the Liberal nobody could fail to notice)? Because it intelligentsia, almost all of whom saw the would have put him out of court with the vision of "the war that will end war". It Left, which insisted that Northern Ireland cost about ten million lives straight off, and should be maintained as a place apart, and led to the situation which the first post-war have moderation preached at it while it was Italian Prime Minister, Nitti, called made to stew in its own juices. And not a Peaceless Europe. Hobsbawm doesn't single revisionist that I know of supported mention it. the attempt to establish a ground of

21 settlement in the North within the politics of was a successful and by and large the state. So forget about Genovese, Zeldin admirable enterprise. Much of this is of and Weber. Hobsbawm is the man. course true". But later "a certain saturnine doubt creeps in" (p-39). * I have no idea what that means. It An alternative origin of Revisionism strikes me as a mere gabble of words. Does is suggested by Foster:- "While the it say that independence was achieved Northern nightmare was at its bloodiest, constitutionally without the actual use of there was an imperative to turn a force? searchlight upon various disputed versions of our national past, and to investigate the In any case, Lyons progressed from supposed verities in the name of which both saturnine doubt to pointed thoughts. "In a sides were conducting the war. This book review of 1976 he permitted himself a produced, for instance, a self-conscious but sharp reflection" on the notion that wholly admirable and productive attempt Unionists and Nationalists shared a genuine among intellectuals in the Republic to try to love of Ireland. He said:- "...we still do not understand the roots of the unionist view" sufficiently realise the depth and intensity (p34). of the feelings by which, already at that date [circa 1900] men were divided rather than From August 1969 to the mid 1970s I united". spoke at a great many meetings around the Republic, many of them at academic And Foster comments:-"The venues, about nationalist misconceptions of emphasis of his thought was already falling the Ulster Protestants. If the intellectuals on division rather than unity" (p.40). Foster refers to actually existed, they must "Already"! in 1976!! have kept a very low profile indeed, because I never met one of them. I also looked in Here we have perhaps a glimmer of the academic journals, Irish Historical wisdom long after the event. I could never Studies in particular, for material that see much use for the Owl of Minerva that would help me to make my case, but I never flew at dusk, when the events of the day found any. I had, as a political were over. But 1976 wasn't dusk. It was propagandist, to become my own historian. the morning after the night before. If I had come across an academic historian who was doing what Foster now claims was In September 1969, within weeks of done I would have seized him and given him the August pogrom which threw the North political currency. into flux, (and after we had done what we could to counter the pogrom on the ground) I gather that the originator, at least Jack Lane and myself had published the precursor, of academic Revisionism was 'two nations theory', which instantly somebody called Leland Lyons, who:- became both notorious and influential. It "...had made his early name by writing was set out in a historical survey of the political studies which implicitly subscribed division called The Economics Of Partition, to the generally accepted notion that Irish which by 1976 had sold about ten thousand national independence, achieved copies. It played some part in shaping the constitutionally but with the implicit threat positions that were formed in the flux of of insurrection, was an inevitable if not 1969-70. It is impossible to tell how much it always productive process in Irish history; influenced conduct—whether it was dozens that the nationalist tradition was the or hundreds who did not engage in military predominant and, in a sense, predetermined activity because, without denying the one; and that the achievement of the authenticity of their experience of life in the independent Free State and, later, Republic Northern statelet, it developed a kind of

22 understanding which led to a different kind of history were the de-stabilising factor. of action. (Or has Occam's Razor, the thousand year- old maxim that theories are not to be By 1976 the malleable flux of 1969- invented unnecessarily, fallen into disuse in 70 was ancient history. Positions had been modern academia?). established and were working themselves out in conflict. I never saw that the belated I gather from Foster that the revisionist historiography—even when it ideology of revisionist history rejects the went beyond sharp reflections in book "narrative mode". And I can see why. The reviews—exerted the slightest influence of great object of an Anglicised history of the course of the nationalist campaign in the Ireland is to remove the British black spot North: a campaign which was always more of 1918 to 1922. And that cannot be done extensive than the Republican movement. by replacing what is held to be a false And it appears to me that the Provos made narrative with a true one. In England itself their own way from their origins in the narrative history abounds, and the idea that pogroms of August 1969 to their present history is anything other than a causally occupation of the corridors of power, connected sequence of events to be told in despising such 'revisionists' as they narrative form is met with only in obscure encountered and having their motivation holes and corners. entirely undisturbed by them. But an Anglicised narrative history And the effect of the broadcasting of Ireland, from which the black spots were censorship, introduced by the revisionist-in- removed, would fly in the face of too many power, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and enforced basic facts which are still well known to be by his 'official Republican' allies who ran a realistic project. The English history of RTE for a generation, was entirely to the Ireland must therefore be a kaleidoscope of advantage of the Provos. It made them the images, rather than a statement of a guardians of mainstream national culture— connected sequence of events. the culture of Young Ireland, the Fenians, Easter Week and the War of Independence. Foster is "struck again and again by the importance of the narrative mode: the If revisionist history had arisen from idea that Irish history is a 'story', and the a concern that false history was the source implications that this carries about a of the trouble in the North, one would have beginning, a middle and a sense of ending. expected coherent versions of what the Not to mention heroes, villains, donors, revisionists imagined to be true history to helpers, guests, plots, revelations, and all make their appearance in popular form the other elements of the story form" (p2). within the arena of the conflict. But they And he sees that this is the form of the fairy never did. I can only conclude from this tale, whose structure was analysed by that the professed concern for the North Vladimir Propp in 1928. was spurious, and served as camouflage for Anglicising the history of the South. English reviewers were delighted with Foster's message that there was no If their concern had been the North, truth in Irish history, which was a made-up I take it that they would have seen that the story. And, for all the qualifications in sub­ constitutional structure imposed on the Six clauses, that is his message. Of course the Counties in 1921 was a travesty of pedantic implication is that all narrative democracy, unique among the states of the history is fairy tale, but the book is written world, and that the prima facie case against to be read with prejudice. it as a permanent source of disturbance should be dealt with before there was recourse to the theory that mistaken views Brendan Clifford (IPR, Jan. 2002)

23 3. WHERE ARE WE GOING?

number of pretentious words if only in trying to indicate that Ireland is a currently in fashion are scattered complicated place, characterised by Aaround by Foster as makeweights diversity as much as by uniformity; and, in a gossipy discourse, admiringly described more broadly, that history is not about as catty by Ruth Dudley Edwards (using the manifest destinies, but about unexpected Latin version, feline—bitchy would be an and unforeseen futures" (p53). even better description of it). One might say that these words—"predetermined", The jibe about "Old Marxism" here "solipsist'% "teleological", "manifest is cheap-jack, as is so much else in the book. destiny", "apostolic succession"—are dotted Marxism, Old or New, now exists perhaps around like currants in a cake, except that, as a residue of the dominance which it when currants go into your stomach, they exerted in British and Irish academia a release something in the way of quarter of a century ago, but I can see it nourishment, while I cannot see that these nowhere else. When I took it on in the words as used by Foster have any meaning 1970s, it was ruling the roost. And the to release when they go into your head. Variety of it that I took on, because it was dominant, was the New Marxism of For example: Lyons, in his pre- Professor Hobsbawm, the Althusserian revisionist phase, went along with the Marxism of which Professor Bew was an generally accepted notion "that the acolyte. I found that it was absolutely nationalist tradition was the predominant determinist and that it removed the last and, in a sense, predetermined one". And vestiges of freedom from the ideology. Foster asks: "What is the evidence for predetermined 'collision' between the But determinism is not a peculiarly culture of an Irish Ireland and that of an Marxist idea, or an Irish nationalist idea, English England?" (p39). and it is least of all an Irish nationalist idea derived from Marxism. I think that The word "determinism" is used temperament must decide whether or not disparagingly throughout, and apparently one conceives—that is, imagines—the world in connection with "solipsism". We are told in a deterministic way. I am that Joyce conjured up:-"...a parody of temperamentally unsuited to holding a Yeats, A.E. and solipsistic national culture. determinist understanding of things, and And it would be Joyce who would, in the time was when the learned determinists end, subvert the idea of the novel as the viewed me suspiciously as a "voluntarist" or story of nations. As for the accepted story, opportunist. But one of the first in a partly independent Ireland, philosophers I read was Spinoza—that was determinism ruled: the wonder tale when I was living among Mrs. Professor shadowed out by Sullivan, where a virtuous Foster's rural idiots—and I saw the force of Ireland finally reached the desired his intellectual position. Another destination, fulfilling the final function philosopher I read in Sliabh Luachra was delineated by Vladimir Propp" (p20). Schopenhauer. I also saw the force of his argument, which was a kind of incitement And, "...the limitations of the old towards passive contentment in defiance of manifest-destiny notion of Irish nationalism the will. And I never dreamed of disputing have been exposed as mercilessly as the Sophocles's contention that, "The best thing bankruptcy of old-Marxist historical is never to have been born at all". But I theories about 'logical positions' and could never reason myself into a determinist 'inevitable contradictions'. Here the understanding of things, any more than I revisionist historians have played their part, could find intellectual merit in voluntarist philosophies—Bergson's being the one I Revolution, see The Long Affair, 1996. I read in Sliabh Luachra. So, in the end, I suppose O'Brien judged genocide to be the made do with Kant and his antinomies, right Indian policy, but did not consider it which enabled me to have it both ways. expedient to say so. (Strange goings on amongst the rural idiots, eh, Mrs. Professor Foster?). Many things have come and gone in the world since the early 19th century. If Let's dwell for a moment on the those things were the "unexpected and contrast of "manifest destinies" and unforeseen futures" they were also .brief, "unexpected and unforeseen futures". The transitory futures. The main thing has been world is tightly gripped by the manifest the relentlessly grinding progress of that destiny just now, the USA, and nothing else manifest destiny. Carrying the United is allowed to breathe in it. (As for teleology, States to the Pacific, obliterating everything the world always comes to an end for the human on the way, was only the first step. time being. It is called the present. The Then it became manifest to Admiral Mahan way it reaches this end can be told as a that destiny called the United States across story, and can't really be told in any other the Pacific etc. etc. way. And the story of how the world came to be where it is today is the story of a In the 1820s America decided that its manifest destiny. The words teleology and own domestic law was universal in solipsism are further explained later in this application—was the only authentic chapter). international law. And now, at this momentary end of history, that is how the Nationalist Ireland—or "Irish matter stands. nationalism" might put it more accurately—certainly had some part in this What kind of idea is manifest story of manifest destiny, but I'm not sure destiny? It is pre-determinist, teleological whether it had any responsibility for the and solipsist in the most extreme degree— inspirational name. It was coined by John these three things being facets of one and L. O'Sullivan in the remarkable magazine the same thing. But is it not also voluntarist he published in connection with the in the most extreme degree? annexation of Texas by the United States around 1840, but I don't know how closely (Solipsism is misused in this usage. O'Sullivan's name connects him to Ireland. But, since the revisionists insist on using it, In The United States Magazine for July 1845 misuse is minimised in its application to the he wrote of "our manifest destiny to USA. America has arrived at the position, overspread the continent allotted by to which it was led by manifest destiny, of Providence". being alone in the world).

The thing was there before Predeterminist, teleological views of O'Sullivan, but it was a thing without a a particular kind are conducive to energetic name. And Shakespeare had it all wrong action to accomplish what is conceived as about names. inevitable. English Puritan disruption was driven by the most absolute teleological I suppose the thing began with conviction. And, if Cromwell said that Jefferson—with his Lewis and Clarke nobody goes as far as a man who doesn't Expedition and his dispassionate, matter-of- know where he's going, that was because fact genocidal policy towards the Indian power unbalanced him and regressed him nations - which Conor Cruise O'Brien takes into a mere gentleman. In the days of his no account of in his genocide indictment of achievement he was the leader of those who Jefferson, which he bases on a flourish in knew where they were going, who knew one of Jefferson's letters about the French that their arrival there was pre-determined

25 because it was written in the Book, and who derivable from the three great attributes of acted freely to accomplish what was God: Omniscience, Omnipotence and inevitable. Omnipresence. Calvin was no fool. Catholics, on the other hand, have tended to The Puritans across the ocean were take God with a pinch of salt, so as to leave likewise driven by destiny. But thus far room for other things. If the existence of they have never been disconcerted by God is not assumed, what can be meant by success in the way that Cromwell was. being pre-determined? It could mean that They appear to have been designed for only one outcome is possible if certain solipsism. They are happy to fill the world specified forces are set in operation. But with themselves. And they eagerly hail the that is a figurative extension of the term. shooting of fish in barrels as feats of But, if one adds that the outcome can be military glory. calculated in advance of the event, I suppose that comes close to the full sense of Manifest destiny has been operative being pre-determined. in Ireland too, though on a smaller scale, and Irish manifest destiny has also fed into In human affairs, however, the that of the United States. Martha M'Tier, forces in motion are purposeful. Purposeful William Drennan's sister, was, around activity is teleological activity, activity Christmas 1803, struck by the awful directed towards an end. Human conflicts thought that the Catholics, miserable are conflicts of different destinies which are remnant though they were then, were manifest to the different forces in conflict. destined to get their country back. She had This means that they are malleable. But, that inkling of the future when some hot assuming that English Ireland and Irish news from Europe came to Belfast by way Ireland each held to its purpose, then a of Chapel Lane (at what is now the city end collision between them was unavoidable— of the Falls Road). She found that event and in that sense predetermined. Both were ominous. And is it now deniable that it was expressions of manifest destiny. Both were an omen? teleological. And, if purposeful activity is to be described as solipsistic, then both were The Irish had an idea of themselves solipsistic. It was as manifestly evident to which involved them in getting back what England that it was destined to determine had been taken from them. If they had not Irish affairs, as it was to the Irish had that idea, would they have got back so nationalist movement that it was not. much of it already? If ideas of manifest destiny and Was there a predetermined collision, purpose are bad history, then they are bad or an inevitable contradiction, "between the everywhere—and they are operative culture of an Irish Ireland and that of an everywhere. But I don't see the ground for English England"? It is a strange question. judging them as good or bad history. They I am only aware that there was ever conflict are historical forces, and are effective or between England and Ireland in the context ineffective in realising their ends. And it of the English occupation of Ireland. The was not British purpose that proved to be conflict was between English Ireland and effective in the conflict in Ireland. Irish Ireland. Foster says that revisionist historians Was it pre-determined? If one "exposed" the Irish manifest destiny notion assumes the existence of the Christian God, (by which he seems to mean that they I suppose the answer must be "Yes"—or, at refuted or undermined it), by showing that the very least, "Possibly". Protestant Ireland is "a complicated place, theology is predestinationist for the good characterised by diversity as much as by reason that nothing else is logically uniformity".

26 There is diversity everywhere. If ground than the ground it had taken its Ireland had wallowed in its diversity under stand on, and tried to shift it over onto that the Act of Union, it would not be what it is ground. It refused to shift, even though its now—and, if it had not thwarted British chosen ground has been crumbling under it manifest destiny right alongside the heart of ever since. Manifest destinies are not easily the Empire, the world would possibly not be discarded in actual human affairs. The what it is now. (It is arguable that Britain destiny that gripped Protestant Ulster when would have acted differently in its world it closed the gates of Derry to King James role in July-August 1914, if it had not still holds it fast, in fine disregard of the become desperate for a means of escape advantage this gives to the Jacobites, now from the rupture of its internal political life that the greater Imperial teleology to which brought about the Home Rule conflict). "Ulster" was dedicated has fallen into confusion. It puts one in mind of the maxim But Ireland was quite obviously not of an obscure English philosopher, who is characterised by diversity as much as by more interesting than the famous ones, uniformity. The national movement set about "the instability of the homogeneous" about establishing, amidst the diversity, (Howard Collins in The Epitome Of The enough uniformity to make purposeful Synthetic Philosophy, 1894). political action possible. The British administration, as the power in place, The manifest destiny which, sought to protect its dominance by fostering belatedly, is being refuted and undermined the diversity. Major Street's Administration by the revisionists within their university Of Ireland In 1921 (recently re-issued by cocoons, is forging ahead out there in the Athol Books) was an appeal to the diversity world. Will it, like a cartoon character, of interests in Irish life to break the suddenly realise that it has run out of uniformity established by Sinn Fein—and ground and collapse? I doubt it. rest content, as private interests, under the British uniformity. But the Sinn Fein (Teleology is the theological doctrine hegemonising influence contained the that the world moves towards an end set for diversity of particular interests within the it by God in the moment of its creation, and national consensus, the national uniformity. that what happens in it has the purpose of British manifest destiny in Ireland gave up accomplishing that pre-determined end. the ghost, and the unravelling of the Empire Literally it means knowledge of an end began. (telos). Purposeful action, action towards the accomplishment of an end, is If the revisionists were to show that teleological. And progress is a teleological Ireland was as diverse as it was uniform, concept. Since, in Western civilisation only they would have to show that what purposeful action is reputable, I take the happened in Ireland between 1916 and use of the word "teleological", as Foster and 1921—which they obviously regard as a others use it, to be an unfailing sign of mistake—was also an event which did not charlatanism. If they were conscientious happen. Buddhists, they would not be charlatans. But they are far removed from Buddhism. The only politically functional And, when they condemn Republicanism as diversity which Britain succeeded in teleological, it is in the service of another activating in Ireland during the critical teleology, another destiny, which cannot yet period was the division between the two be asserted openly). great uniformities—two manifest destinies, two solipsisms, two teleologies. Solipsism—solus (alone) plus ipse (self)—is the philosophical position that one Over thirty years ago I made out a is alone in the world with one's idea of other case for Ulster Unionism on different people and things. It is a deduction from

27 \

Locke's philosophy made during the Penal she might actually have been spying when he Laws by the English Bishop of Cloyne (Co. makes the perfectly decent point that she Cork), George Berkeley. I first came across actually supported Irish neutrality in the war its bizarre use by revisionists in an article in and was simply giving a read to English Irish Historical Studies, where Richard people of what was going on—I find these English described the adoption by debates, you know, incredibly old-fashioned Republicans in the 1930s of a policy which now, that we'd still be putting labels on did not have popular support at the writers in that way. I don 't find the Irishness moment of its adoption, as a solipsist action. of Bo wen or Yeats problematical. The only sense I could make of it was that "Boland: I don't find it a problem—Well, I adoption of a policy with the purpose of never have and I don't find it really of any realising it through political action, as interest or not. I mean, you're asked, Cecil distinct from making a survey of established Day Lewis, is he really an Irish poet? I opinion and agreeing with it, was to isolate mean, who cares? Or Robert Graves is oneself from the status quo and was claimed as an Irish poet or an English poet. therefore solipsist. But, if the word is to be I mean, I honestly don't think that these kind used that way, it must be said that of straitjackets matter at all." Churchill retreated into solipsism in the mid-thirties, that De Gaulle did in June Suddenly it doesn't matter, while a 1940, and that Britain was lost in solipsism few years ago it was a matter of vital from June 1940 until a significant other importance. I wonder why? We included pulled it out of itself in June 1941. Bowen in The North Cork Anthology, knowing that she was entirely unknown in North Cork, and that in the autobiography It might be said with much less written towards the end of her life, when abuse of language that Unionism, the role-playing was over, she described tcleologically guided into ever-decreasing how essentially English she was, and how circles under the influence of a failed her essence blossomed when, as a girl, she destiny, has reduced itself to solipsism. We was removed from Anglo-Irish Dublin to warned it that this is where it was heading, Kent. We knew nothing then of the Bowcn and tried to show it an alternative. But the industry that was about to take off under revisionists (I am thinking of Professors the auspices of the British Council. Boland Bcw and Patcrson, and Eoghan Harris) forced it on our attention with a encouraged it into the fugue of solipsism. denunciation of us as racist in The Irish Times. It was then a vital matter that PS. Radio Eircann broadcast on Bowen should be acknowledged to be fully 23rd February a discussion of Foster's book Irish. By merely responding to Boland's by Professor Declan Kiberd and John denunciation, and to another denunciation Boland, compered by Andy O'Mahony and in the Sunday Business Post (edited by the produced by Michael Campion, in which I Professor's brother, Damien Kiberd, at the had the honour of being described as a time), we seemed to knock the wheels off the nutter by the Professor:- Bowen bandwagon. That's how brittle revisionist intellect is. The Professor's "The Professor: And the later Yeats got suggestion that Bowen "was simply giving a caught up in that argument—Was he Irish, read to English people of what was going on" was he Anglo-Irish, does it matter? I find it in Ireland during the war needs further is all a hit old fashioned now, just reading it. development, seeing that her reports didn't I cannot feel as excited about these debates as become available to the English people until Roy Foster manages to get. Aubane published them. And some of them "O 'Mahony: Yes, I have the same— have not yet been released from the secret "The Professor: Nobody here except one or files in Whitehall. two nutters*—he quotes someone from the Aubane Historical Society denying that Brendan Clifford (IPR, March 2002) Elizabeth Bo wen was Irish and suggesting * See RTE apology, page 43. 4. ENTER BERNARD O'DONOGHUE

review of Foster's book appeared that he had learned the art of propaganda in Oxford Today, the house from Britain was a slight exaggeration). Amagazine of Oxford * University, Varieties Of Irishness. Bernard O'Donoghue O'Donoghue tells us that Foster's Enjoys A Retelling Of Irish History. The Irish Story:- "is a pretty sustained O'Donoghue is a tutor in an Oxford attack on the monolithic version of Irish College, so perhaps it would be history, which Foster sees as most unreasonable—and would certainly be destructive of his pluralist ideal: a version unrealistic—to expect him to be in any way in which Irish-English relations are not at critical when reviewing a book by a all symbiotic and according to which Irish fashionable professor for the University history is a long struggle to remove English house magazine. (I have seen only one influence altogether". other issue of that magazine. Its function appeared to be that of any company Over thirty years ago, before there magazine: to make propaganda in favour was any 'revisionism', Jack Lane and of the business). myself, in an immediate response to the events of August 1969 in Derry and Belfast, But I gather that he derives from set about removing certain nationalist blind Sliabh Luachra, and that, having left it in spots, making ourselves very unpopular by his early teens, he has re-established a kind doing so. And we spent twenty years trying of connection with it. That being so, I think to get the Six Counties included within the that, however unrealistic it may be, it is political system of the British state so that reasonable to expect something more from Protestants and Catholics would have a him than would be expected from a mere realistic political alternative to the Oxford tutor, and to read what he has communal antagonism into which the 1921 written more closely than would be arrangement had locked them. I would warranted in the case of somebody who have been content to find that the historic only knew the situation through the relationship between England and Ireland writings of Foster and other Oxford was "symbiotic" in fact and had been propagandists. misrepresented in political propaganda. But it was something I could not find. And, (I discovered Oxford University as a having searched for it with a predisposition propaganda apparatus when I was towards finding it, I was more aware of its investigating the initial phase of the Great non-existence than I would be if I had never War about twenty years ago. In the Oxford looked for it. War Pamphlets written by the Professors, and even by tutors, everything European Even though this led me to accept was "revised" on the instant, and stood on what O'Donoghue calls "the monolithic its head, with no concern for consistency version of Irish history" as being with what had been presented as academic substantially sound, but with a couple of knowledge until the end of July 1914 and no blind spots, I continued with the attempt to fear that anybody who counted would get the North included in the British remember what had been said until political system until venomous opposition yesterday and confront what was being said by Ulster Unionism in all its tendencies today with it. reduced the project to hopelessness.

Until I read the premier University's O'Donoghue gives no instance of the contribution to an understanding of the mutually beneficial relationship, the war, I had thought that Hitler's statement symbiosis. Nor does Foster. I found one event in three centuries which might pass government in Ireland is of no use to the muster on a foggy day as expressing a revisionists. Balfour's first action on being symbiotic relationship, and I was so appointed Irish Secretary was to suppress impressed by it that I began to gather the land agitation. His next action was to materials for a book about the English see if he could settle the land question. For politician who contrived it, A.J. Balfour. this purpose he escaped from his minders That event was the subsidised land and, to the chagrin of the Home Rule party, purchase scheme of 1903. went off to the North-West to talk directly to the tenant farmers about the matter. I would say that the only period of Some time later, when he was Prime good government that Ireland experienced Minister, he gave the go-ahead to his under English rule was the ten years of successor as Irish Secretary, George government by the Unionist Party after Wyndham, to make a deal with William Gladstone's retirement, following the defeat O'Brien (who Balfour in his "Bloody" phase of his second Home Rule Bill. What the had imprisoned) to settle the land question 'Unionist Party' meant in those days was through a comprehensive scheme of the combination of Lord Salisbury's Tory subsidised buy-out of the landlords by the Party with Joseph Chamberlain's radical tenant-farmers. Redmond's Home Rule Liberals. This spasm of good government Party, believing (like Balfour) that the had an ulterior motive—to "kill Home rule national grievance was only a shadow cast with kindness". When that Unionist by the land grievance, did its utmost to Government fell in 1905 the power of prevent actual land-purchase from being landlordism in Irish affairs had been conducted under the 1903 Act. That led to broken—by the Local Government reform the overthrow of Redmondism in Co. Cork of the late 1890s and land reform provided in the 1910 General Elections. And, in the for by the 1903 Act. second of those Elections, the Redmondites did not even field a candidate in North When the revisionism which now Cork. dominates academic life and publishing in Ireland was being established in its The Redmondites feared that the positions of power in the 1980s, I was national movement would wither if it was preoccupied with Belfast politics from a deprived of the landlord grievance. They position which was then caricatured as discouraged land purchase by representing Unionist by many of those who have since it as an attempt to swindle the tenants out of become Unionists in earnest. When I heard their hard-earned money, and encouraged about this revisionism, I assumed that it their Liberal allies (who returned to Office would make that decade of reforming in 1906) to let the financing of land Unionist rule (1895-1905) the core of its purchase run into difficulties. And they revised history. But, when I got around to whipped up religious passions at the same reading Foster and others, and found that time, so that the Home Rule Party took on they were even more dismissive of the the appearance of a lay institution of the politics of that era than the nationalist Catholic Church. The independent national historians of the preceding generations had movement, which arose against been, it was evident to me that their object Redmondism throughout County Cork and was not to write a better history, a history spread into the adjacent Counties, took an more in accordance with what actually opposite course, accelerating the buy-out of happened, than the nationalist historians the landlords and then cultivating good had done, but to lose Irish history in an relations with them as Protestant country Anglo-Irish fog. gentlemen. There were fierce disputes throughout the region between the I can understand why this unique "Conciliators", led by William O'Brien and "symbiotic" event in the history of English D.D. Sheehan, under the powerful influence

30 / \

of Canon Sheehan, and the Redmondite course of time displace the Irish or melt Home Rulers. The 'Conciliators' broke the them down and remake them into grip of the Redmondite party in 1910, and something else. And the prophet of they were largely responsible for the totalitarian English policy in Ireland was crushing victory of Sinn Fein at the "the gentle, murderous poet, Spenser", as following election, in 1918. And, when Sean Moylan put it in his typically succinct Britain decided to carry on governing way. Ireland in defiance of that election result, it was the region where the Conciliators had When, on my only visit to Cork triumphed in 1910 that gave the lead in University, I heard a heart-felt account of a meeting force with force, and carried the pious literary pilgrimage to the ruins of main burden of the War of Independence. Spenser's Castle at Kilcolman, the only equivalent for self-hatred I could think of That piece of history, influential was if the Czechs had erected a memorial in though it was in determining the actual gratitude to the Reich Protector of course of events, does not meet the Bohemia, the cultivated and artistic requirements of the revisionist history Reinhard Tristan Heydrich, organiser of agenda. It subverts that agenda, which extermination. On that visit to Cork requires the more assertive nationalists to University, the most interesting thing I be bigots and the Redmondites to be heard was an explanation by Tom tolerant pluralists. The great pluralist McCarthy (a great admirer of Elizabeth revolt of the Conciliators against Bowen) of the usefulness of a touch of Redmondite bigotry is therefore cut out of Irishness in giving one an "edge" on the their history. "It remains the historians competition in the English literary market. task to reconstruct earlier history in all its And I suspect that it is this, rather than a untidiness", O'Donoghue says, But I concern with historical matters of suppose that piece of history goes beyond substance, which concerns O'Donoghue. untidiness and becomes perversity, and they are subject to a moral imperative with He writes:- "His [Foster's] greatest regard to it, "to reconstruct the past as we scorn (and he can be witheringly scornful) would like it to have been". is reserved for those who disqualify writers such as Elizabeth Bowen from 'Irishness'. When that episode is consigned to Foster is passionate in his defence of the the waste-paper basket, along with the right of such Anglo-Irish writers to say, in books in which William O'Brien described the words of Iris Murdoch when she was it with a rare combination of involvement 'struggling in the tragic grip of Alzheimer's and detachment, I cannot imagine where disease', 'Who am I? Well, I'm Irish else an instance of symbiosis is to be found anyway—that's something...Foster sees his in all the three centuries of the Glorious project as writing back into Irish history Revolution of 1688, or the five centuries of the events, and more importantly the Reformation England, or even the eight people, that the more streamlined centuries since England conquered Ireland nationalist story has cut out. in the name of the Papacy. The pre- Reformation Normans became Irish, but "A major figure is the historian F.S. that hardly qualifies as symbiosis, since L. Lyons...Other heroes of this tradition England punished them for it. After the are Hubert Butler and Bowen again. The Reformation gave the English state a double-dyed anti-heroes are Frank totalitarian aspect through merging it with McCourt and Gerry Adams, both of whose the Church, the great object of English versions of Irish childhood are seen as policy was to settle a colony in Ireland selective and... 'made up', deleting elements which religious fanaticism would deter from of the past at will. Amongst the literary becoming Irish, and which would in the heroes Trollope is pre-eminent,..."

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If there is a difference between wither, if it could reach, is more genuinely expressing scorn and sneering—and there is felt in her case than in the case of the a great difference in general usage—then others. what Foster does is sneer. I first looked at his History to check up on some basic fact (What is one to make of this about Young Ireland. I found that nothing withering scorn which has no purchase on resembling a history of Young Ireland was the object scorned? Some pre- in it, only a series of sneers combined with revolutionary French writer described the factual misrepresentations which struck me "cascade of scorn", which poured down the as coming from honest, malevolent various layers of the Old Regime. That ignorance. (I have listed some of these in an scorn was felt by its objects, who responded introduction to The Nation reprints.) And with the Great Fear in which feudalism was the only time I saw Foster perform—at the dissolved, and the Reign of Terror, through Hubert Butler Centenary Conference— which republican virtue built itself into the what was memorable was his sneer at a social structure of France. "Withering couple of local Republicans at scorn" can be dangerous if it is felt by its Bennetsbridge who—at least by his object, on which the initially withering account—were put back in their proper effect is likely to be a long-term stimulus. place by Mrs. Butler when they tried to act Withering scorn of which the object of it is "inclusively" towards her following the oblivious is much safer—and the Oxford Sinn Fein electoral victory of 1918 (an event University house magazine which is not on which readers of Foster's History might public sale is a very safe place for it. But easily miss). what is its use? The word that came to mind when I saw some of Foster's media There is a curious omission from hype for his book was "pixillated". But we O'Donoghue's list of Foster's "anti-heroes": no longer believe in leprechauns—and I "little Alice Taylor, out there saving the hay cannot recall that in Sliabh Luachra we and milking the cows and quenching the ever did. Cliona was much more fetching). lamp". I gather that O'Donoghue spent some of his youth in the region of Cullen I wonder where O'Donoghue's and more recently has acquired a holiday expertise on West Belfast comes from? home there. Cullen is a few miles north of Jack Lane and myself spent a great deal of Aubane, where Jack Lane comes from, and effort in 1969 and the early 1970s trying to a few miles south of Gneeves where I come head off the war by opening an alternative from. Since I know about Alice Taylor, course of action to the Catholic community, even though I have little interest in whose position actually was intolerable, and childhood memoirs, or, indeed, in literature, we did not notice that O'Donoghue had any I take it to be a certainty that O'Donoghue involvement at all. knows about her. I took an opposite course to Adams Foster hates Gerry Adams, who is in 1969 and persisted in it for over twenty altogether beyond his reach. He is envious years. It was not Adams who prevented of Frank McCourt, and only affects to that alternative course from being realised, despise him. But he seems to feel a genuine but the communal Protestant addiction to contempt for Alice Taylor. But she is the routine of "provincial" ascendancy. equally beyond the reach of his "withering (And the bizarre arrangement made in 1921 scorn" as Gerry Adams is. The overlap for the governing of Northern Ireland—its between people who read her and people exclusion from party structures by which who read Foster is minuscule—which I the rest of the state was governed, a thing suppose is also the case with the others, which is unique among the states of the raising the question of who is withered by world—is something else that is missing his scorn. But the scorn which would from Foster's History). And how does he come by the appears to lead to a more powerful intimate knowledge of working class life in identification with it when the colonial Limerick city half a century ago, which comes home. That was certainly the case enables him to pass judgment on Frank with Bowen. As Kipling (an Indian writer?) McCourt? put it: "What can they know of England who only England know?" It might be said, in a simple-minded way, that he only reports what Foster said. Jack Lane experienced the Irish But that isn't so. What Foster says is soul- educational system to the top level, whereas food to him, and he praises Foster for I was scarcely touched by it and lived saying it. And, in his reportage, he makes a within a segment of a parish into my deletion from Foster's list of anti-heroes. twenties, but it struck both of us as equally He deletes the anti-hero whom he certainly absurd when a writer in the Cork Examiner knows something about, while mentioning proclaimed Bowen a North Cork writer. the two that are beyond his experience. And, despite the massive propaganda of Why did he not complete the list with Alice recent years, I have yet to meet anybody in Taylor? Or disagree with Foster about Ireland, outside a specialised sliver of her? I suppose that, with his position in academia, who has read her novels. Oxford and his foothold in Sliabh Luachra, the reason why he could do neither is Bowen's Ireland was Anglo-Ireland, obvious. as Orwell's India was Anglo-India, or its Burmese adjunct. Orwell had a much As to the "heroes" of Irish literature, greater sense of affinity with Burmese life the "pre-eminent" one, Trollope, was a than Bowen had with Irish life—she hardly Londoner who wrote the fictional history of pretends that her Ireland existed outside the middle- to upper-class English society in the walls of the Big Houses of the racially mid-19th century. In a book on Mangan exclusive English colony, which had that I wrote many years ago I said that, by carefully segregated itself from the natives the way things were going, any famous for a quarter of a millennium. And yet I English writer who set foot in Ireland never saw Orwell described as a Burmese would be claimed as Irish. I thought I was writer. Why not? Because Anglo-Burma exaggerating, but I know better now. became a hopelessly lost cause after the Trollope was an English civil servant who British secret service organised the murder happened to be posted to Ireland for a few of the Burmese Cabinet in 1947. years. His Irish posting is not even mentioned in Chambers Biographical If there was the slightest hope of Dictionary. recovering Anglo-Burma, I'm sure the British Council would have no difficulty in As to Iris Murdoch, it so happened finding literary critics who would reveal that I read a couple of her novels soon after Orwell's essential Burmeseness. As it is, he they were published. I joined a Book Club is merely one of the classic literary figures advertised in the News Of The World and of English jingoism. Bowen is no less an got, as far as I can recall, The Bell and English jingo than Orwell, but her Under The Net. The Book Club was English usefulness lies in other directions. and it did not present her as Irish. The Bowen industry is part of a English literature is thick with wider project to put Irish literature on a writers born in the colonies. The initial proper footing by excluding from it phase of removal gives a vantage point on everything that is incompatible with its re­ the whole, which is not available to acquiring the status of a provincial English somebody who is immersed within the literature which it once held. A book called English homeland from the start, and Irish Fiction was published in London in 1999. The selection was made by Colm quibble about facts.) When I observed it, Toibin. Missing from its 1089 large pages almost a century after Gissing, it was a of small print is the most influential writer world in which souls were readily re-made of Irish fiction there has ever been: Canon to meet commercial opportunity. I was Sheehan. Sheehan is also missing from the invited to participate in it at a reasonably Oxford Companion To Irish History (1998), high level, but since I knew more interesting neither having an entry in his own right, ways to waste a life I kept clear of it. nor being mentioned in an article by Patrick Maume on Literature and the Since everything else in historian. And he is not mentioned in O'Donoghue's uncritical review is Foster's Irish Story. (And I find that there adulatory, his intention can hardly have is a book of Oxford Irish Quotations, edited been to disparage. Is it that Foster is envied by O'Donoghue (1999) from which he is for being out there in the commercial world also missing). He is unmentionable, even to among the hacks, even though as an the extent of saying why he is not worth amateur, while so many others, perhaps mentioning. He is simply to be deleted. with greater talents, remain confined within Why? Because, though he was the academic cloisters? It would certainly be in inspiration behind the "Conciliation" accordance with the spirit of the age if movement around 1910, his general academics who remain merely professional orientation was un-English. Not anti- should envy and admire those who become English, but genuinely and unaffectedly commercial, even in Oxford. European. I grew up within the remnant of that European culture in the recesses of (I looked to see if O'Donoghue Sliabh Luachra, and I assume that is why I himself had a book out amongst the hoi could be as conciliationist of Protestant polloi, and saw he had a Literary Guide To Ulster in the 1970s as Sheehan had been Ireland in the book lists, published three towards Irish Protestantism sixty years years ago. When I couldn't find it in the earlier. bookshops, I contacted the publisher, who said it had not actually been published and O'Donoghue sees "a new self­ that there is no immediate intention to consciously cosmopolitan Ireland", but it publish it). has somehow escaped my notice. I suppose what he means is that Ireland now takes its There is a strong flavour of hack lead from Oxford. And who knows but we writing in Foster's Irish Story—even a will yet see North Cork accepting the flavour of desperation. Since he knows "gentle, murderous" Spenser as its premier where his next dinner is coming from, I poet! assumed the reason was that he sensed that he had almost run his course as the O'Donoghue bestows a curious universally-admired historian of Ireland, accolade on Foster's writing, describing it and that he was hitting out wildly in all as "Grub Street at its finest". Grub Street directions in order to ward off the feeling is the street of literary hacks who cut each that the ground was shifting under him. But other's throats in the jungle world of even though Dublin 4 imitates London, commercial periodical publishing. I believe London is a very different proposition the term dates from the 18th century. In indeed from Dublin 4. It is the difference Gissing's late-19th century representation between the organ grinder and the monkey. of it, New Grub Street, it is as far as I recall—it is close on half-a-century since I A review of Foster's book, by read it—a soul-destroying world set among Thomas Bartlett of UCD, was published in the quality Reviews. (And I might remark the Times Literary Supplement on 25th that, if somebody devised a claim on Gissing January 2002. Bartlett is an authentic as being Irish, I would not be inclined to historian, while Foster is a kind of media performer. The review leaves Foster It was an act of great cruelty—as any without a shred of credibility. Nothing like genuine review of such stuff had to be. And it has been, or perhaps could be, carried by I gather that Foster tried to put the law on an Irish literary publication. It shows the Bartlett and the TLS. Grub Street's finest vast difference, which has always existed, scurried back to the cloisters and tried to between England itself and hand-me-down restore his professorial dignity with a writ. West Britishness. The media performer, the Although he loved the kitchen he couldn't mountebank, the Oxford propagandist— stand the heat. (See next page). was taken apart by an authentic historian. Brendan Clifford (IPR, April 2002)

35 STICKING TO THE PAST by Thomas Bartlett, Professor of Irish History, UCD.

his latest work from the "most severe enough for the Irish. Typically, brilliant and courageous Irish Foster has some sympathy with the latter Thistorian of his generation" (as the view; alternative viewpoints are to be blurb has it) consists of twelve essays, encouraged, if only for their provocative thematically linked "by a preoccupation impact. with the way Irish history, biography and memoir are refracted through narratives of Oddly, what is missing from this one kind or another". Eight of the essays essay is, first, any sense of a historic have been published elsewhere since 1995; narrative shape to Irish history, and second the remaining four are lectures. In sum, any reference to any historiography other they provide an arresting, though ultimately than to that of Ireland. One would like to disheartening, meditation on the current see, for example, how the hugely influential state of Irish history-writing, and they offer Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (Compendium of a sardonic comment on the role of the Irish Wisdom about Ireland) by the seventeenth- historian in the recent commemorations of century Irish historian Geoffrey Keating the Famine and the 1798 Rebellion. was adapted to fit the needs of nineteenth century writers such as Sullivan and In "The Story of Ireland", Foster's O'Grady. inaugural lecture as Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University, he And what of the historiographies of focuses on the Irish narrative as revealed in other new states such as Poland and the nineteenth century, notably in the work Czechoslovakia? of A. M. Sullivan, who published his Story of Ireland in 1867, but also in the books of Irish history-writing in the Standish O'Grady, who wrote his rival nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Story of Ireland in 1894. Sullivan's rendition looks exceptional only because the silent was essentially a morality tale - suffering, comparison is always with British bondage, resistance, betrayal, resurrection historiography, and this comparison is and triumph pass the baton from one to the wholly invalid. That said, Foster's main other - and the book, Foster writes, argument is a good one: all national "supplied the canon of Irish history as narratives necessarily involve elements of taught for generations by the Christian occlusion, elision and, of course, amnesia, Brothers". but what he calls the "Irish propensity to therapeutic forgetting" is surely an optical Foster has much fun ticking off the illusion produced by too insular a various canonical episodes in this work - the perspective. victim deceived, the hero returns, the hero betrayed, and so on - and measuring them These general points on memory, against the criteria identified by the myth and imagination are pursued Russian structuralist, Vladimir Propp, as throughout the rest of the pieces in this constituting the morphology of the fairy volume: three on Yeats, one on Elizabeth tale. O'Grady's Story was, if anything, even Bowen, one on Foster's mentor, F. S. L. more bizarre, being virulently anti- Lyons, one on Hubert Butler, and one on nationalist as if to atone for any Trollope. Each of them demonstrates encouragement his earlier work may have Foster's mastery of the literary/historical given to "the cause", and arguing that what essay: close attention to text and context, would now be labelled the "catastrophic careful reading of the subjects' dimension" to Irish history was, in fact, not autobiographies and forensic interrogation

36 of their creative writings in order to reveal which the "complexities and paradoxes" of the competing fictional narratives Irish history are elided, and the Famine constructed by them to meet present needs. anniversary in 1995-7 has confirmed his fears. This was a time, he tells us, when It is when Foster moves into present- "post-traumatic stress disorder stalked the day Ireland that his touch deserts him; land and buried memories were regrettably, the measured tone of the indiscriminately exhumed". There was scholar yields to the stridency of the much talk of "survivor guilt", "coffin polemicist. Thus, the "supposed ships" were reconstructed, and Tony Blair secularisation of Irish society", claims was made to apologise. Foster, is shown as bogus, because last year an unidentified "confessionally-minded Worse, in response to the "big Dublin history lecturer" at an unidentified business" of commemoration, some "Irish "Dublin institution of higher education" historians have been increasingly had his first-year students study extracts presenting their wares for a popular from history textbooks and asked them to audience", and some "who had written guess the religion of the author, "and judicious theses on the Famine, turned their therefore their supposed bias". None of this findings into books for the popular market, is footnoted or even loosely sourced; and often turning up the blame to a markedly this reviewer has never heard of such an strident level". All of this elicits "a faint experiment (however interesting it might shiver"' from the fastidious Foster (editor prove). of the successful Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland). Similarly, American politicians Foster's next target is those, yet "in search of the ethnic Vote" had the again unnamed; "born-again, newly-Irish, Famine "defined as genocide" in certain Eng. Lit. academics" whom he attacks for states and put on the curriculum of having "got in on the act" of Famine "Holocaust Studies". commemoration. So much for "Ireland of the Welcomes". So far as the Northern Here, Foster's derision may be Troubles are concerned, we are soberly rather mis-placed. In his Modern Ireland, informed that "the nightmare has 1600-1972 (1988), the Irish Famine is receded... hopes are raised again and again, explicitly referred to as a "holocaust" (page we are no longer looking over the brink", 324); in the subsequent American and an assertion that serves as a salutary paperback editions, no doubt for very good reminder that historians should stick to the reasons, the h-word was silently excised and past and leave the present to journalists. replaced by "catastrophe". In the volume under review, the Famine is referred to as Foster next turns his attention to "an unparalleled and apocalyptic atrocities during the 1798 Rebellion, and to catastrophe". what he sees as the willingness of certain Irish historians - "commemorationists" - to It is, however, the commemoration of airbrush sectarian killings, such as the the 1798 Rebellion which attracts Professor massacre of over 100 government Foster's most withering remarks. The essay supporters by rebels at Scullabogue, Co entitled "Remembering 1798" is an Wexford, from the new narrative of the unwieldy one. Part of it is a discussion events of the summer of that year. Foster's about the impact of the 1898 anniversary of concerns about the rage for the Rebellion on W. B. Yeats and others. commemoration and the historian's role in His point here is a good one, though it are signalled earlier in the book when he scarcely novel: in large measure, the roots contemplates the 150th anniversary of the of Easter Week 1916 can be traced to the Irish Famine. Commemoration, he feels, is a groups and organisations that came "marketing and packaging" exercise from together in 1898 to remember 1798.

37 Another part of the essay is a narrative of and delivered to "relevant civil servants and the 1798 Rebellion itself which will add diplomats". Foster gleefully claims that he little to our knowledge of that event. This was tempted to add a seventh point: "Don't segment is surprisingly marred by a string talk about the war", and he concludes: of cliches (dogs bark early, late or don't "Certainly the historians retained by the bark at all), and, worse, by inaccuracy and government for the purposes of inconsistency. commemoration, and sent forth on mission, acted up to the mark." Someone called David Baillie Fox, we are told, wrote a "first-hand description" of To this sad charge, I can only echo the impact of the "pacification" of Ulster in Standish O' Grady's "were you 1797 which is "worth remembering". In momentarily mad, or living in London, fact, what is worth remembering is that this when you wrote this?" As one of those account was written by David Baillie historians "retained" by the Irish Warden (his nom de guerre was William Government, my explicit remit was to Fox) and also that he has nothing deliver a lecture on the express subject of whatsoever to say about the results of "the war" in the summer of 1798. True, I government actions in 1797; and though did not spend my twenty minutes discussing Foster states that Warden is "not much the sectarian atrocity at Scullabogue. but I quoted" by "commemorationists", this did mention it; and I did not dismiss the reviewer in 1996 cited the precise passage incident by reference to collective suicide or that Foster cites. spontaneous combustion. Instead, I suggested that in a sectarian state, in a There is a further puzzle here in fevered sectarianised atmosphere, and in Foster's use of this text. Warden wrote his the aftermath of a calamitous military account in the United States, whither he defeat for the rebels at the Battle of New had fled after the Rebellion. He dedicated it Ross, such appalling things were all too to the "brave republican", while attacking likely to occur. the "cringing loyalist" and the "neutral time-server". There is no hint of regret or I also suggested that the sectarian repentance, much less remorse, in his nature of the rebellion in Antrim and Down apologia for his actions in 1798. His account might repay examination - not just Catholic provides no support for any of Foster's versus Protestant, but Presbyterian against remarks about the centrality of Anglican. It is simply nonsense to say that sectarianism: so why is he praising it? sectarianism was deliberately ignored. In 1998, as in 1798, reliance on second-hand From inaccuracy to inconsistency. reports, gossip and hearsay has proved to Those historians who cite Miles Byrne's be not the best way to gain accurate version of the rebellion in Wexford are information. rebuked for doing so, even though, a few pages earlier, Foster praises Byrne's It is the duty of the historian of writings as "perhaps the most useful first­ Ireland, whether Irish or of any other hand account of all". For the most part, nationality, to explain to audiences of all however, this essay is taken up with a types, not just academic but "popular" and denunciation of fellow Irish historians for "newly Irish" as well, what he or she is having anything to do with about, and to enter into discussion with '' commercialised theme-park history ". them. It is simply not good enough for Foster quotes from a rather bland, Professor Foster to assail those Irish platitude-filled, six-point "Mission historians who attempt to reach out beyond statement on 1798", a briefing document the ivory tower in order to inform and allegedly put out (once again, no source is educate the wider public. For Irish given) by a government committee in 1997, historians to fail to do so would mean

38 inevitably conceding "Irish history" and the "Troubles" or, for that matter, of the "commemoration" to the crank, to the 1798 Rebellion. In March 1977, five young monomaniac and to those who are agenda- men were sentenced for their part in that driven and politically engaged. So far as act of "criminal, religious bigotry", as the 1798 and 1998 are concerned, what this judge described it. The names of four of the means in practice is contemplating the five youths are not significant: the fifth, meaning of a sectarian attack such as the however, bore the name of the Presbyterian petrol bombing of a Catholic house in south United Irish leader: Henry Joy McCracken. Belfast which occurred in August 1976 and That is the Irish story; and I'm not making which is never noticed in the literature of it up. (From The Times Literary Supplement, 25.1.2002) *

VARIETIES OF IRISHNESS

Bernard O'Donoghue enjoys a retelling of Irish history Foster's arrival at Hertford ten years ago as the inaugural holder of the Carroll Professorship of Irish history is one of the University's most rejoiced-over triumphs in recent times. As one might hope from a writer active in literary as well as historical fields, Foster is also a brilliant essayist whose elegant acerbity of style and forceful views make him an unfailingly compelling controversialist, in the best historian's tradition. His much praised 1993 collection Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History included an essay called 'Varieties of Irishness', encapsulating the pluralism he is committed to. His greatest scorn (and he can be withcringly scornful) is reserved for those who disqualify writers such as Elizabeth Bowcn from 'Irishness'. Foster is passionate in his defence of the right of such Anglo-Irish writers to say, in the words of Iris Murdoch when she was 'struggling in the tragic grip of Alzheimer's disease', 'Who am I? Well, I'm Irish anyway - that's something.'

The Irish Story is a pretty sustained attack on the monolithic version of Irish history, which Foster sees as most destructive of his pluralist ideal: a version in which Irish-English relations are not at all symbiotic and according to which Irish history is a long struggle to remove English influence altogether. In the new self-consciously cosmopolitan Ireland this is something of a dead issue, as Foster acknowledges, but it remains the historian's task to reconstruct earlier history in all its untidiness, rather than to reconstruct the past as we would like it to have been. Foster sees his project as writing back into Irish history the events, and more importantly the people, that the more streamlined nationalist story has cut out.

A major figure is the historian F S L Lyons, upon whose early death Foster succeeded as Yeats's biographer. Other heroes of this tradition are Hubert Butler and Bowen, again. The double-dyed antiheroes are Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams, both of whose versions of Irish childhood are seen as selective and - in the terms of Foster's subtitle - 'made up', deleting elements of the past at will. Amongst the literary heroes, Trollope is pre-eminent, though it must be said that Foster's attempt to justify his intolerable view of the Irish Famine betrays 'Matilda's aunt' syndrome: the effort nearly kills him. The writing has brilliance and acidic wit. This is Grub Street at its finest, and enormously illuminating history. The reader is borne along by the style and force of the polemic, and only at the end do you realise just how much you have learned that you didn't know before. It is another sparkling Foster success, provoking thought and protest and amusement in a finely controlled amalgam. Bernard O'Donoghue in Tutor in English at Wadham College

(From 'Oxford Today', Hilary Term, 2002) 39 was reading the February 1995 issue of That reminded me of Roy Foster and Netguide and I came across this:- his book Paddy and Mr. Punch, (London, I 1993), where I had noticed the following. At "The Reich Stuff. the start of the book he is attacking the independent Irish historians and, on the 'The Holocaust never happened!' page 15, his attack on Alice Stopford Green includes the following scntence:- 'Yes, it did, and here's proof.' The decades-old fight "If, however, Mrs. Green was fooled by against the hate and lies of the what a later historian has crisply called 'the Nazis has found fertile ground on concoctions of the Annals', she had a real the Internet. A dedicated cadre of and immediate reason for being thus fooled; researchers and scholars, led by the desire to establish a legitimate Vancouver, Canada, resident Ken continuity for Irish separatism." McVay, compiles and posts proof against the wild claims of the And for the reference, the reader is online neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. directed to note 75 on page 313 which says:- Three years ago, the 52 year old McVay began collecting facts "J. V. Kelleher, 'Irish History and Pseudo- that disproved the revisionists' History', pp. 120-22, for the case against the claims for his own use. Recently, 'Book of Rights' and other sources as he made the information available twelfth-century creations. 'So extensive was via a listserv-an automatic mailer the revision of historical evidence that we that responds to requests sent via have, I would say, about as much chance of e-mail. He also posts the recovering the truth about early Christian information to the alt.revisionist Usernet newsgroup, where many of Ireland as a historian five hundred years these neo-Nazi congregate. from now would have if he were trying the reconstruct the history of Russia in the McVay calls his enemies twentieth century from broken sets of inept researchers and incompetent different editions of the Soviet liars. 'One of them posted a Encyclopedia." message that he'd found a news story in this old magazine about This is a comprehensive some Jewish politician making claims of a mass extermination of condemnation of the sources for early Irish Jews after World War 1. The guy history and of the writers who have used claimed this was a lie the Jews these sources. pulled out of their hat after each war. But it is not easy to check the reference. I think this is the only note in the It took us months to track book where Foster does not give place and done this magazine and when we date of publication. If it were an article in a found it - it'd been out of print for 50-60 years - the article said journal the name of the periodical and the nothing of the sort." volume reference would be given. So, if you look for this book, you won't find it.

40 Kelleher never wrote a book or an article reliable, because it is about matters with with the title "Irish History and Pseudo- which the revisionists were not concerned. History", a title which implies a deep and But everything that deals with the kingship wide-ranging critical analysis of Irish of Tara, particularly in the early centuries, historians and historiography. or with the rise or the identity of the Ui Neill, or with the two chief ecclesiastical The student will have to give up and centres in Ireland, Armagh and accept Foster's word for it that Kelleher Clonmacnoise, can only be regarded with showed that the sources for early Irish wary suspicion. No doubt even a large history are mostly invention. portion of this information is genuine. It will, however, be a long while before we But hold a while! In 1963 John V. shall be able to say with confidence what is Kelleher published an article "Early Irish reliable and what has been tampered with History and Pseudo-History" in Studia or falsified." Hibernica, vol. 3, pp. 113-127. This is the source Foster is abusing. Far from 'crisply' dismissing the Annals as 'concoctions' Kelleher is saying John V. Kelleher was born in the opposite,that they are mostly reliable Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1916 and he 'at least from the early seventh century on.' was for a long time professor of Irish No wonder it is difficult to track down studies in Harvard University. He is a Foster's 'source' when what he is doing is gentleman who is highly respected as a using Kelleher's name to give false scholar and a poet. Dolmen published a authority to his own propaganda. collection of his work in 1979, Too small for stove wood, too big for kindling - collected The revisionists say that these are verse and translations. but small points and that no notice should be taken of them. But in my opinion, if Kelleher thinks - 'my own belief - Foster misrepresents a scholar's work and that Brian Boru was the first High King of fumbles the references, then it is important Ireland and that there is not a strong for Irish people to correct him. Throughout historical basis for the proposition that the world, Foster's books, published by the there were High Kings before Brian Boru. Oxford University Press, Allen Lane and He thinks that there was political re-writing Penguin press, are presented as reliable in the evidence for the early High Kings and works on the history of Ireland. As an it is to this alone he refers when he says Englishman said in the 16th century 'it '...most of you are familiar with that were better that we had the exposition of concocted tradition...' This is a historical our quarrel with these people'. That was question which is not yet settled and then, it is the same now, and will it be Kelleher is simply laying out his own always so? theory, as he makes quite clear. The Carroll Foundation made In the other sentence, Kelleher did money available to fund a professorship of not write 'about as much chance of Irish history in Oxford, England, and in recovering the truth' but 'about as much 1991 Foster was appointed the first chance of recovering the whole truth' and professor. But his cavalier approach to Irish he continues, in the same paragraph:- history is astonishing. Someone who uses "Not that the historian's task would be these methods is not concerned with writing quite hopeless. Eighty or ninety percent of history, he is up to something else. the information in the encyclopedias would be sound enough. In the annals too we shall find that most of the information, at least from the early seventh century on, is Seoirse O Luasa

41 INDEX Act of Union. 27 Skene. 10 Fox, David Kant. 21,25 Adams, Gerry. Chamberlain, Baillie. 38 Kavanagh, 11,31,32,39 Joseph. 30 France. 19,20,32 Patrick. 12 Africa. 19 Chapel Lane. 26 Fraser, Lady Keating, Althusser. 24 Christian Antonia. 18 Geoffrey. 36 Alvey, Dave. 14 Brothers. 36 Friel, Brian. 12 Kelleher, J.V. Anthony, Sir. 34 Churchill. 15,20,28 40-1 Armagh. 41 Cliona. 32 Genovese, Kemmy, Jim. 13 Clonmacnoise. 41 Eugene. 18-9 Kent. 28 Balfour. 30 Co-op Creamery. Germany. 15,16 Kiberd, Damien. 28 Belfast. 29 13 Gissing. 34 Kiberd, Declan. 28 Bennettsbridge. 32 Collins, Howard. Gloucester, Kilcolman Bergson. 25 27 Bishop of. 17 Castle. 31 Berkeley, Bishop. Commonwealth. Gramsci. 19 Kilkenny. 14 28 20 Graves, Kinnock, Neil. 21 Bew, Paul. 16,28 Connell, Jim. 14 Robert. 28 Kipling. 33 Boland, John. 28 Corkery, Great War. 29 'Book of Rights1. 40 Daniel. 14,17 Gladstone. 30 'Last September, Boru, Brian. 41 Cromwell. 18,25-6 'Glorious The.' 14 Bowen, E. Cullen. 7,32 Revolution'. 31 Lewis & Clarke 5,6,14,20,24,28,31, Czechoslovakia. 36 Gneeves. 32 Expedition. 25 33,39 Grub St. 34,35,39 Limerick. Bowenscourt. 5 Day-Lewis, Gogarty. 19,20 8,12,13,33,36,34 British Council. Cecil. 28 Green, Mrs. Locke, John. 28,33 de Gaulle. 28 Alice Stopford. 28 British Empire. 6 de Valera. 39 16,40 Lyons, F.S.L. British Labour Deevey, 22,31,36,39 Party. 21 Patricia. 9 Harris, Eoghan. Brittany. 20 Derry. 29 13,28 'MeinKampf'. 17 Buddhism. 27 Dillon, James. 6 Mangan, James Butler, Hubert. Drennan, Herder. 15-6 Clarence. 33 14,31,32,36 William. 26 Hertford College. Manifest Butler, Mrs. H. Dublin 4. 34 39 Destiny. 25-8 14,32 Dungeness. 15 Heydrich, Marxism. 24 Byrnes, Miles. 38 'Economics of Reinhard. 31 Mary, Queen of Partition'. 22 Hitler. 17,29 Scots. 18 'Catholic Bulletin '. East Belfast. 16 Hobsbawm, Eric. Maume, 16-7 18,20,21,24 Patrick. 34 'Conciliators'. Easter Week. 23,37 Holocaust, 37,40 McAuIiffes. 7 30-1 Edgeworth, Home Rule Bill. 30 McCarthy, 'Cork Examiner'. Maria. 19 Home Rule Party. Tom. 31 33 Edwards, Owen 30 McCarthys. 7 'Cork Free Dudley. 8 Hythe. 15 McCourt, Press'. 12 Eliot, T.S. 15 Frank. 8,11,13,32- Calvin. 26 English, 'Irish Historical 3,36,39 Campion, Richard. 28 Studies'. 22,28 McCracken, Michael. 28 'Irish Times'. Henry Joy. 39 Canada. 17 (Feasta'. 40 9,10,18,25,34 McQuaid, John Carroll 'Foras Feasa ar Israelis. 7 Charles. 5 (cigarettes) Eirinn'. 36 Italy. 19 McTier, Foundation. Election of 1918. 32 Martha. 26 5,36,41 Falls Road. 26 Jefferson. 25 McVay, Ken. 40 Catholic Famine, The. 36,37 Jews. 5 Ministry of Ascendancy. 16 Fenians. 18,23 Joyce. Information. Catling, Patrick Fichte. 16 24 6 42 Moore, George. Occam's Razor. 23 'Spectator, The'. 10 Trollope. 19,20 Orwell. 33 'Sunday Business 31,33,36,39 Moylan, Sean. 31 Oxford Post'. 28 Murdoch, Iris. University. 29,32 'United States 31,33,39 Oxford War 'Studia Magazine'. Myers, Kevin. 6 Pamphlets. 29 Hibernica'. 41 25-6 'Oxford Today'. Salisbury, Lord. 30 UCC. 5,31 'Nation, The'. 32 7,20,29 Savoy. 20 UCD. 7,9 'Netguide'. 40 Scullabogue. 38 Ui Neill. 41 Nazis. 19 'Paddy & Mr. Shakespeare. 25 Uncle Tom. 19 New Romney. 15 Punch'. 39,40 Sheehan, USA. 25 New Ross, Palestinians. 7 Canon. 19,20,30,34 Battle of. 38 Papacy. 31 Sheehan, D.D. 30 Wadham Nitti. 21 Paterson, Six Counties. 20,23 College. 39 Non-Conformist Professor. 28 Sliabh Luachra. War of Conscience. 18 Penal Laws. 18,28 12,19,25,29,32,33,3 Independence. Normans. 31 Poland. 5,36 4 6,23,31 North-West Propp, Solipsism. 27-8 Warden, David Cork. 16 Vladimir. 23,24,36 Sophocles. 24 Baillie. 38 Provos. 23 Spenser. 31,34 Waterstones. 11 Oc. 20 Puritan Street, Major. 27 Weber, Eugene. O'Brien, Conor Revolution. 13 Sullivan, A.M. 36 19,22 Cruise. 21,23,25 Synon, Mary West Belfast. 13,32 O'Brien, Kate. 8 Rabelais. 10 Ellen. 6,8-10,15 West O'Brien, Rebellion of'98. Britishness. 35 William. 30-1 36-9 'Two nations Whiteboys. 18 O'Callaghans. 7 Redmondism. theory'. 15 Whitehall. 6,28 O'Connell. 19 16,30-1 Tara. 41 Woolf, Virginia. 5 O'Grady, Reformation. 13,31 Taylor, Alice. Workers' Standish. 36,38 Reign of Terror, 32 8-10,16,32 Control. 21 O'Keeffes. 7 Renan. 15-6 Teleology. 27 Wyndham, O'Mahony, Robinson, Mary. 8 Templeogue. 9 George. 30 Andy. 28 Rodney, Tennyson. 14 W. W. 2. 2,5 O'Sullivan, Admiral. 19 Texas. 25 John L. 25 Rousseau. 21 Thatcher. 21 Yeats. 24,28,37,39 O Dulaing, RTE. 23,28 Thin Lizzy. 18 Young Ireland. Donncha. 5 Russell, G.W. (AE). Toibin, Colm. 34 11,17,23,32 O Suilleabhain, 16,24 Trimble, David. Zeldin, Eoghan Ruadh. 19 Russia. 40 21 Theodore. 18-21

RTE APOLOGY, 9th MARCH 2002.

"RTE and Declan Kiberd regret that a comment made on the 'Off the Shelf' programme was broadcast on the 23 rd of February 2002 caused offence to the Aubane Historical Society in North Cork. This was not our intention and we sincerely apologise.

The Aubane Historical Society has published a wide range of material on national and local history including material on major historical figures like Parnell and Thomas Davis and writers Canon Sheehan and Elizabeth Bowen."

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