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Eoin Macneill's Early Medieval Ireland

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Eoin Macneill's Early Medieval Ireland Elva Johnston Eoin MacNeill’s Early Medieval Ireland: A Scholarship for Politics or a Politics of Scholarship? Abstract: Eoin MACNEILL (1867–1945) was the first academic historian of early medieval Ireland; he is frequently considered to be the founder of the discipline of early Irish history. He was also a prominent nationalist activist, a revolutionary, and a minister in thefirstIrishFreeStategovernment.Thispaperwillconsiderthesharedinspirations for MACNEILL the politician and MACNEILL the scholar. In particular, it will focus on MACNEILL’s belief that the medieval past of Ireland was the making of its national char- acter and the foundation of its right to independence from the British Empire. This brought him into conflict with the great unionist historian of Norman Ireland, Goddard Henry ORPEN. Their debate, revolving around contested pasts, proved to be trouble- some for later generations of historians who were concerned to write an Irish history free of political bias. But MACNEILL was no mere propagandist. He was passionately de- voted to the writing of source-driven history, one reliant upon core research skills in language and palaeography. He believed history should be scientific but not necessar- ily, or even ideally, value-free. This paper will examine these issues, primarily through the lens of MACNEILL’s career up to the formation of the Irish Free State (1922) and sub- sequent Civil War (1922–1923). It will show the extent to which his disagreements with ORPEN,aswellasMACNEILL’s efforts to accurately delineate the early Irish past for scholars and, crucially, the wider public, were tied to his conviction that understand- ing the medieval was always relevant for contemporary societies. Keywords: Eoin MacNeill, revisionism, nationalism, Irish Manuscripts Commission, tribalism, Gaelic Ireland, Goddard Henry Orpen, Normans, British Empire, present- ism, public history I Eoin MACNEILL: Scholar and Politician In early medieval Ireland, Fer Dá Chrích, man of two districts, was a common saint’s name.1 It could refer to someone associated with two places or careers. In either sense, 1 There are at least eleven examples of this name in the medieval Irish martyrologies alone. For convenience, see The Martyrology of Tallaght from the Book of Leinster and MS. 5100–4 in the Elva Johnston, School of History, University College Dublin, Belfield Dublin 4, Ireland, [email protected] Open Access. © 2020 Elva Johnston, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-010 212 Elva Johnston this serves as a metaphor for the complex life of Eoin MACNEILL, one frequently treated as bifurcated between politics and scholarship, for he was a politician and an academic historian. This dual role raises questions about the integrity of academic history and its relationship to political action and even propaganda, one which has proved troubling to later generations of Irish scholars, especially those who identified as ‘revisionists’.2 These revisionists consciously argued for a historical scholarship free from nationalist impulses and grounded in historical documentation. The Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, with their heavy confluence of religious, linguistic and ethnic identities, shaped by rival understandings of the past, problematized the role of academic historians; they came to question the primacy of national narratives in shaping scholarship. At the same time, historiographical approaches, which largely emphasized empiricism and the ideal of value-free history, created a seeming division between contemporary schol- ars and previous generations of historians. History was defined as a science, associated with modernity and progress.3 The scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were sometimes portrayed as slaves to highly presentist and politicized histo- ries, shaped around the ultimate goal of Irish independence from British rule.4 Nonetheless, as this paper will show, the debates of former generations, including those engaged in by Eoin MACNEILL,continuetoechointhepresent. Eoin MACNEILL’s career was strikingly varied; he was a man of many faces. MACNEILL was a Gaelic revivalist, an Irish Volunteer, a Free State minister, a bureau- crat and an academic, an establishment voice and an insurgent.5 He was born in Antrim and died in Dublin, his birth-place divided from the new state by the Border between the Irish State and the United Kingdom. To those outside of early Royal Library, Brussels, ed. Richard I. BEST / Hugh J. LAWLER (Henry Bradshaw Society 68), London 1931, pp. 28, 44, 47, 63, 67, 69, 77. Crích literally means ‘boundary’ (see the ‘electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language’ [eDIL], s.v. crích, online: http://www.dil.ie/12912; last accessed 15/05/2019), but also commonly refers to the territory incorporated within boundaries. 2 The revisionist debate influenced most areas of Irish history. The best introduction is Ciarán BRADY (ed.), Interpreting Irish History. The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994, Dublin 1994; its influence on early Irish studies is clear in Kim MCCONE / Katherine SIMMS (eds.), Progress in Medieval Irish Studies, Maynooth 1996; Jonathan M. WOODING, Reapproaching the Pagan Celtic Past – Anti-Nativism, Asterisk Reality and the Late-Antiquity Paradigm, in: Studia Celtica Fennica 6 (2009), pp. 61–74, provides useful commentary. 3 See for instance, Robert Dudley EDWARDS, An Agenda for Irish History, 1978–2018, in: Irish Historical Studies 81(22) (1978), pp. 3–19. 4 This gap is very much emphasized in Roy F. FOSTER, The Story of Ireland: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 1 December 1994, Oxford 1995. 5 The best short introductions to MACNEILL’s career are Patrick MAUME, MacNeill, Eoin (1867–1945), in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), online: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 34813 (last accessed 15/05/2019); ID. / Thomas CHARLES-EDWARDS, MacNeill, Eoin (John), in: Dictionary of Irish Biography (2013), online: http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a5283 (last ac- cessed 15/05/2019). See also Michael TIERNEY, Eoin MacNeill: Scholar and Man of Action 1867–1945, ed. Francis X. MARTIN,Oxford1980. Eoin MacNeill’s Early Medieval Ireland 213 medieval scholarship, he is best known for two controversial roles: the infamous Countermanding Order to halt the mobilisation of the Irish Volunteers, which became part of the mythology of the Easter Rising of 1916, and his ineffectual performance as the Free State’s representative on the Irish Boundary Commission of 1924–1925.6 It had been expected that the Boundary Commission would create more equitable Border arrangements but it dashed these hopes. These disappointed hopes seem to have scarred MACNEILL. Despite urging, his time on the Commission did not form part of the material that MACNEILL dictated for his memoir, although there are other gaps 7 in it as well. Nonetheless, MACNEILL was one of the most influential cultural politi- cians of his generation. In particular, his contribution to the founding of the Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC) in 1928, for which he served as first Chair, was im- mense.8 It was driven by his commitment to making the primary sources of Irish his- tory available.9 He envisaged the IMC as an Irish Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 10 founded in the early nineteenth century and still active to this day. MACNEILL,it seems, was always determined to make the medieval relevant. He believed that the Irish needed to know their own past and that this past put them on a par with the other peoples of Europe.11 Knowing the past was the prelude to, and the shaper of, present actions. Thus, the past was inherently political, in the sense that it could be presented as the fore-runner to current aspirations. For MACNEILL, it never simply ex- isted in its own right. Despite these intersections of politics and scholarship, there is a limited apprecia- tion of the extent to which they were bound together in MACNEILL’s mind. For instance, 6 The standard study remains Geoffrey J. HAND, MacNeill and the Boundary Commission, in: Francis X. MARTIN / Francis J. BYRNE (eds.), The Scholar Revolutionary: Eoin MacNeill, 1867–1945, and the Making of the New Ireland, Shannon 1973, pp. 199–275; see also Francis X. MARTIN, Eoin MacNeill on the 1916 Rising, in: Irish Historical Studies 12(47) (1961), pp. 34–40; Enda STAUNTON, The Boundary Commission Debacle 1925: Aftermath and Implications, in: History Ireland 4(2) (1996), pp. 42–45. 7 Eoin MacNeill: Memoir of a Revolutionary Scholar, ed. Brian HUGHES, Dublin 2016, p. xiii. 8 Deirdre MCMAHON / Michael KENNEDY,ReconstructingIreland’s Past: A History of the Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin 2009, pp. 1–94. 9 See for example Eoin MACNEILL, The Fifteenth Centenary of Saint Patrick. A Suggested Form of Commemoration, in: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 13(50) (1924), pp. 177–188; ID., A School of Irish Church History, in: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 21(81) (1932), pp. 1–6. 10 MCMAHON /KENNEDY (note 8), pp. 6–7. For the MGH see David KNOWLES, Great Historical Enterprises, London 1965, pp. 65–97; Horst FUHRMANN, “Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen”: Gelehrtenleben in 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica und ihrer Mitarbeiter, Munich 1996. Isabelle GUYOT-BACHY /Jean-MarieMOEGLIN (eds.), La naissance de la médiévistique. Les historiens et leurs sources en Europe (XIXe–début du XXe siècle) (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences Historiques et Philologiques 5 / Hautes études médievales et modernes 107), Geneva 2015 (on the MGH esp. Gerhard Schmitz, Les Monumenta Germaniae Historica, in: ibid., pp. 299–313). 11 Eoin MACNEILL, Celtic Ireland, Dublin 1921, repr. Dublin 1981, pp. xi–xv. 214 Elva Johnston MACNEILL’s memoir juxtaposes his study of the Irish language, under the direction of the Jesuit scholar Edmund Hogan, with a consideration of the Parnell Crisis.12 This cri- sis split constitutional Irish nationalism and created bitterness for a generation.
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