
Regan, a lecturer in history at the University of Dundee, has long been a critic of professional historians writing on Ireland. Many of his original publications, which reappear as chapters in the book, entangled him in vigorous exchanges with other Irish historians. It comes as no surprise then that the book itself elicited some negative comment from the academy. Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin, has recently written an uncomplimentary review of the book, and of Regan.[2] Unfortunately, Ferriter’s review resurrects some of the abusive urges from the height (depth) of the revisionist debate, and demonstrates, once again, that academic historians sometimes engage in gratuitous personal attack, ad hominem argument, and baseless derisory speculation.
To be sure, Regan’s work is controversial: it addresses hotly-contested topics and directly, sometimes provocatively, challenges established opinion. This character is readily seen from the book’s major themes. Regan examines declining scholarly standards in the writing of Irish history occasioned by outbreaks of violence in the north; he questions the historical consensus about the democratic formation of the Irish Free State; he critiques Peter Hart’s sectarian interpretation of republican violence in the revolutionary years; he explores the writing and political career of Conor Cruise O’Brien; and he comments on the origins and nature of the revisionist controversy.
The real power of this book is that it
treats these themes as inter-related rather than discrete. The interweaving of
seemingly disparate parts into a holistic account of recent developments in
Irish historiography is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Regan’s work.
Regan’s abiding interest is in the practice
and methodology of Irish history. He
suggests that, since the mid-1960s and especially since 1970, interest in the
empirical accuracy of historical accounts began to be replaced by concern for their
popular and political acceptability. What
resulted was a consensual approach to the writing of much Irish history, which
failed to address glaring weaknesses in emerging historical narratives.
This deterioration in the quality of
scholarly history has distinct origins in fears for the stability of the
southern state and in growing discomfort about the story of the state’s violent
origins:
The threat of a
northern adventure igniting a religious war ever remained. Partially, this was realised in 1956 when the
IRA began its offensive against Northern Ireland, lasting fully six years. . . .
As nothing before, the IRA’s recrudescence after 1970 awakened fears in
the south about the state’s official history and its power to draw southerners
into the northern conflict. (p. 4).
To pose the southern state’s dilemma in a
recent form: how could the Irish state, with any credibility or legitimacy,
both celebrate its insurrectionary origins and
conduct a counter-insurgency campaign against the Provisional IRA, which
claimed to be the direct lineal descendant of the insurrectionary impulse that had
given birth to the state?
The writing of Irish history was affected
by the crisis of impending “northern adventure,” and it changed in various
ways. The physical-force or Fenian
interpretation of the emergence of the southern Irish state began to be
replaced by a new understanding that stressed the state’s democratic origins. This revised history focused on the formative
influence of the pact election of 1922, marginalizing the significance of the
rising of 1916, and tended to see the civil war as a contest between democratic
treatyites and militarist anti-treatyites.
In its preoccupation with developments in the 26 counties, the new
history also became a state-centred history that marginalized northern, pan-nationalist
and irredentist elements.
If the northern threat to the stability of
the southern state encouraged agreement among historians on a revised narrative,
the intolerance of the “O’Brien Ethic” discouraged dissent from that narrative. After the eruption of violence in the north
in the late 1960s, the influential writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien
openly associated dissent with disloyalty to the southern state. He was enormously successful in popularizing
this form of thinking. Those writing the wrong kinds of Irish history—and those
espousing the wrong kinds of political views or commemorating the wrong kinds
of historical events—could be easily denounced as “republican apologists” who
approved of Provisional violence threatening the state (p. 28). Regan notes that:
While alone the O’Brien
ethic cannot fully explain any consensus existing among Irish historians, fear
of denunciation remains a disincentive for those raising a critical voice
against Irish revisionism (p. 280).
In short, the revisionist thesis of the
democratic origins of the southern state was, in large part, uncritically accepted
by academic historians, despite problems with every element of its empirical
base. A wealth of evidence suggests that
the 1922 pact election did not bestow an unequivocally democratic mandate on
the treatyites. Strong historical
evidence supports the view that there were diverse motives and ideologies on
both sides of the Treaty divide. It is
therefore historically inaccurate to portray the treatyites as the democratic
side. The narrative of democratic state
formation also diminishes the considerable effect that continual British
threats of coercion had in shaping both the process and form of the Irish
settlement. The dictator-like powers
wielded by Michael Collins shortly before his death in August 1922 also belie
the story of democratic state origins.
Regan concludes that Ireland in the revolutionary years was bereft of a
functioning constitutional order “in which democracy . . . could be said to
exist” (p. 67).
Equally problematic are historical narratives
of the primitivist and sectarian nature of the Irish state’s republican
enemies. Here, Regan dissects the work
of the late historian Peter Hart, especially his accounts of the Kilmichael
ambush of 1920 and the killing of 13 Protestant loyalists in west Cork in 1922.[3]
Hart contends that Tom Barry, the legendary republican commander who led the
Kilmichael ambush, lied about the false surrender of British forces in order to
justify the ensuing “massacre”. He characterizes
Barry as a killer with primitive politics. Hart constructs a sectarian narrative of the west
Cork killings, asserting that people were killed by the anti-treaty IRA because
they were Protestant, and uses the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to these
and related actions by the IRA.
Hart’s account of the revolutionary years remains
exceedingly controversial. It has been generating
intense public debate for a prolonged period.
Presumably because of the sheer volume of letters received, the Irish Times called a halt to
correspondence on Hart’s work in 1998, as did the magazine History Ireland some 15 years later.[4]
Regan finds that Hart’s conclusions about
Kilmichael and his related characterization of Barry are without foundation. There is just too much contradictory evidence
to allow for such an unambiguous interpretation, a point that Ferriter concedes
about Kilmichael in his review of Regan’s book.
Regan also finds that Hart’s sectarian thesis of the west Cork killings
and the designation of “ethnic cleansing” are conclusions “unburdened by credible
evidence” (p. 21). Hart himself, in some
of his later work, seems to have retreated from if not abandoned the claim of
ethnic cleansing.[5]
Regan’s work can be seen as part of the larger
debate on Irish revisionism, although he is uncomfortable with how the term
“revisionism” has been applied. I can
see at least two ways in which Regan’s specific historical concerns relate to
that larger debate. Revisionists argued
that traditional nationalist/Fenian historiography was based more on myth than
history, in that it omitted stubborn historical facts that did not fit in with
its preordained story of heroic nationalist struggle against British
oppression. They also argued that such historiography
was present-minded: instead of trying to understand the past as the past,
nationalist historians selectively used, disfigured and stretched the past to
justify political and ideological positions in the present. Regan’s new historians are as guilty of the
very historical crimes of myth-making and present-mindedness that revisionists
had accused traditional nationalist historians of committing.
The place of myth in new Irish history is a
principal point of Regan’s analysis. He
refers to the story of the democratic formation of the southern state as a “foundation-myth,”
supported by the false narrative of the sectarian thesis. He contends that some new historians practice
elision, or “the simple expedient of ignoring the unhelpful or contradictory
evidence”; they also practice negation, which tries to deny the importance or
even the existence of such evidence (p. 229).
Where “patterns of omission” of evidence repeatedly occur, the resulting
historical narrative becomes oversimplified, inaccurate and therefore
implausible (p. 198). There are, Regan
believes, sound methodological reasons for questioning the myths of democratic
state formation and republican sectarianism.
Another of Regan’s main points is that new
history is present-minded. Its
historical accounts produced resolutions to the contemporary dilemma that Provisional
armed struggle posed for the southern state’s acknowledgement of its origins in
republican violence. New history generated two such resolutions. First, the
narrative of democratic state formation provided a new “myth of struggle” for
the southern Irish state, which ignored or minimized the violence and coercion accompanying
its birth.[6] In the place of armed insurrection against
imperial power, the new myth substituted democratic struggle culminating in decisive
electoral victory. This new rendering also
undermined the Provisional claim of continuity with the establishment of the
state. Second, the sectarian-primitivist
thesis provided a resolution by demonizing the republican enemy. While this thesis was based on a new historical
understanding of the IRA in the revolutionary years, it was quickly
transplanted, by historians and journalists alike, to the here-and-now and
applied to the Provisionals. Or, perhaps just as likely, the new historical
understanding was used to justify what historians and journalists already knew
to be true about the dark essence of Provisional republicanism (pp. 196-197).
These new historical perspectives on
democracy and sectarianism eased the southern state’s dilemma: the state could,
with its credibility and legitimacy intact, remain true to its “democratic” roots
and at the same time take coercive measures against the “sectarian” campaign of
the Provisional IRA. What proved to be
good politics for the state was based on bad history.
Overall, Regan’s book is valuable to anyone
seeking to understand Ireland’s revolutionary years and more recent history. It is also useful to those interested in
critical historical methodology. Not
everyone accepts Regan’s account of new history, and some historians are adamantly
opposed to it.[7] To his credit, Regan directly engages his
critics and, in the book, gives citations to the works of historians who are sharply
critical of his views.
As other reviewers have noted, parts of the
book are repetitive. Repetition is probably
inherent in the kind of book that collects works previously published by a
single author. Nevertheless, such books
remain valuable. Although many chapters of
the book reiterate arguments and reintroduce concepts, each chapter does offer
new insights on, and new developments of, Regan’s main arguments.
John M. Regan, 2013, Myth and the Irish State. Irish Academic Press: Sallins. ISBN 978-0716532125.
[1] With the exception of chapter 11, which as far as I have been able
to determine has not been published before.
[3] Regan is one of Hart’s most persistent critics, along with Niall Meehan, Brian P. Murphy, Meda Ryan and the Aubane Historical Society. See, for example, Brian P. Murphy and Niall Meehan, Troubled History: A 10th Anniversary Critique of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies (Aubane: Aubane Historical Society, 2008).
[4] See the editor’s note appended to Peter Hart’s letter to the editor, “The Kilmichael Ambush,” Irish Times, 10 December 1998; and the note appended to John A Murphy’s letter, “Ethnic Cleansing and Tomas Rua O Suilleabhain,” History Ireland 21:1 (January/February 2013).
[5] Regan is similarly critical of Eve Morrison’s recent article
confirming the authenticity of Hart’s account of Kilmichael; see her
“Kilmichael Revisited: Tom Barry and the ‘False Surrender,’” in David
Fitzpatrick, ed. Terror in Ireland:
1916-1923 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012): 158-180. For a recent evaluation of the controversy
over Hart’s work, including his use of the term “ethnic cleansing,” see Stephen
Howe, “Killing in Cork and the Historians,” History
Workshop Journal 77:1 (Spring 2014): 160-186. Overall, I find Howe’s treatment of the west
Cork killings inconsistent and in the end inconclusive. On the one hand, he gives careful
consideration to the competing narratives of what happened in west Cork. On the other, he displays a quiet but
persistent determination to keep alive some form of the sectarian thesis. He says, for instance, that it is quite
likely that the west Cork killings were “the extreme end of a much broader
spectrum of attitudes and behaviour which, whilst complex and varying in causes
or motivations, included an indubitably sectarian element” (p. 173). He also quotes approvingly a passage from
Charles Townshend’s appraisal that found general merit in Hart’s position: “it
can hardly be doubted that Protestants felt under threat and that there was
often some reason for this” (p. 179).
And, he describes an IRA attack near Newry some two months after the west
Cork killings and notes: “All the victims were Protestant, as in west
Cork. It is hard to doubt that this too
was in some sense a sectarian massacre” (p. 177). There are two points to note about these
quotations. They indicate an
interpretation that is far weaker than Hart’s unambiguous sectarian
thesis. Beyond this, though, it is
difficult to ascertain what the quoted passages mean, if anything. What precisely is the sectarian element in the
broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviour that are themselves complex and
varying in causes or motivations? Even
if we can hardly doubt that Protestants often had some reason to feel under
threat, what exactly does this say about the nature of the IRA campaign? Can we, with any confidence, use the religion
of victims in west Cork and Newry to impute some unspecified sectarian motive
to the killings? If we, like Howe, take
a deterministic and hierarchic approach to causation that elevates sectarianism
above other causes, such that it must always be some (unspecified) part of a
complex explanation, we empty sectarianism of analytical meaning. Henry Patterson displays a similar
determination to apply the label “ethnic cleansing” to the Provisional IRA
campaign in County Fermanagh; see his “War of National Liberation or Ethnic
Cleansing: IRA Violence in Fermanagh during the Troubles,” in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism,
ed. Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of
Queensland Press, 2008): 230-242.
[6] On the function of myth in nationalist histories, see John Coakley,
“Mobilizing the Past: Nationalist Images of History,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10:4 (January 2004): 531-560.
[7] David Fitzpatrick, “Ethnic Cleansing, Ethical Smearing and Irish
Historians,” History 98:329 (January
2013): 135-144.
Very interesting. Sounds like a lack of objectivity and convenient subjectivity is not alone the realm of Tim Pat Coogan. A couple of historians there worth some further delving into.
ReplyDeleteNever liked Connor Cruise O'Brien, at the worst of times during the troubles he and Gerry Fitt were always Westminster stooges and a disgrace.
"To his credit, Regan directly engages his critics and, in the book, gives citations to the works of historians who are sharply critical of his views".
Found that an interesting and relevant observation. Republicans could do worse than take note of it. Any veering off from the republican 'position' and people are cold shouldered and ostracised it seems. An old Provo trick which seemingly persists with republicans at present who could do with more friends rather than less. But then they can hardly agree between themselves, can they? The Provos have ended up just saying what is convenient on any given day and change tomorrow without a blink or a blush. To attempt to take them serious at this point is akin to a form of 'mental self harming'.
The perception of history is always being looked at anew as in the case of Irish veterans of WW1+2 being afforded long over due respected by the Irish government. The political climate of the day plays a crucial part too. There is a thin line also perhaps I'd imagine for those in academia between saying what they really think and keeping a career intact. The way of the world; he who pays the piper calls the tune.
I attended an Irish Historical Society hedge school evening in January of 2013 at The National Library where Regan, David Fitzpatrick, Eve Morrison and John Borgonovo debated "The War of Independence: four glorious years or squalid sectarian conflict?"
ReplyDeleteI had previously read his scholary and accessible "The Irish Counter-revolution 1921 to 1936" and wasn't disappointed with his contributions on the night!
I look forward to getting my hands on a copy of "Myth and The Irish State".
Good review Mike. I have the book and hope to read it within the ... decade!! Always the way with books.
ReplyDeleteIf you are interested in the work of Niall Meehan on the matter, he writes under the moniker Harry W on Politics.ie.
Another review here of 'Myth and the Irish State'. http://www.theirishstory.com/2014/02/08/book-review-myth-and-the-irish-state/
ReplyDeleteThe jist of the review is that Regan has many things right, but it's easier to criticise than to write your own history. Look forward to the follow up of 'The Irish Counter Revolution', which is a fine book.