Revisionism

Revisionism

I am reading Sean O’Tuama’s Fili faoi sceimhle, which means “poets in terror” (literally under, but I think this is just an idiom where the languages differ). He writes about two poets whom he regards as being the most significant to write in the Gaelic language since the 17th century, Egan O’Rahilly (c. 1670-1729) and Sean O Riordain. This is an opportunity to talk about the topic of revisionism in Irish history, not something I have deep knowledge of but which interests me a great deal. I am reading his book because I have a negligible knowledge of Irish Gaelic and well-organised, rational prose is something that doesn’t stretch my abilities beyond their limit.

Revisionism is something that started in the 1930s, which is when the professional training of Irish historians started. The values of historians, as an academic and international profession, included sobriety, preference for objectivity in the sense of not taking sides in the politics of the past, preoccupation with source analysis, preference for exposing the biases of source texts over identifying with their standpoints, and a wish to judge events in terms of how they appeared to participants rather than of how their eventual consequences, perhaps centuries later. Because the teleological bias of previous generations of historians had been nationalism, the new academics made a habit of squeezing nationalist bias out of the stories and looking at how it all appeared after you had done that. Indeed, rewriting stories to leave out the nationalist message, and finding new interpretations with apparent ease and as a rapid result of doing that, was the bread and butter of European historians over several decades. I say “European” because the nationalist emotion was very attractive to historians from other regions, in just those decades, and it is surely a problem to write the history of decolonisation without accepting nationalism as the direction of travel of most regions (becoming, after difficulty, “nations”) in what were, as at 1940, European overseas empires. In 1940, there were quite a few books around which told the story of Ireland in nationalist terms. These were mostly not written by professional historians. Some of them wanted to judge all Irish people, since 1169 AD or so, in terms of their attitude to English rule, and how far they had given up all other interests in life in favour of anti-imperial struggle. This preconception was spread into things other than books, for example songs, poems, speeches, and newspaper articles took them for granted, and presented the conclusions without re-examining the basic narratives. After the foundation of the Free State, these conclusions were part of the public universe of speech. The “revisionists” were simply historians who were interested in the processes of source analysis, and of reconstructing the past, rather than in nationalist piety. They also very much improved the factual basis of Irish history, by reading the source documents and recovering new facts.
As I understand it, the argument about revisionism entered a new phase in the 1970s. The activities of the Provisional IRA were unacceptable, after a certaian point, to the majority of academic historians in the Republic. They became aware that their acceptance of a nationalist view of Irish history (from, let’s say, 1532 up to 1923) coincided with the PIRA’s instrumental use of the past, however much blurred. This forced a reappraisal of their own work. A version of collective history in which the Protestants weren’t all bad, and acquired the right to be Irish after, well, a hundred years or so, and in which getting over shared tragedy was the healthiest reaction to it, became more attractive to them, as a group. But, in writing new work which engaged with that, they either lost view of the centrality of land forfeiture, dispossession, and famine, or at least induced mighty anxiety in other historians that they might do so. This anxiety gave rise to the debate on revisionism. This is described in two books of essays, Interpreting Irish history, edited Ciaran Brady, and The making of modern Irish history, edited D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day. I think it is fair to say that the debate was at its peak a generation ago.

There is another group of historians we have to consider, and that is ones who sympathised with either the British government or the Protestant Ascendancy and are not minded to analyse the Gaelic viewpoint on affairs because their social commitment prohibits that. A variant on this is people who write about Irish history without knowing Gaelic – I feel that, as Vincent Morley (for one) has pointed out recently, writing Irish history without reading the Gaelic documents is an exercise in fiction. This is not revisionism as I understand the term, but the virulence of the debate was partly due to the presence of some quite dubious publications with which the genuine revisionists could, unfairly, be associated. If the proposal was, in reaction against PIRA massacres and torture schools, to rewrite Irish history from a pro-British point of view, then one could be wholeheartedly against it. But, this was not actually the game that people were playing.

O’Tuama remarks that one McCarthy friendly to O'Rahilly rented part of his former family land from its new owner, but that the high rent was disadvantageous for him, and that showiness (scléip) of lifestyle was no longer available to him. This also meant that he could not patronise a house poet or poet in the way which Gaelic landowners had done since the early Middle Ages, if not before. The question of high rent repays our attention. The conquest of Ireland in Tudor times was driven by the need to acquire land; new settlers arrived, in several counties, and expelled the native Irish from their land. The settlers were productive, in some ways, but were also producing for sale or export. They removed their land from the supply of the nutritional needs of the native population. Colonisation meant land shortage, which got worse with time. The shortage of land kept rents high. The rural people outbid each other to get land, as tenants, and this meant that they could not also build up reserves – cash, possessions, stores of food, stocks of animals. As modern economists have shown, the people who die in a famine are the ones who lack funds; there is always a market in food for those who can afford the high prices which follow shortages. So a countryside of households with no reserves is set up for famine. The famine of 1741 was just a rehearsal for the more appalling events of 1845 to 1850. Now, it is generally agreed that the solidarity of the (Catholic) Irish population in wanting Home Rule and the expulsion of the English, around 1900 to 1923, was a consequence of Famine in the 1840s. This was a mass death event, it was not just a collective memory but the dominant one. But if you track back the whole series of Irish famines, going back to Munster in the 1580s, it seems that the land shortages and high rents were direct consequences of the original Tudor re-taking and settlement. The collapse of British rule followed logically from flaws in the land regime set up by the Tudors. While apparently solid, it was a fragile settlement of affairs and the pattern of rural poverty, distrust of the government, uprisings, and famines which began under Elizabeth persisted thereafter. So the “grand narrative” which links the establishment of English rule (outside the district around Dublin) to its eventual breakdown and the establishment of the Free State (later the Republic) exists in reality and is the most natural pattern which disengages itself from the sources. It is not a projection of intellectually biased politicians of the 1940s, or any other time.
If you superimpose the nationalist vision on the deeps of history, you conclude that people who weren’t agitating for independence were wasting their lives. But, as independence did not come until 1923 (arguably, 1948, when far-reaching constitutional changes were enacted and the link to the Crown was severed), you also conclude that even the people who sought freedom were up until that point, wasting their time – ending in frustration. This does not work as a view of history. People certainly led their lives, and achieved at least some of their goals, even when they couldn't vote. You can’t write history from a functional standpoint, based on the end goal, in which you ignore what people did in their lives and what they wanted to do. This is a way of making history vanish. And anyway, life isn’t simply a waste of time.
O’Tuama points out that O’Rahilly drew on poems by Godfrey O’Daly from the 14th C (he died in 1387), as part of the local (aristocratic) culture which he had internalised, just as it was drawing to an end. And Sorley MacLean draws on O'Rahilly in his long sequence of poems Dain do Eimhir, written in the 1930s. So the question whether Gaelic cultural memory was interrupted can be answered directly, just by looking at those three poets.
I do not find revisionism sympathetic. But, I have seen a few of the older books, and it is clear to me that the scholarly style of history which began, or at least took off, in the 1930s has been endlessly productive of new stories and new facts, and so clearer understanding. In fact, if you grasp the nationalist interpretation in 6th form, as I did for some reason, then fifty (!) years later you definitely want new interpretations, to avoid simple staleness and repetition. You read books to acquire new information, not to re-chew the knowledge you already have.
O’Tuama describes the history of the land-owning families in the district of Kerry where O'Rahilly came from. As he observes, the poet gives descriptions of members of the McCarthy family whom he could not possibly (ni moide) have known. He carries out the ancient bardic role of legitimating land-owners, but his voice is raised for a pattern of overlordship which had ceased to be while he was still in his youth. Just as he writes in an archaic poetic language, a standard which people were moving away from, so also he deals with significant political change by recording cultural memory of the system before it changed. His poems are notably conservative and critical. The story of his district is largely that of the decay of the McCarthy family. In 1688, Parliament had legalised the change of dynasty whereby William of Orange became king and James II Stewart ceased to be king. This followed a coup d’etat which was successful in England but barely so in Scotland and Ireland. So full-scale war followed in Ireland, the so-called War of Two Kings. The theory of feudal land-holding was that the king owned all the land, outright, and that he distributed it to his subjects on the basis of loyal service. If they failed in that service, for example by armed uprising, subversion, treason, he could straightforwardly take the land back – they had forfeited it. The War of the Two Kings saw the McCarthys collectively come out for King James and fight as Jacobites. The defeat of James saw them forfeit their estates. The Great McCarthy was in prison and then in exile, and many other branches of the family lost their land held as tenants, as they were expelled or simply unable to pay the rent demanded of them. Nearby, the arrangement was that Nicholas Browne, the Jacobite landowner, should not benefit from his estates during his lifetime, but that his daughter should keep them – and she was married to an MP and banker named John Asgill, an Englishman: “in 1703 he bought the forfeited estates of Sir Nicholas Browne (2nd Viscount Kenmare in the Jacobite peerage), who was living abroad in exile, for the term of Kenmare’s life. He himself had married Kenmare’s eldest daughter, who had been brought up as a Protestant.” (History of Parliament, on-line) Their offspring would inherit the land. This obviously resembles the arrangement whereby William of Orange, closely related to the Stewarts, would become king, reigning with his wife (and cousin), who was the daughter of the previous Stewart king. O'Rahilly, put simply, records the time when Brownes and McCarthys were in power over the whole district, and discusses every change as a loss and a deterioration. He wrote a prose satire on two characters, Tadhg Dubh O Croinin and Muircheartach O Griofa, who were the land agents (aidhbheardaithi) put in over the Browne lands. O’Tuama records them as being sued by Asgill for £1000 in rents which they had collected and not passed on to him. He uses the word faslaigh, upstarts, to record O’Rahilly’s view of them. It looks as if the beneficiaries of the shift of power were these two figures, local godfathers, who exploited the unsteady conditions of the time and throve in them. We could write the history of the district with them as the heroes and events interpreted from their point of view. This is the line of modern history – shifting viewpoint to find a new story. O’Rahilly sees it as his duty to praise the wealth and power which was present at 1680 – and refuses to give credit to the wealth and power of those in possession as at 1720. This is inconsistent – if you follow wealth and power, it is irrational to scorn the New Men. In fact, it is not rational to praise inherited wealth and to detest acquired wealth. This amounts to invalidating and even repressing a key historical process. O'Rahilly had a formidable knowledge of genealogy, mainly McCarthy genealogy – this qualification and sanctified knowledge may have steered him away from accurate political perception. Naturally the two godfathers had no genealogy, or none that bards were willing to take cognizance of.
O’Tuama records that one Lord of Muskerry (another McCarthy) went to live on an island in the Elbe, near Hamburg, and lived by selling the timber of ships that were wrecked there. One could retell this story from the aspect of his success in a new profession, inquiring into his marketing methods, his clients, the kinds of wood he salvaged, and so forth, but really this is perverse. The story of his life is one of exile and dispossession, the loss of the society which he grew up in, and he must have been aware of this. Not everybody saw the world in nationalist terms, or even in political terms, but when we see so many people either losing their land or fleeing the country altogether, and the role which the government and the laws played in that, we can be sure that those individuals knew what they had lost and knew that the British government had been the agent which brought the loss about.
O’Rahilly seems barely to have left a small area in South Munster during his life, but he wrote aislings, dream poems in which a beautiful woman appears to him who is Erin and who speaks for the woes which Erin is suffering. These poems rise above the praising of local nobles and of their wealth and feats, which bardic poetry recounted so many times, they are about the fate of Ireland, and it would be perverse not to call them nationalist poems. (They are also Jacobite poems, but O'Rahilly had Erin in mind more than James III.) The Tudor conquest forced Irish people to see their country as a whole, as its condition was so much affected by the incursions of the English; and as a result we have people writing nationalist poems. World views shift, but there is a natural link between a nationalist around 1720 and a nationalist in 1921, or in 2021 for that matter.
I find it problematic that O’Rahilly was lamenting, not just the situation he had lived in, but the situation prevailing before his birth – he was fixing memory in verse, and had acquired memories fixed in verse by his predecessors, certainly not from print but either from manuscripts or from oral recitation. But, to be honest, this thriving of memory beyond the personal is necessary to society, and makes it possible to reflect – to capture the process of change, and so, it follows, to think about politics. He was patronised by the Brownes, Jacobites in defeat, but they had arrived as English land-takers in the Elizabethan colonisation, and their vast lands had been, around 1550 or 1560, lands of the McCarthys. When he remarks that the land of one Browne inheritor had once belonged to the McCarthys (“o shiuil Sir Val i gceart na gCarthach gcaoin’), he is referring to a state of affairs prior to 1588, i.e. a hundred years before his own birth. That is, he is summoning a kind of historical awareness similar to what we might claim, today, about O’Rahilly who lived three hundred years ago. I think the key is formal language: wrenching a moment into poetic form makes it permanent, and then the use of writing makes it possible to bring that moment back. The form is literally rigid, but we could also use the word ‘stable’. O'Rahilly was learned in collective memory rather than simply conservative. The decline of the McCarthys was thus a long-term event, and it is more accurate to take the long view than just one moment of dispossession. Because the land-holding system of an older Ireland saw everyone as the retainers of the local great family, either as tenants or as household members such as bards, the destruction of the great family meant the destruction of the niches in which everyone else lived. A whole new society came along. O’Rahilly is not just recording the economic annihilation of the McCarthys and of O’Rahilly, but a much larger social process in the history of Kerry.

I had difficulty with the word aidhbheardaithi. I think this may be a Latin word, “adverted” as in “inadvertent”. A land agent is advertent of the owner’s interests just as an attorney is “attourned” towards them. Just learn another 5000 words, I tell myself, and you can actually read this language. Someone from Munster is Muimhneach, in the plural Muimhneachan. So 'Moynihan' means 'person from Munster'.