An Impartial collection
(part 2 of previous post)
O’Tuama quotes an account of a Great McCarthy by a “spy” (spiaire) around February 1729:
“that he has been struck and inhumanly pursued by a milesian prince of a drunken and extravagant character, commonly called McCarthy Mór… as being a person who lives extra legem and matters not indictments nor any other prosecution.”
This is memorable because it is so forthright, but it is hardly likely that the person being described would describe himself in the same terms. Being robust does not also mean that something is the last word. Are we to take it that self-awareness is always wrong, and that it is the employment of the historian to puncture and disperse this self-awareness? Indeed, O'Tuama quotes O’Rahilly’s funeral eulogy on this McCarthy, which is not much of a character sketch but does present him as the soul of the old order, which is passing out of view with his death, in 1729. (‘Milesian’ means that his family reached Ireland with the milesian invasion, in mythical prehistory, and not with any later group of ships.)
The interest is in the superimposition of two views of the same thing. Two is not the upper limit. Superimposition, and the abandonment of the single robust narrative line, are so central to what makes life interesting for a modern historian that they are not going to go away. They will continue to be the staple of historical research, and not just in Ireland. It’s just that this way of opening up the past is never likely to upset the underlying pattern of “bad government, foreign government” which is familiar to pupils in secondary school.
O’Tuama suggests that O’Rahilly’s depiction of Tadhg O Croinin was influenced by the figure of Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ novel. It is hard to avoid the reaction that this would cast the McCarthy landowners as Don Quijote figures – with O’Rahilly’s bardic poetry corresponding to the unreal and exalted chivalrous romances which Don Quijote read. It is notable that Sancho was sane and saw the world as it is.
O’Tuama quotes a 1922 history of the McCarthy family which I tried to access in an on-line version which had been scanned in such a way as to make it unusable. I did randomly pick up this bardic account of the high life at Dun Togher, around 1625:
Their strongholds were filled with beautiful women, and quick-slaying cavalry viewing them; mirth, drunkenness, playing on harps, poems, songs, bards, and the bacagh shouting and roaring, and soothsayers were at their feasts; there too were gamblers in mutual discord, and large-bodied vagrant gluttons contending.
This very castle was the building where O’Rahilly set one of his poems, ‘An file i gCaisel an Tochair’. (Bacach comes from Latin baculus, staff, and probably means beggars, unable to walk properly; although the editor is unwilling to use this translation. The poem is about generosity so the beggars are a natural part of the picture.) The bard is Donal na Tuile. This portrait probably does concur with Tadhg’s understanding of himself. By 1700 the castle was in the hands of another family. A tag of verse states that this Tadhg died sheltering in a slit of the mountain, after his lands were forfeited.
According to Colm Lennon, Togher means a causeway through a marsh.
I found some irish texts on-line and extracted this O'Rahilly poem. the translation dates from 1900, I think.
IV. GILE NA GILE. The Brightness of Brightness I saw in a lonely path, Crystal of crystal, her blue eyes tinged with green, Melody of melody, her speech not morose with age, The ruddy and white appeared in her glowing cheeks. 5 Plaiting of plaiting in every hair of her yellow locks, That robbed the earth of its brilliancy by their full sweeping, An ornament brighter than glass on her swelling breast, Which was fashioned at her creation in the world above. A tale of knowledge she told me, all lonely as she was, 10 News of the return of Him to the place which is his by kingly descent, News of the destruction of the bands who expelled him, And other tidings which, through sheer fear, I will not put in my lays. Oh, folly of follies for me to go up close to her! By the captive I was bound fast a captive; 15 As I implored the Son of Mary to aid me, she bounded from me, And the maiden went off in a flash to the fairy mansion of Luachair. I rush in mad race running with a bounding heart, Through margins of a morass, through meads, through a barren moorland, I reach the strong mansion — the way I came I know not — 20 That dwelling of dwellings, reared by wizard sorcery.
They burst into laughter, mockingly — a troop of wizards And a band of maidens, trim, with plaited locks; In the bondage of fetters they put me without much respite, While to my maiden clung a clumsy, lubberly clown. 25 I told her then, in words the sincerest, How it ill became her to be united to an awkward, sorry churl, While the fairest thrice over of all the Scotic race Was waiting to receive her as his beauteous bride. As she hears my voice she weeps through wounded pride, 30 The streams run down plenteously from her glowing cheeks, She sends me with a guide for my safe conduct from the mansion, She is the Brightness of Brightness I saw upon a lonely path.
THE BINDING. O my sickness, my misfortune, my fall, my sorrow, my loss ! The bright, fond, kind, fair, soft-lipped, gentle maiden, 35 Held by a horned, malicious, croaking, yellow clown, with a black troop ! While no relief can reach her until the heroes come back across the main.
‘the fairest thrice over’ refers to James II, the Stewart king, and the heroes over the sea are Jacobites in exile. "Brightness of Brightness" is just an intensifier, like "king of kings" in the Bible and in related Christian texts. It is there applied to concrete nouns and not abstract ones.
Another poem:
THE ANSWER OF AODHAGAN.
I shall shave the bristles, I shall crop the nails Of the snub-nosed, wheezing hangman, The scarred fellow, scabbed, loud-voiced, spiteful, Shorn, sole-spotted, stumbling. 65 From the top of his head, in which droves of vermin are wont to be, Covered over, gathered together in foul lumps, To the soles of the club-footed fellow, who is stiff-necked, Aged, hollow-voiced, gnawed. I will tear the ragged wretch, who is planed, poor, 70 Vicious, into wounded bits ; The starving miser, the hangman trickster, The powerless cripple full of reptile spawn. A fellow full of vermin, of running eyes, a dirty gaunt wad, A fugitive vagabond is the liar, 75 A slender hunchback, a greasy swallower, Who swallows every rubbish into his greedy maw. I will gnaw the feet of the villain caitiff, Branching, broken, wounded ; And his two hard heels on which are chilblains, 80 Holes and scorched cavities. Crooked nails made of iron Are covering and shield for his fingers ; And his two shanks, sprained, broken, scalded, Peeled, seared, full of scars.
I shall peck at his knees and the junctions of his nerves ; Which will take from the wrong-doer his power of walking, And his two hips like a pair of bare boards And his waist tawny and feeble, His rotund belly hung above that ; 90 As a cess-pool, wide-arched ; A brutish, greasy, greedy maw, Has the curlew of the false teaching. A narrow breast, slender, bristled, yellow-skinned ; Eyes of a thief dim of sight ; 95 Hair of a he-goat ; back with two ridges, Yellow, bulging, putrid, rough. An ignorant clown, a stroller deserving of the gallows, An old burned stalk from the sea-side, A wretch of odious manners, a conceited simpleton, 100 A harsh enemy of the Irish nobility. A pecker at a small potato, a trifler about the house, A scraper of the greasy pot ; A scabby wretch, a raw-boned ragged fellow. A shameless simpleton of consumptive coughing. 105 His throat emits a storm of wind Which sickens thousands into dire pain The surly carcass from which comes a stench Through his rough open jaws.
Domhnall is he, the hated of the neighbours, no A remnant without the power of making a single poem ; Sinister son of Donnchadh, large-skulled, husky, Jealous, churlish, nerveless. Decrepit is the lean withered creature, faded of foot, Crooked, a grease-sweating object ; 115 He is deceitful, destructive, quarrelsome, vicious, Cunning, contentious, cowardly. He looks like a monkey, frightened, when it goes In anger running against the side of a wall ; Or like a rat running through a cellar, 120 Hotly pursued by strong cats. Ye poets of Munster, ban ye This yellow-skinned clod ; A noisy little bard, put cards beneath him, It is plain that it is madness he has written against me. 125 It is not proper for the learned ever to listen to Lays from a mouth which does not compose smoothly ; It is a shame for the nobles of a fair proud land To write praise of his poems or his verses. [in his black hair are strong nits, and ashes, 130 And active crooked-legged vermin ; A forked comb tears the lumps Which gobbles the guest with a noise as of a bell.
His hair may be compared to that of the demons On the brink of darkened Acheron ; 135 Brian O'Brosnaghan, a slothful churl, The worst fish on the Kenmare strand.] THE BINDING. A poor, empty, wretched miser, a withered branchlet, Starved hangman of porridge in a crooked mouth, An ill-shaped wretch, who barters his friends for a very trifle, 140 It was he who made, unawares, an attack with his tongue on Aodhagan Fionn. [Domhnall, son of Donnchadh, the long-necked fellow of grinding teeth, The corrupted sluggard of the goats, who does not speak justly ; Also, as I hear, empty was his lordship Until through the rabble of Dromann, you burst, you old remnant.]
I suppose 'ceangal', or binding, means a final stanza which ties the themes up.
Showing posts with label revisionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revisionism. Show all posts
Friday, 3 December 2021
Saturday, 27 November 2021
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'.
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'.
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