Is the aftermath of epoch-making events really when the action happens? Not the war; the peace treaty. Not the referendum; the negotiation. Follow the hand… how often have we heard people comment that one side won the war and the other the peace?
Radicals sparked the Irish Revolution; reactionaries shaped the new Ireland it created. The settlement after the war to end wars paved the way for decades of conflict in the colonial world, as well as a second even greater world conflagration. The compromises of peace can appear to some to dishonour the sacrifices of conflict. This is especially so when those who made the sacrifices are no longer present to comment.
Needless to say, nothing so simplistic can be altogether true, but there is a thread to pull here and the West Cork History Festival excels at pulling such threads. This year, we will do just that.
The West Cork History Festival was founded in 2017 and quickly established a reputation for the quality and breadth of its programme. It is a festival for anyone interested in local, national and international history. Held at beautiful Inish Beg near Baltimore, it features talks, debates, film, music and local field trips.
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In 2024, our programme will cover a greater range of topics than ever. Gathered under the two broad themes of Aftermaths and The Diaspora, it will begin with two of the greatest historians of their generation, Margaret Macmillan and Roy Foster, in conversation about their lives as historians. We can expect them to consider the way in which the impact of great moments of upheaval are shaped in their aftermaths and to help us try and understand the thinking of those who did the shaping.
Recovering the possible futures of the past, the histories that never came to be, has allowed both writers to illuminate the periods about which they have written. We can expect them to shed some of this light on us.
Aftermaths: The weekend will include new works on the Irish, American and Russian civil wars, consideration of the afterlives of the families of the Big Houses, and reflections on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their legacies. Andy Bielenberg, John Dorney and Helene O’Keeffe will describe their work mapping the violence of the Civil War across Ireland. This will include the, perhaps surprising, relative lack of transgressive violence in Cork. Donal Byrne will share some of what he has learned in tracing the fortunes of the families of many of Ireland’s big houses in the wake of the revolutionary period. Anna Reid will discuss the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919.
Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen is a reflection on the trauma of the Troubles in his home place and its aftermath, and he will discuss both the writing of it and the reactions to it. Henry Hemming will talk about his recently published book on the British undercover agent Stakeknife. There are many stories from the covert side of that conflict, and the period more generally, which remain untold, but that is now beginning to change. Martin and Henry will open up lines of discussion, which we will no doubt continue to explore in future years.
For a different angle on the history of responses to terror, Conor Gearty will discuss his book on the development of anti-terrorism law and its impact on liberal democracies. In what will be the first annual lecture in memory of James Kingston, former legal adviser to the Department for Foreign Affairs, Gearty offers a pungent critique of a policy framework that many governments have come to regard as normal.
Russell Napier will discuss an entirely different kind of aftermath, and our failure to learn the lessons of the financial past, in his talk on the wake of debt crises. The Library of Mistakes, which has branches in Scotland, Switzerland and India and plans to open in Singapore, London and the United States, has attracted a cult-like following among its readers and members with its serious and not-so-serious approach to learning the lessons of financial history. An Ulsterman, Russell is the Keeper of the Library and will bring it to west Cork with a talk on 21 lessons from financial history for the way we live now.
Diaspora – our range of contributions on this will include Thomas Keneally in conversation with Myles Dungan, on his latest novel on the life and complex inheritance of John Mitchel. Myles himself has a new book out, Land is All That Matters, and he will also talk about this, a subject of course at the heart of many stories of the diaspora. We will hear from Ida Milne on the letters of the Elmes Family and their revelation of three “sides” in the 1798 rising in Wexford.
Breandán Mac Suibhne will describe his work on a huge trove of letters from Irish migrants to the US, collected by Kerby Miller; Catherine Bateson will discuss her work on the role of the Irish in the American Civil War, while Catherine Wynne will describe the influence of the Irish In the British Army in the 19th century as a part of the diasporic experience (there is an ongoing debt to them in the distinctive vocabulary of Cork).
If this is not enough, we will hear from Ruti Lachs on the history of Cork’s Jewish community and from Caroline Campbell on the evolving role of the National Gallery in Irish life from its founding to the present day. Taking us further away and further back in time, Christopher de Bellaigue will conjure up 16th-century Constantinople, talking about his book on the early career of Suleyman the Magnificent. This is a novelistic treatment of an extraordinary man at the heart of a remarkable empire. A second volume will be coming soon and perhaps Christopher will give us a glimpse of what it contains.
Simon Kingston is co-founder of the West Cork History Festival, which began in 2017.
