Dangers lie in the romanticising of 1798

The New year will be dominated for many by the commemoration of the 1798 rebellion, just as the past four years have been by memories of the Famine. Already, the familiar and uneasy mix of historical reassessment, popular celebration, and the reduction of complex events to "heritage" soundbites for mass consumption is well in train.

Such commemorations are inescapably political, and often tell more about contemporary needs than they do about the events themselves. It is no surprise to find a version of 1798 now being propagated, with State support, that is in tune with nationalist versions of the current "peace process" - a lost dream of "United Irishmen" that can yet be made a reality. It is ironic, however, that the impetus for this comes from Wexford, the main theatre of the conflict 200 years ago, but the one in which the slogan of "Comoradh '98, the United Irish Revolution" is least appropriate.

In recent decades a major reassessment of the Wexford rebellion, mainly by fellow historians Tom Powell, Louis Cullen, Kevin Whelan, and Daniel Gahan, has transformed our understanding of its economic, social, and political contexts. Most startling was Louis Cullen's uncovering of the United Irish organisation in the county, a fact denied in the aftermath of the rebellion by those involved, whose testimony seemed to fit the evidence.

However, as Cullen has shown with scrupulous care, the evidence for the United Irish role in the Wexford uprising remains tantalisingly fragmentary, and is by no means enough to justify eulogising it as simply, or even primarily, a United Irish rebellion.

This is also clear from Gahan's excellent new account, called, more appropriately, The People's Rising. This is rightly dismissive of the exaggerated claims made for the so-called Wexford "Republic", which, like the even more shadowy Wexford "Senate", has no credible historical basis. It hardly needs stressing that any attempt to reduce this complex and bloody event to a single cause or controlling force is unhistorical.

The politicisation of the poor in the 1790s, portrayed vividly in Kevin Whelan's The Tree of Liberty, assumes pre-existing concerns and an older political culture, which related particularly to linked conflicts over land and religion, arising from a colonial process that continued, especially in north Wexford where the rebellion began, well into the 18th century.

Cullen and Whelan have shown the inadequacy of the old single cause explanation, first expounded by the ultra-Protestant historian Richard Musgrave in 1803, that the outbreak was a purely sectarian affair. However, the seeming intention of "Comoradh '98" "to remove unnecessary baggage, like sectarian division," as one prominent spokesman put it, is equally distorting. What we need is an understanding of 1798 which takes account of all its complexities, and is more concerned with the (limited) surviving evidence than with some version of the perceived political needs of our own day.

Even in relation to those needs, it is wrong and foolish to deny the powerful sectarian currents in our history, which still continue to wreck lives. The very existence and rationale of the United Irishmen, after all, were a clear recognition of the problem of sectarian division.

My own historical consciousness has been shaped powerfully by 1798, to the degree that my current research on the rebellion has become partly an exercise in memory and autobiography. Born at Carrigbyrne, the site of the rebel camp before the bloody battle of New Ross, (and close to Scullabogue, site of the most notorious rebel atrocity), I grew up in that ancient town whose main focal point is a romantic statue of a rebel leader.

At the Christian Brothers school we were imbued with an intensely nationalist version of the rebellion, whose ballads were staples of our singing classes. Above all, I was taught by my mother to be proud of her great-great-grandfather, John Rice of Irishtown, who was killed in the aftermath of the battle of New Ross on June 5th, 1798, and to honour his first cousin, Edmund Rice, founder of the (Irish) Christian Brothers.

It is perhaps little wonder then that I joined that order at 14, and remained with it for seven interesting years. My own small project for the bicentenary is to explore the story of John Rice's death, which, so far as I can discover to date, does not appear in the historical record. In this he is a representative figure of the rebellion, one of the mainly anonymous victims of the most bloody episode in modern Irish history.

The Wexford rebellion claimed, perhaps, 20,000 lives in a few hot summer weeks, several thousand of them on that awful June day, piled high in the few narrow medieval streets of my home town. This is a reality of 1798 that must be remembered, these the dead that should be commemorated, at least as much as the wealthy, idealistic, United Irish leaders. These helped to sow the whirlwind, but had little control over its destructive course.

We know of John Rice's death instead through oral tradition, a vivid family story committed to paper by my cousin, Bride Roe. Its essentials are in the opening sentence. "He was killed by a group of English soldiers because he had sheltered some women and children in a loft behind his house during the battle of Ross. The hiding place was discovered and all were killed."

I have been trying to provide historical contexts for his story, to check it against the known facts, and to speculate as to why he might have been killed. Like his much wealthier cousin downstream at Waterford, he exemplified the new Catholic middle class and had already established a prosperous provisions business in a town dominated by the ultra-Protestant interest when he died at 42.

Was he a victim of that success, his death engineered by rivals in the chaotic, hysterical aftermath of the battle? We know that such things happened. Or is the emphasis on sheltering women and children in the story designed to deflect the memory of the fact that his loft sheltered rebels instead, - some of the brave "Bantry men" from my father's home parish who were in the vanguard of the attack on the town?

I am struck particularly by the way that his story provides, at a micro level, a counter-narrative to the shameful atrocity eight miles away at Scullabogue earlier that day, where some rebels burnt over 100 people, most of them Protestants and many women and children, in a small barn. There is a strong local tradition of denial or displacement of this horrific event, well captured in an assertion by an uncle of mine that "there was a barn there where Cromwell burnt the Catholics."

The excesses of the military at New Ross have long been used to explain, if not justify, Scullabogue, and Gahan's new account makes dramatic but poorly substantiated claims in this regard. What is most worrying about Comoradh '98 is its attempt to minimise further or sanitise what happened at Scullabogue. This has involved claims that the presence of some Catholics among the victims disproves "the supposed sectarian angle", and that those killed were "loyalists" and so, by implication, protagonists in the conflict, and legitimate "prisoners of war".

A list of 113 men, women, and children killed at Scullabogue can be found in A History of Newbawn (1986), edited by Kevin Whelan. Those who died, it concludes, "were a large contingent from the village of Tintern, wives of members of the North Cork Militia, and the local Yeomanry, servants and associates of the landlord class, local Protestant farmers, government officials, and a few Catholics". The "few Catholics" (nine of the 113 listed) were almost certainly there because of real or imagined connections with Protestants.

Just because Musgrave and others exploited Scullabogue for sectarian purposes, modern commentators, however well-intentioned, are not entitled to rob it of its strong sectarian dimension, which was also connected to disputes over land in earlier decades. Instead, it should be a primary aim of Comoradh '98 to help people "to face the horror", as the Wexford historian Sean Cloney has pleaded.

At the very least, the names of those who died should feature on the "suitable, dignified and appropriate memorial' promised by the Comoradh Committee. The text proposed, however, does little to honour that promise, describing the victims merely as "prisoners" (again, by implication, legitimately so) and making them incidental to what appears to be the real purpose of the memorial, which is to reassure us that "the remorse of the United Irish at this outrage, a tragic departure from the ideals of their Republic, is shared by the people of Ireland." This is surely the ultimate "revisionism" and as propagandistic as anything in Musgrave. Hopefully, the efforts being made, by the people from both communities, to have that text reconsidered, will prove successful.

In Wexford 1798 should not be romanticised. It was an event of great savagery and cruelty, mostly by the ill-disciplined forces of the State. Its most remarkable feature remains the determination and bravery of the rank and file rebels. We must try to understand them in their own terms, and not reduce them to ciphers in the idealistic schemes of the United Irishmen.

Dr Tom Dunne is a professor of history at University College Cork.