Aidan Clarke obituary: Historian noted for disdain for ideology

Aidan Clarke

Born: May 2nd, 1933

Died: December 18th, 2020

Aidan Clarke, who has died aged 87, wrote two truly groundbreaking monographs on aspects of 17th-century Irish history. The Old English in Ireland, 1625-41, was a forensic examination of the position of Irish Catholic royalists at a time of increasing difficulties for both royalists and Catholics in this country and Britain. Prelude to Restoration: the End of the Commonwealth, 1659-60, was an equally thorough study of the end of the Cromwellian era here.

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In both, he demonstrated his very committed belief that to have any true notion of what actually happened in the past, one needed to eschew nationalist, unionist or other ideology and keep rigorously to the evidence.

Clarke, who was professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) from 1986 until 2001 (although he continued to teach for another four years), had “the most subtle historical mind in early modern Irish history” according to his former graduate student, and later close colleague and friend at Trinity, Ciaran Brady.

Clarke didn’t deny the inescapability of ideology. Instead he habitually adopted an attitude of sustained intellectual detachment. His view was that ideology got in the way of assessing the minds of people in past centuries. Long silences were very characteristic of him – he answered questions very often only after long pause for careful reflection, according to Brady

Poet’s son

Clarke’s independence of thinking was very probably the product of his noticeably unusual parentage and upbringing. He was the son of poet Austin Clarke, who had been dismissed from his lecturing job at UCD for marrying in a registry office and not a church. He was forced to earn a precarious living as a freelance literary journalist. Clarke’s mother, Nora (née Walker) was also a journalist and a Gaelgeoir who had been Bulmer Hobson’s secretary. Clarke was raised with no religion whatsoever, something almost unheard of in the Ireland of the last mid-century. He attended only schools in Dublin which did not practise corporal punishment which included, successively, Sandford Park School and the Erasmus Smith High School. At school, he excelled at boxing, rugby and cricket, the latter a sport he played into late middle age. He then read history and political science at TCD, graduating in 1955.

Coleraine infuriation

After completing his doctorate there, Clarke spent six years at Magee University College in Derry (1959-1965) where he became secretary of the committee pressing for the city to be the site of Northern Ireland’s second university. John Hume was its chairman and remained a life-long friend thereafter. The award of the university instead to the predominantly unionist town of Coleraine infuriated him: in recent years he told an interviewer for a TCD aural history that he thought then, and still did, that the decision was “frankly absurd”. He also described society in western Northern Ireland, in private conversation, as “semi-feudal”.

Remarkably, Clarke’s contribution to the running of both Trinity and the Royal Irish Academy, of which he was president from 1990-1993, was as important to him personally as his writing. He was, successively, senior tutor, registrar, bursar and vice-provost of TCD in the 1970s and 1980s. He especially enjoyed teaching which he described as “not about filling buckets but starting fires”.

Clarke was also very active in the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement from the 1960s onwards as well as the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was one of the first advocates of wholefoods in Ireland, being a founder member in the 1970s of the Dublin Food Co-Operative.

Clarke is survived by his son Oisin, and his daughters Caoimhe and Subhanora. He was predeceased by his wife, Mary (née Hughes), a mathematics and English teacher, their son Caesan, and by his brothers, Donald and Dardis.