Irish History: Tom Dunne's polemical volume falls into three distinct and somewhat awkwardly linked sections: 100 pages of autobiographical memoir, 50 pages on the bicentenary commemoration, and 120 pages on a detailed study of the background and fallout of the Battle of Ross, notably the massacre at Scullabogue.
The memoir explores Dunne's cultural and intellectual formation - a Wexford rural background, three deeply traumatic years as a novice in the Christian Brothers in the late 1950s, his student years at UCD in Earlsfort Terrace, a post-graduate stint in Peterhouse, Cambridge, and his career as an academic historian in UCC.
We have lamentably little honest writing about intellectual formation and this part of the book is ground-breaking. One can see, too, how maimed the author feels by his teenage years in the Brothers, and how this cast "long shadows" (a discarded but highly apt earlier title for the memoir) over the rest of his life, and his embrace of history as a profession. The memoir is by far the most engaging part of the book: it is a pity that it was not extended into the distinct volume that it deserved to be, rather than suddenly changing tack in mid-course into a micro-study of historiographical matters.
The bulk of the book is narrowly focused on commemoration and a study of the Battle of Ross that blends family with 1798 history. As these sections consist largely of a sustained attack on my role in both the commemoration and the writing of that history, it is necessary to lay out clearly the points at issue.
It is clear from the memoir that Dunne's views were formed (or deformed) by his recoil from the experiences of Catholic-nationalist Ireland of that grim decade, the 1950s. While his working through of these issues may be important therapeutically, that does not grant him immunity from the normal historical protocols. Dunne argues that there was a manipulative and malevolent political orchestration of the commemoration. In fact, the commemorations were marked by a mature, positive and sophisticated understanding of 1798. The groundwork had been well laid by two decades of solid research and reinterpretation of the 1790s, spearheaded by Louis Cullen, Marianne Elliott and Tom Bartlett, and carried on by a gifted cohort of younger scholars. The high quality of debate and, crucially, publication broadened the discussion well beyond the rancorous revisionist debate. The active generation of 1798 scholars seriously engaged with each other, but also, crucially, with local communities. Academic historians can be remarkably snippy about other scholars, including local historians, trespassing on their field. Indeed they can sometimes metamorphose into Co Cavan small farmers, patrolling their disciplinary bounds with a shotgun aimed at interlopers.
The commemoration met a real need, emanating from within the communities themselves. That grassroots impetus is important because it refutes the conspiracy theory that the commemoration was concocted by the State leaning on a few "ideologically committed" or gullible historians. The most striking feature of 1998 was the sheer range, scale and quality of these community events. These communities took ownership of their past and of the commemoration: the sense of continuity was potent in 1998. The commemoration was also notably inclusive. In Co Wexford, for example, women and Protestants participated in large numbers - a positive development - and people massively enjoyed the year.
The commemoration elicited a remarkable community efflorescence. Bill Murray and John Cullen's remarkable Epitaph of 1798 contains colour photographs of every single 1798 monument in the country. This labour of love - privately published and already a collector's item - records more than 1,000 monuments. Six hundred memorials of vastly varying quality, scale and ambition were erected during the bicentenary commemoration. One example is the visionary Tulach an tSolais on Oulart Hill, Michael Warren's modern megalith, spliced down the middle to reveal a clear, pure interior chamber, and aligned so that the rising solstice sun on June 21st shines directly through it onto Vinegar Hill. Epitaph of 1798 conveys a powerful sense, even at a quantitative level, of the sheer scale of community involvement. This is not properly acknowledged in Dunne's book.
Neither are cultural events. Highlights included Stephen Rea's superb production of Stewart Parker's Northern Star in the resonant setting of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church in Belfast, and Medbh McGuckian's characteristically brilliant blend of ellipsis, emotion and imagination in her 1798-themed and Wexford-named collection, Shelmalier. Dunne's brief foray into literary matters is somewhat unfortunate: he claims that Pakenham's Year of Liberty (1969) influenced Heaney's 'Requiem for the Croppies' - a poem first published in the Dublin Review in 1966.
Dunne's volume, as its memoir section adumbrates, is soaked in the bitter aspic of an earlier Ireland and lacks a sense of the profound changes of the 1990s. The 1980s, the high-water mark of revisionism, were a desperate, almost despairing decade, economically, culturally, politically. In the 1990s, there was a palpable sense of the burden of our history and of our economics lifting and shifting. Both the Famine (on which I was also the Government adviser) and the 1798 commemorations occurred in the aftermath of the IRA ceasefire and the advent of the Celtic Tiger. The commemorations marked the end of the phase when revisionism was the dominant public discourse. As Irish people became much more poised and self-confident, they also tired of being hectored about their history. One of the core clichés of revisionism was that once the Irish got "modernised", economically successful, and joined the contemporary cosmopolitan mainstream, they would trade in their interest in history for a good cappuccino. The opposite happened. The more Irish people gained economically, the more willing they were to engage with that complex past in all its pain and complexity. The renewed self-confidence of ordinary Irish people was the most striking feature of the bicentenary: it has been recently confirmed in poll data on declining anglophobia, for example.
The conspiracy theory is that there was some Blackadder-ish "cunning plan" to alter people's opinions. That never happened. Tom Bartlett has already vigorously refuted the charge that there was a narrow commemoration agenda driven by politicians: the exact opposite was the case - politicians took their cues from the historians, not the other way around. The new thinking on 1798 emerged from within a scholarly community: it was diverse, it did not sing from the same hymn sheet, but it shared a genuine interest in 1798 and a common engagement to renew the civility of Irish intellectual discourse, so that divergent and strongly held views could be heard in an open debate. As a space opened in which many different voices could speak, the old stridency and the old partisanship receded. That impulse emerged from within a rapidly maturing Ireland - the Ireland of the Robinson presidency, the Celtic Tiger, and the Good Friday Agreement.
There was remarkably little controversy, partly because the bicentenary steered well clear of polarised party-political or partisan commemoration. It responded to the wider community, the commemorations were inclusive, and communities responded positively. There was little of the ugly mud-slinging that had disfiguredculture debate in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. A handful of diehards tried to muddy the waters but their efforts ran into sand: the tide had gone out on revisionism.
By the time 1998 came around, a bracing new air had swept through the moth-eaten older versions of 1798. Its calcified certainties, sour sectarianism and reductionism were decisively redefined in favour of richer post-nationalist and post- revisionist interpretations. Dunne seems to disapprove strongly of that shift. The commemoration occurred in a political atmosphere where the bitter miasma of three decades suddenly appeared to be lifting and clearing. There was an almost tangible sense in 1998 that frozen politics were melting and that the horizons of possibility were expanding. The tone of the commemorations was markedly civil, inclusive and pluralist. That is my considered historical judgment, based on personal involvement in 120 different bicentenary events, all of them worthwhile, many of them deeply moving, indelibly imprinted in imagination and memory.
If we turn, as Dunne does, from commemoration to historiography, the first thing to acknowledge is that the interpretative framework of 1798 is continuously evolving. The making of history is necessarily an ongoing and collaborative process: it is not a product but a process. History is a journey, not a destination. For an open-minded historian, the important thing is the journey. 1798 is complex. So is its archival record. So is its historiography. I have spent 25 years marinating in the sources and Tom Dunne has an enviable confidence that he has cracked 1798. I may be a slow learner but it took 15 years for me to understand that what I "knew" about 1798, I did not know. It took me a long time to be liberated into uncertainty again: many never reach that necessary second stage of complex understanding. You have to resist premature certainties. Einstein said: "Make it as simple as possible but no simpler." Dunne ignores that "no simpler".
For example, a reasonable estimate of deaths in 1798 would be 30,000. Of these, a maximum of 2,000 were on the loyalist side. The balance of violence was absolutely weighted against the insurgents. There is no engagement in Dunne's account with the historical and ethical judgment that these figures necessitate. An obsessive focus on Scullabogue silences the 28,000 rebel dead. In death as in life, the rebels remain unequal.
Tom Dunne is fond of quoting T.S. Eliot, so let me quote Eliot quoting Julian of Norwich: "and all shall be well/ and all manner of things shall be well/ but to purify the motives/ in the grounds of our beseeching."
The important ethical question is always motivation. Mine has been to achieve a better understanding of 1798 and also to communicate it.
It is a great pity that the landmark 750-page volume of 1798 essays published in 2003 arrived "too late to be considered properly" for Dunne's volume, which unfortunately means that his commentary is seriously out of touch with the cutting edge of a fast-moving debate. The 33 diverse contributors - the intellectual community of 1798 scholars - offer little support for Dunne's dramatic conclusions. The work on 1798 has now moved decisively in a post-nationalist and post- revisionist direction, leaving behind the dreary 1980s debates that Dunne insists on rehashing at tedious length. My own contributions comprehensively address the historiographical issues raised here by Dunne, and it is unfortunate for him that he spends so much time raking over the ashes of older articles, when he could have addressed my current thinking on 1798. It is a dynamic understanding. I do not think the same now as I thought five years ago: that is what happens with the life of the mind.
Peter Collins's useful book has two components: a brisk historical review of previous commemorations, especially those in 1898 and 1848, and a comprehensive account of the 1998 commemoration in Ulster. Collins is secretary of the Belfast-based United Irish Commemoration Society (UICS), based in that beacon of civility, the Linen Hall Library. The UICS, formalised in 1996, is avowedly non-political and cross- community, with a brief of promoting the United Irishmen as "part of our common heritage and history". Collins has no doubts about the success of his organisation: "In the case of the bicentenary, in marked contrast to the past, the cross-community and inclusive nature of the commemorations, North and South, has been most heartening."
He assures us that "the bicentenary commemoration generally was not controversial or politically divisive" and that 19 of 26 District Councils in Northern Ireland sponsored events.
In a thoughtful contribution, the doyen of Northern historians, A.T.Q. Stewart (hardly a closet nationalist), agrees that the commemoration was "a success and had passed off in an atmosphere of tolerance and good humour". He judges that it demonstrated a "marked lack of partisanship and a reaching out to the community as a whole". He also notes that "In the North the Presbyterians reoccupied their history". The veteran UVF leader Gusty Spence reveals the extent of earlier amnesia within the Protestant community when he observes that only in an earlier commemoration did he hear for "the first time" that "all the rebels in Belfast were Protestant".
Old memories of 1798 still endure. I vividly remember an incident in one of the great Leinster finals of the early 1970s when a Kilkenny player pulled late across the Wexford midfielder Phil Wilson. An irate Wexford supporter shouted: "What good are they anyway - didn't they piss on the powder in '98?" - a reference to an incident involving Castlecomer men in 1798. The 1890 All-Ireland final between Wexford (represented by the Shelmaliers from Castlebridge) and Cork (Aghabullogue from North Cork) had to be abandoned: the over-enthusiastic Wexford men were motivated by the memory of the depredations of the North Cork Militia in their area in 1798. Tom Dunne in this book tells us that he was not sorry when a superior Wexford team was unluckily beaten in 1998 by a terrific last-minute goal by Johnny Dooley. Like his views on 1798, that idiosyncratic opinion would not be widely shared in his native Wexford.
• Prof Kevin Whelan is the director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin. He is co-editor of 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Four Courts Press, 2003)
Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 By Tom DunneLilliput, 336pp. €20, Epitaph of 1798: A Photographic Record of 1798 Memorials on the Island of Ireland and Beyond By Bill Murray and John Cullen Carrigbyrne Pike Group, 208pp. €30, Who Fears to Speak of '98? Commemoration and the Continuing Impact of the United Irishmen By Peter Collins Ulster Historical Foundation, 196pp. £6.99