Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798 by Kevin Whelan, Cork university Press 192pp, £14.95
An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry 1796-1834 by Allan Blackstock, Four Courts Press 320pp, £30
IN 1898 George Bernard Shaw turned I down a proposal "that I should help mydowntrodden countrymen by assembling with other Irishmen to romance about 1798. Until Irishmen apply themselves to what the condition of Ireland will be in 1998, they will get very little patriotism out of Yours sincerely." Shaw, thou should'st be living at this hour. Ireland hath need of thee! In 1998 we are not only romancing about 1798 but reliving its horrors, and unless we can find the exit form the circular ruins of our history there is every likelihood that 2098 will be much the same.
The bicentenary has produced so rich a harvest of books that bookshops now devote a whole section of their premises to works dealing solely with the Rebellion. Among the most attractive of these are the large-format illustrated volumes written to accompany the major commemorative exhibitions. Earlier this year the handsome and scholarly record compiled and edited by Dr W.A. Maguire for the Ulster Museum's "Up in Arms" exhibition set a benchmark. Now we have Kevin Whelan's Fellowship of Freedom, a lavishly illustrated companion volume to the exhibition arranged by the National Library of Ireland and the National Museum of Ireland at the Collins Barracks site. Professor Whelan has contributed substantially to our knowledge of the United Irishmen and provided challenging insights for his fellow historians; here he has used his first-hand knowledge to draw together the scattered materials of 1798 and explain what it was all about.
We are doomed always to see the events of 1798 in a distorting mirror. On the most practical level, there are not enough contemporary pictures and drawings, so that compilers of books such as this are forced to rely too heavily on later efforts of imagination, ranging from Cruikshank's pike-men in funny hats, through the simian nightmares of Victorian England to the romanticised battle scenes of later illustrators such as J. W. Carey. Whelan has cast his net widely. There is even a portrait of Seamus Heaney. One is tempted to jest thatthe. jury is still Out on the role Seamus played in 1798, but there is a serious point here, for Whelan writes that a poem of Heaney's "is still crouched essentially within the Catholic-nationalist paradigm which presents the Wexford rebels...as depoliticised peasants". That our finest poet is more moved by the plight of the Wexford rebels those of his native province says much about our present troubles.
Whelan is at pains to redress the balance, for this book devotes generous space to the Presbyterian story and tells it objectively, from Francis Hutcheson to William Orr, Pike Sunday, and the battles of Antrim and Bailynahinch. The splendidly serene photo- graph of Mary Ann McCracken in old age is reproduced; the idealised portrait of her brother, Henry Joy McCracken, is now too familiar - c'est magnifique mats ce n'est pas Daquerre.
The problem of image surfaces in a different way in Allan Blackstock's An Ascendancy Army. The Irish Yeomanry is usually perceived as one of those cardboard props t draped on to the stage of Irish history to indicate the hostile climate in which revolutionary violence has always had to exist. The Yeos were the baddies of 1798, for the most part "Orangemen", not truly Irish and not worth serious historical investigation.
Dr Blackstock had no illusions about the unpopularity of his subject when he began his research. It was precisely because he little material on the subject that it attracted him. Now, having tracked down all the primary sources and meticulously analysed them, he has produced an outstanding book which dispels many of the myths, and will at once take its place as the standard work on the subject. It is one of those rare and luminous works of scholarship which appeal as much to the general educated reader as to the academic historian, largely because Blackatock has a mastery of lucid prose and a gift for exposition.
Late 18th-century Ireland had a chronic need for a citizen defence force which had two functions, to guard the realm against foreign enemies and to help maintain law and order internally. The government came to see the mistake it had made in arming the Volunteers, patriotically raised in the 1 780s for the first purpose, but becoming in the end the instrument of Ascendancy nationalism. It was therefore anxious not to repeat this political error in 1796, when the Dungannon Association and other groups, led by magistrates and landlords, began to organise their tenants for military purposes, but the pressures of European war, and above all the rapidly growing threat of the United Irishmen,forced its hand.
The tangled history of how the authorities wrestled with the problem and how theYeomanry became involved with Ascendancy, and later more general, Protestantpolitical stances, until well into the 19th century, is here deftly unravelled.