Sir, – I have no idea whether, as Prof Nigel Biggar suggests, President Michael D Higgins has "drunk too deeply" at the well of post-modernist or post-colonialist theory ("President's view of British Empire is incomplete", Opinion & Analysis, March 10th). I can only assure him that as a historian I have not needed these theories to convince me that the British Empire was an overwhelmingly malign influence throughout its involvement in Irish affairs.
Prof Biggar shows a lamentable lack of historical context when he writes of the “grave threats” faced by the Irish Free State in 1922.
The gravest threat actually facing Irish nationalists then was that of “immediate and terrible war” from Britain if they rejected the Treaty settlement. The Irish Civil War cannot be understood without that imperial context, something too often forgotten both here and in Britain.
I welcome President Higgins’s willingness to engage with concepts such as imperialism, particularly as there remains an unwillingness to do so both in academic and media commentary on the Decade of Centenaries. – Yours, etc,
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Dr BRIAN HANLEY,
Department of History,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.
Sir, – Professor Nigel Biggar’s arguments are seriously defective both historically and politically. He argues that as every state exercises force that they “must be in the business of dominating”.
There is a vast difference between a democratic independent state having a monopoly of force under the rule of law and an invading imperial power exercising violent suppression of those it has conquered.
He argues that the early British empire was not a “project” but was “mainly resistance to Catholic Spanish imperialism” and was mostly “about trade”.
Historically this a totally inaccurate description of the Tudor and Stuart conquest of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries.
There certainly was a “project” to confiscate Irish land and to oppress the people and it was very “coherent”, serving the imperial power and those who profited through violence and what has been termed “legal imperialism”.
The fact that there was a renaissance of the Irish language and literature in the generation before independence does not change the facts concerning centuries of cultural oppression when the Irish language and indeed the faith of the majority of the Irish people under the British Empire were suppressed by law.
The evidence that some imperial agents were relatively benign compared with others who were more vicious does not make imperialism much less of an exploitative system that history easily demonstrates that it always has been for the peoples it suppresses for profit.
Prof Biggar’s “awkward facts” in no way diminish the potent analysis of empire offered by President Michael D Higgins. – Yours, etc,
Dr FERGUS
O’FERRALL,
Cabinteely,
Dublin 18.
Sir. – Nigel Bigger describes President Higgins’s view of the British Empire as incomplete. He denies cultural repression and cites the freedom given to Yeats, Synge and Hyde in promoting the Irish language and literature.
Why would it need a renaissance if it wasn’t suppressed in the first place? Has he ever heard of hedge-schools? – Yours, etc,
MIKE CANNING,
Goresbridge,
Co Kilkenny.