Where memory meets mythology

THAT the past is easy prey to the predatory prejudices of the present has long been a staple judgment of historians. As Tom Dunne has quipped about the Bodenstown commemorations, "Nil aon Wolfe Tone mar do Wolfe Tone fein". These volumes of essays concern the dangerous intersection of past and present, myth and memory, history and politics. They are strikingly divergent in their conclusions. For Kennedy, Nationalist Ireland suffers from a mistaken sense of its past as uniquely traumatic - the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) syndrome. Walker concludes that Ireland is not linked in a special way to its past.

Both books seek different scapegoats for the "myth" of oppression: Walker blames outside observers, while Kennedy's target is the insular ignorance of Irish thought. Their conclusions are also at odds: Walker believes that the decommissioning of these vast inventories of historical recrimination is now well underway; Kennedy warns that the prospects for Protestants are especially poor.

Brian Walker's essays all turn on a distinction established by T.W. Moody between Irish history and Irish myth - defined as "a widely held but false notion of the past". The breathtaking thinness of this version of myth does little to impede the relentless march of the professional historian, inveterate slayer of the sacred cows of the tribe. We are on familiar ground here - with the objective historian fearlessly detoxifying malignant memory, only occasionally pausing to berate the stubborn persistence of popular myth. In the light of Drumcree, not everyone might be as sanguine as Walker that "the present conflict in Northern Ireland is not an age old one" or that "the current situation is not linked in a distinctive way to the past".

Confidence in Walker's judgment is not enhanced by finding Liam de Paor described as a traditional Marxist, nor in the untroubled reliance on Conor Cruise O'Brien, Eamonn Dunphy, Bruce Arnold and Dermot Bolger as reliable commentators on the state of the South, nor in finding no mention of gay politics in his discussion of the St Patrick's Day parades in New York in the 1990s. Walker's historical judgments jar at times with those of fellow practitioners, as in his startling claim that there was no real interest in 1641 and 1690 until the late 19th century.

Liam Kennedy's "mosaic" of essays are the product of a technically sophisticated and independent minded economic historian. The best of the essays - on Parnell's economic thought, on the economic importance of the Act of Union, on Longford Protestants, on the co operative movement - are careful, scholarly and judicious in their analysis. Given its topicality, it is a disappointment if he does not reprint his Two Ulsters pamphlet of 1986, whose vigorous repartitionist argument was subsequently espoused by loyalist paramilitaries. The problem with this volume only surfaces in the more general concluding essays, attacking the post colonial and catastrophic versions of Irish history.

While elsewhere much in favour of comparative and less insular perspectives, Kennedy still has a kneejerk (albeit elegantly executed) reaction to the interventions of Edward Said, Fredric Jameson and other literary critics. This animus against literary and cultural critics - accused of being attracted to theory "like jackdaws to shiny objects" - can lead to considerable crudity. Gerardine Meaney's entirely reasonable comparison of the position of Irish and Arab women is dismissed by Kennedy on the grounds that he could not find a reference to female circumcision in Peig Sayers.

Unlike Walker, Kennedy is also explicitly revisionist, celebrating what he calls its powers of "creative destruction". And there are stridently revisionist claims aplenty notably in the adversarial final essay. The establishment of the National School system is seen as an exercise in cultural autonomy (Brian Friel, take note!); the Famine is held not "to constitute a test of Ireland's relative backwardness; the decline of the Irish language, owed little to active state policy"; the Northern Troubles have been handled by the state with a "restraint that must have few parallels elsewhere".

Kennedy is never short of a self confidence bordering on bravado. His stance seems to echo that of Patrick Mayhew - "Cheer up, for heavens sake" - the wars, expropriations, famines, evictions and emigration weren't really all that bad.

This reader reached the end of the book with a growing feeling that the bathwater, the bath, the baby, and the entire plumbing system of Irish history had been gleefully heaved out of Kennedy's window.