Kilmichael Ambush Site

I conclude with a discussion of why demonstrable flaws in the [Hart's] research were ignored within professional historiography.

Those who opposed repression on civil rights grounds in the 1970s were also marginalised, not least by Conor Cruise O’Brien during his 1973-77 ministerial career, for example when he accused then Senator, former President, Mary Robinson, of being an apologist for killing judges in Northern Ireland. Intellectual opposition to the revisionist project that O’Brien spearheaded was neutralised. As an 'ideological revisionist' (Irish Times, 9 November 1978) O’Brien led the assault on nationalist historiography and promoted its characterisation as a catholic phenomenon.

The association of revisionism with popular reaction to overt Catholicism was, in essence, a piggybacking operation. Reaction to Catholic institutional dominance was a movement from within Irish society, but was presented as something that transcended and superseded it, a form of ideological post-nationalism that accompanied post-Catholicism. O’Brien managed to link and to construe support for the republican position in the North, or merely political agitation on the worst effects of repression, as support for something generic called ‘violence’. It was as institutionally successful, and ultimately stultifying, in its way as institutional Catholicism had been.

In these circumstances, historical revisionism appeared to be an intellectual and career building wave of the future. Viewing the past in light of present centred concerns of the elite produced a concept of nationalist narrow mindedness and sectarianism having its roots in the revolutionary period. It is useful to the elite and seemed to make a sort of sense, for which Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies provided evidential detail. Roy Foster continues to promote the theme, recently in ‘How the Catholics became Protestants’, in Luck and the Irish (Penguin, 2009), a book including the observation that those who challenge revisionist views are purveyors, merely, of ‘nationalism with footnotes’.

The Irish economy today is still dependent (primarily) on US multinational investment using Ireland to penetrate the European market. Expressions of Irish national sovereignty are limited to preventing the European Union from raising such taxes, while relying on the same EU to rescue the currently near bankrupt Irish financial system.

On the other hand, the northern problem is currently contained within a rigid framework that recognises the irreducibly sectarian basis of the six-county statelet, and for which there is no workable alternative while that state continues to exist. It is the only framework minimally acceptable to nationalists and maximally allowable by unionists.

In such circumstances of political and economic fragility, a de-motivating, facile and conservative historiography can be a useful thing, since the actual history is considered so thoroughly unsettling. In these circumstances in reaction to bad history Irish historians keep their heads down, their attention fixated on what is directly ahead.