On Tuesday this week, three letters appeared on this page about events in 1916-1922, and that is not unusual. I myself have - occasionally - scribbled the odd line or two about this period. Is there any other country in Europe which still can conduct a debate about historical matters long after all the participants are dead? Many, perhaps most, mainland Europeans would argue that there is absolutely nothing to gain from such exchanges, that the past is the unchangeable past, and that we would all be better off discussing the Euro.
But the past is not perpetually unchangeable, and on this island, where so many are addicted to the ancient antiphons of war, it is certainly not an insulated thing like an archaeological artefact. That is why we should listen to and worry about Dr Brendan Bradshaw, who spoke recently at the Desmond Greaves summer school on the emerging role of the historian, and who led the reaction to "neo-Unionist" interpretations of modern Irish history and the ideological excesses of the "so-called revisionist school".
"Revisionist"
No doubt he did: but will one of these people so free with the terms "neo-unionist" or "revisionist" please tell me what in the name of the Divine Jesus they mean? What is "neo-unionist" about preferring nationalism to behave peacefully? What is especially "revisionist" about any particular school of history, which must of necessity be a historical collective which attempts to perceive history from a set of perspectives not shared by others, and presumably will revise its perceptions accordingly? A historian who doesn't revise previous opinions is not a historian but a parrot. Eh, Dr Bradshaw?
Dr Bradshaw's declared objectives for the rising generation of historians are that they should be present-centred, recognising their role as nationalist historians serving the nationalist community. Their responsibility is to enable the Irish people to "own" their past - whatever that means - and do so with empathy and imagination. Furthermore, they must attend to lacunae in areas of historical research - and here he cites women's studies, in part because "women had played a notable and largely unacknowledged part in the struggle for national liberation."
Interesting; and perfectly revolting, apart from item three, because of course historians are always obliged to fill lacunae anyway, whether the lacuna is about women - and not just women patriots, either - or, come to that, about children slaughtered in nationalist violence. But, emphatically, it is not the duty of historians to do anything for any existing community, other than to report what their studies have found and their thoughts on those findings. How that revelation, how that theory, affects a community's self-esteem or current needs is irrelevant; and historians who attempt to mine the past for present socio-psychological requirements are behaving not as historians but, at best, as bards or scealai - and at worst as the sort of intellectual hacks and political toadies who supplied the historical gibberish which sustained the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Role of historian
So Brendan Bradshaw is not arguing for a mere difference in emphasis, but for a radically different role for a historian: as mediator of the past for present requirements, whatever they might be. The past does not command: the present does. In the hands of democrats, that requirement would be merely disagreeable and intrusive; in the hands of totalitarians, it could be a warrant for genocide, the intellectual authorisation for the liquidation of the khulaks or the extermination of Jews.
What history should one write to satisfy one of this newspaper's most persistent correspondents, and whose letter replying to my Diary about the deaths of 28 children in the 1916 Rising impugned my Irishness, as I predicted someone would? J.P. Duggan declares I have a right to my "suppressed yearnings" for a return of Dublin Castle and the Vice-Regal lodge" (I have none; I am a republican); and that I am "out of order to the point of treason in rubbishing the chivalrous idealists of the 1916 Insurrection."
Treasonous
Ah. Does he think that I should not have pointed out that so many children died in 1916 during a Rising whose leaders had never run for election? Pace Tony Jordan's letter the same day, pointing out that Sean MacBride ran for election - once, in 1900 - I remind him that MacBride was not a member of the Volunteers, did not plan the insurrection and offered only his services on Easter Monday. And I remain unashamed about telling people of the unmandated and infanticidal consequences of starting an insurrection amid the tenements of Dublin.
And if it is treason to point this out, I am proud to be treasonous. JPD then asked if I would prefer that we had stayed "obsequiously under the Crown like Scotland or Wales"? Answer: No, obsequiously or otherwise. Yet although JPD is talking through his predictable hat, his opinions are terribly important. The only history which could please him is the nationalist variety, which also pleases Brendan Bradshaw. It would be a grim and witless day of capering minstrelsy if historians - or, indeed, even mere journalists - were obliged to write to satisfy the needs of such an audience, rather than serve their own absolute obligations to speak the truth as they find it.