Sir, - I am rather surprised at Brian Maye's attitude (December 1st) as a historian to the work of Dorothy McArdle and P.S. O'Hegarty (whose book The Victory of Sinn Fein has just been reprinted with a foreword by Tom Garvin) as "outdated". It is a bit like saying John Morley's life of Gladstone is "outdated", or Piaras Beaslai's life of Collins, or the three-volume biography of Lord Carson. The fact is that the authors wrote close to the time, often at first hand, and are a primary source for contemporary explanations of what happened and attitudes to it and often for the events and people themselves. From that point of view, older works can be just as valuable as new, if not more so, and that applies to any historical subject or period.
Modern historians may have access to sources which establish things which were not clear to contemporaries, but equally contemporaries may be very clear about things about which later historians without the same background knowledge may be confused. Historians need to be familiar both with the older accounts and with good research being done today. Superficial history can be written at any time.
But it is naive, not to say presumptuous, to dismiss landmark works of the past or historical classics as "outdated". It is precisely because attitudes and values have usually changed so much more over the intervening period than the basic information available that it is often necessary to go back to the older work to get an authentic feel for the time, particularly as modern historians are subconsciously tempted to gloss over attitudes that have gone out of fashion or things that by today's standards would be regarded as politically incorrect and are often understandably concerned to bring the past into line with today's preoccupations. - Yours, etc., Dr Martin Mansergh,
Special Adviser to the Taoiseach, Government Buildings, Dublin 2.