No Peace in the Irish History Wars

Mike Burke with a review of John M. Regan’s Myth and the Irish State (Irish Academic Press, 2013). Mike Burke lectures in Politics and Public Administration in Canada.

This book is a compilation of articles and reviews that John Regan has previously published[1], with a newly-written introductory chapter that provides an overview of the book and traces the development of the author’s thought.

Regan, a lecturer in history at the University of Dundee, has long been a critic of professional historians writing on Ireland. Many of his original publications, which reappear as chapters in the book, entangled him in vigorous exchanges with other Irish historians. It comes as no surprise then that the book itself elicited some negative comment from the academy. Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin, has recently written an uncomplimentary review of the book, and of Regan.[2] Unfortunately, Ferriter’s review resurrects some of the abusive urges from the height (depth) of the revisionist debate, and demonstrates, once again, that academic historians sometimes engage in gratuitous personal attack, ad hominem argument, and baseless derisory speculation.

To be sure, Regan’s work is controversial: it addresses hotly-contested topics and directly, sometimes provocatively, challenges established opinion. This character is readily seen from the book’s major themes. Regan examines declining scholarly standards in the writing of Irish history occasioned by outbreaks of violence in the north; he questions the historical consensus about the democratic formation of the Irish Free State; he critiques Peter Hart’s sectarian interpretation of republican violence in the revolutionary years; he explores the writing and political career of Conor Cruise O’Brien; and he comments on the origins and nature of the revisionist controversy.

The real power of this book is that it treats these themes as inter-related rather than discrete. The interweaving of seemingly disparate parts into a holistic account of recent developments in Irish historiography is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Regan’s work.

Regan’s abiding interest is in the practice and methodology of Irish history. He suggests that, since the mid-1960s and especially since 1970, interest in the empirical accuracy of historical accounts began to be replaced by concern for their popular and political acceptability. What resulted was a consensual approach to the writing of much Irish history, which failed to address glaring weaknesses in emerging historical narratives.

This deterioration in the quality of scholarly history has distinct origins in fears for the stability of the southern state and in growing discomfort about the story of the state’s violent origins:

The threat of a northern adventure igniting a religious war ever remained. Partially, this was realised in 1956 when the IRA began its offensive against Northern Ireland, lasting fully six years. . . . As nothing before, the IRA’s recrudescence after 1970 awakened fears in the south about the state’s official history and its power to draw southerners into the northern conflict. (p. 4).

To pose the southern state’s dilemma in a recent form: how could the Irish state, with any credibility or legitimacy, both celebrate its insurrectionary origins and conduct a counter-insurgency campaign against the Provisional IRA, which claimed to be the direct lineal descendant of the insurrectionary impulse that had given birth to the state?

The writing of Irish history was affected by the crisis of impending “northern adventure,” and it changed in various ways. The physical-force or Fenian interpretation of the emergence of the southern Irish state began to be replaced by a new understanding that stressed the state’s democratic origins. This revised history focused on the formative influence of the pact election of 1922, marginalizing the significance of the rising of 1916, and tended to see the civil war as a contest between democratic treatyites and militarist anti-treatyites. In its preoccupation with developments in the 26 counties, the new history also became a state-centred history that marginalized northern, pan-nationalist and irredentist elements.

If the northern threat to the stability of the southern state encouraged agreement among historians on a revised narrative, the intolerance of the “O’Brien Ethic” discouraged dissent from that narrative. After the eruption of violence in the north in the late 1960s, the influential writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien openly associated dissent with disloyalty to the southern state. He was enormously successful in popularizing this form of thinking. Those writing the wrong kinds of Irish history—and those espousing the wrong kinds of political views or commemorating the wrong kinds of historical events—could be easily denounced as “republican apologists” who approved of Provisional violence threatening the state (p. 28). Regan notes that:

While alone the O’Brien ethic cannot fully explain any consensus existing among Irish historians, fear of denunciation remains a disincentive for those raising a critical voice against Irish revisionism (p. 280).

In short, the revisionist thesis of the democratic origins of the southern state was, in large part, uncritically accepted by academic historians, despite problems with every element of its empirical base. A wealth of evidence suggests that the 1922 pact election did not bestow an unequivocally democratic mandate on the treatyites. Strong historical evidence supports the view that there were diverse motives and ideologies on both sides of the Treaty divide. It is therefore historically inaccurate to portray the treatyites as the democratic side. The narrative of democratic state formation also diminishes the considerable effect that continual British threats of coercion had in shaping both the process and form of the Irish settlement. The dictator-like powers wielded by Michael Collins shortly before his death in August 1922 also belie the story of democratic state origins. Regan concludes that Ireland in the revolutionary years was bereft of a functioning constitutional order “in which democracy . . . could be said to exist” (p. 67).

Equally problematic are historical narratives of the primitivist and sectarian nature of the Irish state’s republican enemies. Here, Regan dissects the work of the late historian Peter Hart, especially his accounts of the Kilmichael ambush of 1920 and the killing of 13 Protestant loyalists in west Cork in 1922.[3] Hart contends that Tom Barry, the legendary republican commander who led the Kilmichael ambush, lied about the false surrender of British forces in order to justify the ensuing “massacre”. He characterizes Barry as a killer with primitive politics. Hart constructs a sectarian narrative of the west Cork killings, asserting that people were killed by the anti-treaty IRA because they were Protestant, and uses the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to these and related actions by the IRA.

Hart’s account of the revolutionary years remains exceedingly controversial. It has been generating intense public debate for a prolonged period. Presumably because of the sheer volume of letters received, the Irish Times called a halt to correspondence on Hart’s work in 1998, as did the magazine History Ireland some 15 years later.[4]

Regan finds that Hart’s conclusions about Kilmichael and his related characterization of Barry are without foundation. There is just too much contradictory evidence to allow for such an unambiguous interpretation, a point that Ferriter concedes about Kilmichael in his review of Regan’s book. Regan also finds that Hart’s sectarian thesis of the west Cork killings and the designation of “ethnic cleansing” are conclusions “unburdened by credible evidence” (p. 21). Hart himself, in some of his later work, seems to have retreated from if not abandoned the claim of ethnic cleansing.[5]

Regan’s work can be seen as part of the larger debate on Irish revisionism, although he is uncomfortable with how the term “revisionism” has been applied. I can see at least two ways in which Regan’s specific historical concerns relate to that larger debate. Revisionists argued that traditional nationalist/Fenian historiography was based more on myth than history, in that it omitted stubborn historical facts that did not fit in with its preordained story of heroic nationalist struggle against British oppression. They also argued that such historiography was present-minded: instead of trying to understand the past as the past, nationalist historians selectively used, disfigured and stretched the past to justify political and ideological positions in the present. Regan’s new historians are as guilty of the very historical crimes of myth-making and present-mindedness that revisionists had accused traditional nationalist historians of committing.

The place of myth in new Irish history is a principal point of Regan’s analysis. He refers to the story of the democratic formation of the southern state as a “foundation-myth,” supported by the false narrative of the sectarian thesis. He contends that some new historians practice elision, or “the simple expedient of ignoring the unhelpful or contradictory evidence”; they also practice negation, which tries to deny the importance or even the existence of such evidence (p. 229). Where “patterns of omission” of evidence repeatedly occur, the resulting historical narrative becomes oversimplified, inaccurate and therefore implausible (p. 198). There are, Regan believes, sound methodological reasons for questioning the myths of democratic state formation and republican sectarianism.

Another of Regan’s main points is that new history is present-minded. Its historical accounts produced resolutions to the contemporary dilemma that Provisional armed struggle posed for the southern state’s acknowledgement of its origins in republican violence. New history generated two such resolutions. First, the narrative of democratic state formation provided a new “myth of struggle” for the southern Irish state, which ignored or minimized the violence and coercion accompanying its birth.[6] In the place of armed insurrection against imperial power, the new myth substituted democratic struggle culminating in decisive electoral victory. This new rendering also undermined the Provisional claim of continuity with the establishment of the state. Second, the sectarian-primitivist thesis provided a resolution by demonizing the republican enemy. While this thesis was based on a new historical understanding of the IRA in the revolutionary years, it was quickly transplanted, by historians and journalists alike, to the here-and-now and applied to the Provisionals. Or, perhaps just as likely, the new historical understanding was used to justify what historians and journalists already knew to be true about the dark essence of Provisional republicanism (pp. 196-197).

These new historical perspectives on democracy and sectarianism eased the southern state’s dilemma: the state could, with its credibility and legitimacy intact, remain true to its “democratic” roots and at the same time take coercive measures against the “sectarian” campaign of the Provisional IRA. What proved to be good politics for the state was based on bad history.

Overall, Regan’s book is valuable to anyone seeking to understand Ireland’s revolutionary years and more recent history. It is also useful to those interested in critical historical methodology. Not everyone accepts Regan’s account of new history, and some historians are adamantly opposed to it.[7] To his credit, Regan directly engages his critics and, in the book, gives citations to the works of historians who are sharply critical of his views.

As other reviewers have noted, parts of the book are repetitive. Repetition is probably inherent in the kind of book that collects works previously published by a single author. Nevertheless, such books remain valuable. Although many chapters of the book reiterate arguments and reintroduce concepts, each chapter does offer new insights on, and new developments of, Regan’s main arguments.

John M. Regan, 2013, Myth and the Irish State. Irish Academic Press: Sallins. ISBN 978-0716532125.

[1] With the exception of chapter 11, which as far as I have been able to determine has not been published before.

[2] Diarmaid Ferriter, “Picking a fight over the rights and wrongs of our history: Myth and the Irish State,” Irish Times, 5 April 2014, p. 10. For Regan’s response, see https://independent.academia.edu/reganjohn.

[3] Regan is one of Hart’s most persistent critics, along with Niall Meehan, Brian P. Murphy, Meda Ryan and the Aubane Historical Society. See, for example, Brian P. Murphy and Niall Meehan, Troubled History: A 10^th Anniversary Critique of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies (Aubane: Aubane Historical Society, 2008).

[4] See the editor’s note appended to Peter Hart’s letter to the editor, “The Kilmichael Ambush,” Irish Times, 10 December 1998; and the note appended to John A Murphy’s letter, “Ethnic Cleansing and Tomas Rua O Suilleabhain,” History Ireland 21:1 (January/February 2013).

[5] Regan is similarly critical of Eve Morrison’s recent article confirming the authenticity of Hart’s account of Kilmichael; see her “Kilmichael Revisited: Tom Barry and the ‘False Surrender,’” in David Fitzpatrick, ed. Terror in Ireland: 1916-1923 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012): 158-180. For a recent evaluation of the controversy over Hart’s work, including his use of the term “ethnic cleansing,” see Stephen Howe, “Killing in Cork and the Historians,” History Workshop Journal 77:1 (Spring 2014): 160-186. Overall, I find Howe’s treatment of the west Cork killings inconsistent and in the end inconclusive. On the one hand, he gives careful consideration to the competing narratives of what happened in west Cork. On the other, he displays a quiet but persistent determination to keep alive some form of the sectarian thesis. He says, for instance, that it is quite likely that the west Cork killings were “the extreme end of a much broader spectrum of attitudes and behaviour which, whilst complex and varying in causes or motivations, included an indubitably sectarian element” (p. 173). He also quotes approvingly a passage from Charles Townshend’s appraisal that found general merit in Hart’s position: “it can hardly be doubted that Protestants felt under threat and that there was often some reason for this” (p. 179). And, he describes an IRA attack near Newry some two months after the west Cork killings and notes: “All the victims were Protestant, as in west Cork. It is hard to doubt that this too was in some sense a sectarian massacre” (p. 177). There are two points to note about these quotations. They indicate an interpretation that is far weaker than Hart’s unambiguous sectarian thesis. Beyond this, though, it is difficult to ascertain what the quoted passages mean, if anything. What precisely is the sectarian element in the broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviour that are themselves complex and varying in causes or motivations? Even if we can hardly doubt that Protestants often had some reason to feel under threat, what exactly does this say about the nature of the IRA campaign? Can we, with any confidence, use the religion of victims in west Cork and Newry to impute some unspecified sectarian motive to the killings? If we, like Howe, take a deterministic and hierarchic approach to causation that elevates sectarianism above other causes, such that it must always be some (unspecified) part of a complex explanation, we empty sectarianism of analytical meaning. Henry Patterson displays a similar determination to apply the label “ethnic cleansing” to the Provisional IRA campaign in County Fermanagh; see his “War of National Liberation or Ethnic Cleansing: IRA Violence in Fermanagh during the Troubles,” in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism, ed. Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2008): 230-242.

[6] On the function of myth in nationalist histories, see John Coakley, “Mobilizing the Past: Nationalist Images of History,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10:4 (January 2004): 531-560.

[7] David Fitzpatrick, “Ethnic Cleansing, Ethical Smearing and Irish Historians,” History 98:329 (January 2013): 135-144.