All history is selective—involving myriad choices from period and subject matter to documentation, interpretive theory, the citation (and omission) of passages, and the words or tropes adopted. Furthermore, despite all its pretensions to social scientific truth, history remains such a literary and subjective venture that one historian's myth is bound to be another's reality, especially when one is writing about such intangibles as national identity, nationalism, the nation, or “the imagined community.”Footnote 1 This we all know. But whenever the subject of race rears its ugly head, then selectivity becomes magnified because historians, cultural critics, sociologists, and polemicists prefer to emphasize one set of comments and ignore or play down remarks that run counter to their cherished convictions. In the always contested turf of Anglo-Irish cultural and social relations, it is easy to stack the deck of note cards so as to draw exclusively on those who had big or little axes to grind while omitting all the comments free from apparent cutting edges. Moreover, what exactly constitutes “public opinion” and the “official mind” of the British political (and civil service) elite has always afforded room for endless disputation.

This kind of selectivity has a special bearing on the study of race—a four-letter word that has been used and abused for several centuries by scientists and humanists, not to mention bigots. The meanings of this word have multiplied over the centuries as biologists, anatomists, physiologists, and naturalists have deployed it along with genus, phylum, and species to differentiate animal, insect, and other forms of life. In academic circles today the application of this dangerous word to human beings raises eyebrows and hackles. Of course, “race” is a trope or metaphor as well as a rhetorical device designed to both exclude and include. A compound of myths, ideas, and physical variables, it contains neutral as well as positive and negative attributes depending on the context. In this respect, reliance on racial categories of humankind has always included an element of distancing Us from Them—and in more extreme cases of dehumanizing the Other. Besides color of skin and shape of facial features, “race” has usually been associated with hereditary traits of behavior or character no matter how contradictory these may be. The idea of race also involves an embryonic narrative of struggle, survival, oppression, denigration, and degeneration. Moreover, it differs from nationality insofar as people may belong to the same “nation” but not the same “race.” Thus Victorians would never have regarded the Jews, Anglo-Irish, and Scots-Irish in Ireland as racially identical to the Gaelic Irish even though they all were white; and the Welsh, Highland Scots, Cornish, Irish, and Bretons belonged to distinct nations but were racially classified as Celtic.

At the outset of his essay, much of which deals with the post-1886 period, G. K. Peatling observes that “race” is a “flexible and constructed” term that transcends such scientific criteria as “genetics, biology, or skin color.” He goes on to state that “racism … cannot be reduced to chromatism or prejudice based on skin color.” So far so good. However, most racists have fixated first and foremost on color as the most obvious sign of difference. Several pages later Peatling quotes David Lloyd's observation that those who rely on categories of race indulge in a “fantasmatic projection of differences” that arises out of visual “disturbance” (p. 117). And color of skin is, of course, the most “disturbing” of these differences.

Despite his earlier admission about the secondary importance of skin color, the subtext of Peatling's neorevisionist essay relies on the negative argument that the Irish could not possibly have been racialized by the British governing class because both peoples were white. At least this seems to be the main point of his title and argument, even though the latter is repeatedly obscured by a murky and convoluted style. Three examples of this obscurantism will have to suffice. In his first page, he writes: “Some researchers however have gone further and emphasized the fact and power of circumlocution adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized in spite of their lacking clear signifiers of racial otherness.” Talk about circumlocution! Which researchers does he have in mind and what are those “cultural agencies?” He then asserts: “Historical research that posits connections and equivalences between the experiences of the Irish and nonwhite groups … can unconsciously reenact partisan and unsatisfactory positions in British-Irish political debates of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 116). Just how does “research” into what past actors actually said or thought about the Irish lead to the unconscious reenactment of “partisan and unsatisfactory positions?” Of course, the debates over Irish Home Rule were partisan, but this fact does not mean that historians are guilty of “reenacting” the polemics of the day simply by quoting the actors or protagonists. Lastly, we are treated to the following conundrum: “Only an analysis critical of constructs such as ‘the Irish,’ ‘nonwhites,’ ‘blacks,’ and ‘colonialism’ … can consistently acknowledge the fruitful and extensive additional possibilities of progressive political action which are not dependent on such essentialist conceptions” (p. 122). I take this to mean that we should immediately abandon such labels as Irish and nonwhites and create a new vocabulary so as to set the historical record straight.

Peatling's brief has a familiar ring. In fact, it derives in the main from Sheridan Gilley's critique of my work back in 1978, when he indulged in a classic piece of revisionist spin-doctoring by accusing me of comparing “anti-Negro racism in the United States with English hostility towards the Victorian Irish.” Had he bothered to read my sentences in a scholarly fashion, he might have noticed that I invoked Gunnar Myrdal's argument that the dominant white males of America regarded negroes in the same light as white women and children. This passage in Myrdal's work moved me to suggest the existence of a “striking parallel” between the attitudes of male Anglo-Saxonists toward Irish Celts and English women and children. In short, “the mature and virile Anglo-Saxon had no intention of conferring his sophisticated institutions upon the childlike and feminine Irish Celt.”Footnote 2 At no point did I liken the condition of Irishmen at home or abroad to that of blacks in either Africa or America. So much for the tactic known as suppressio veri et suggestio falsi.

Besides accusing the “progressive” school (that includes Gerry Adams) of trying “to monopolize sympathy and speak for the Other,” Peatling attributes to me “self-congratulatory ‘whiggish’ myths about English/British history in an attempt to demonstrate the exceptionalism of Irish historical experience” (p. 119). All this because in Anglo-Saxons and Celts I argued that most British politicians and intellectuals considered the Gaelic Irish unfit for self-government owing to their racial and/or ethno-cultural makeup and applauded G. M. Young for admitting that England's treatment of Ireland had been an unmitigated disaster. (I readily concede that there have been greater disasters in British history than Ireland—notably, World War I.) If Young exaggerated, at least he was not consumed by the Irish revisionist desire to normalize the British presence in Ireland and to turn Paddy into a figure of harmless and apolitical fun for the amusement of people on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Like Gilley and others, Peatling seems fixated on the pigmental similarity between the Irish and British peoples, and he shares the same rooted aversion for any racial explanation of the defeat of the Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893.Footnote 3 Relying in the main on ballads and broadsheets, Gilley insisted that the dominant stereotype of the Irish in England was national, not racial, and contained a much kinder and gentler image of Paddy, endowing him with “generosity, hospitality, and courage in battle.” If he was mercurial, impulsive, rash, disorderly, and overly fond of both drink and rebel songs, Paddy was also a good-natured and amusing rascal, who posed no serious threat to English civilization or political stability apart from the occasional riot or outburst of republican enthusiasm. According to Gilley, “`Paddy’ was partly Paddy's own creation” because “the Irish saw in ‘Paddy’ their self-image,” and they loved to laugh at their own foibles. No need to worry about the huge disparity in power relations between colonizer and colonized or the collective damage to national self-esteem caused by all those Paddy jokes and cartoons that flourished in English comic weeklies after the 1840s. By emphasizing Paddy's endearing or benign qualities, Gilley and company dismissed the popular image in England of the “wild” and unruly Gael, who had resisted British rule for centuries, and remained distinctly Irish despite all the miscegenation between Saxon and Celt since the arrival of Strongbow.Footnote 4

Like Gilley, Peatling also seeks to take the sting out of Charles Kingsley's famous remark about the “white chimpanzees” he saw during his tour of western Ireland in 1860. With a wave of his neorevisionist wand he maintains that the allusion to simian peasants seen walking along the roads of county Roscommon was untypical of English attitudes toward the Irish.Footnote 5 But just what was typical? Admittedly, such a choice example of simianization is rare. But it tallies beautifully with the cartoons of the monstrous Irish ape-man found in almost all the comic weeklies of Great Britain and North America from the 1850s to the 1890s, as the nasty Irish monkeys and chimps of John Leech's lively imagination in the 1840s gave way to the lethal guerrilla-gorillas produced by Tenniel and other comic artists after the Fenian uprising. These ferocious creatures became even more Calibanish and cannibalistic at the height of the land war. It takes a hardcore revisionist to ignore the cumulative effect of all those editorial cartoons of bestial Paddy drawn by Tenniel, Boucher, Morgan, Nast, Opper, Gillam, and Wales—to name only the leading comic artists in London and New York. But then, as Roy Foster has argued, these distorted images were not confined to Irish plebeians and were meant to be satirical or funny and harmless. As for the link between color and semisimian Paddy, I must ask the obvious question: if someone calls you an ape, does it really matter what color he assigns to your skin?

In sum, both Gilley and Peatling have built their revisionist church or chapel on the friable foundation of the physical—or pigmental—resemblance between Britons and Irishmen. Similarity of skin color means that Paddy could not possibly have been racialized. Therefore the only real difference between the Irish and British masses had to be religious or sectarian. Armed with this conviction, the revisionists insist that the Irish in Britain—when not rioting, drinking, assaulting, or stealing—suffered no systemic insults or loss of civil rights because their tolerant British hosts considered them equally white and therefore deserving of the respect due to other (white) subjects of the Crown. Beneficiaries of British prosperity, the Irish were supposedly never abused for having been born outside the Anglo-Saxon pale of ethnicity. Among others, Luke Gibbons has firmly rejected this benign or myopic scenario, pointing out that “a native population which happened to be white was an affront to the very idea of the ‘white man's burden,’ and threw into disarray some of the constitutive categories of colonial discourse. The ‘otherness’ and alien character of Irish experience was all the more disconcerting precisely because it did not lend itself to visible racial divisions.”Footnote 6 Historians of the Irish in Britain and elsewhere have been reluctant to discuss the actual visibility of these immigrants. Just how different did the Irish-born strangers look to the host populace? Apart from their speech or brogue, did their dress, demeanor, and behavior—not to mention physiognomy—mark them indelibly? Surely, not all Irish laborers in Britain wore knee breeches and carried clay pipes in their hat bands.Footnote 7

Early modern historians of Ireland have also applied the concept of “racing the Irish” to the Tudor and Stuart colonizers who acquired land and drove the “native Irishry” from their homes and holdings. Against the background of cultural laws that prohibited Irish styles of dress, speech, and tonsure, the militantly Protestant New English regarded the native Irishry as “wild” woodkernes inhabiting a “wild” and dangerous terrain and threatening the invaders’ grip on the lands recently annexed. To deal with these supposed barbarians, heathens, or pagans, Elizabethan and early Stuart settlers carried out a strategy of anglicizing, civilizing, and christianizing; and any indigenes who refused to submit to such forceful acculturation faced the grim alternatives of the sword, starvation, or exile.Footnote 8 In short, the English habit of “racing” the Irish has a long history.

Constant harping on the truism that the Irish were white of skin hardly constitutes a major breakthrough in the analysis of relations between Westminster and (southern) Ireland, and it fails altogether to dent the argument that the Victorians racialized the (Catholic and Gaelic) Irish. After all, if one is bent on denigrating some group or community, similarity of skin color has never proved an effective deterrent. Quite apart from the obvious fact that many white peoples have been persecuted—not to mention exterminated—by fellow whites over the centuries, racists or bigots have always known where to look for the stigmata of ascribed inferiority.

Of course, the stark contrast between black and white skin mattered, especially when Irish male immigrants landed in America only to find themselves competing with “nagurs” for not only menial jobs but also the affections of white (Irish) women. As David Roediger has shown, hostility to blacks flourished among job-hungry Irish-American workers in mid-nineteenth-century America, where tense relations with freed slaves in the workplace were complicated by the explosive issues of abolitionism and interracial sex. In this highly charged economic, political, and emotional context nativist slurs about the darkness of Irish skin, “Irish niggers,” and the results of Hiberno-African “miscegenation” made Irish-Americans all the more anxious to identify with the whiter than white Anglo-Saxon populace. To achieve their coveted goal of assimilation they had to combine forces socially and politically (within the Democratic party) and distance themselves as far as possible from nonwhites.Footnote 9 By the same token, one could argue that the absence of both a comparable black minority and the institution of slavery in Great Britain inspired many Anglo-Saxonists to exaggerate the differences between themselves and the “primitive” Paddies in their midst, whom they resented for their lack of skills and presumed burden on the local police and poor law guardians. Any superficial resemblance based on whiteness of skin could easily be dissolved by focusing on other physiognomical as well as behavioral differences and by attributing to the Gael every vice and bad habit that Britons had been taught to repress in the name of respectability.

If the color of Paddy's skin is a nonstarter in the debate over racializing the Irish, it is worth noting that at least one eminent Victorian ethnologist emphasized the different degrees of melanin or “the black factor” present in the hair, eyes, and skin of inhabitants of the British Isles. As I pointed out in Anglo-Saxons and Celts, John Beddoe operated on the assumption that Anglo-Saxons and Celts were racial opposites, and he found that the Celts of western Wales and Ireland were much darker of hair, eyes, and complexion than Anglo-Saxons. He went on to suggest that the true Celt had certain affinities with Cro-Magnon or “Africanoid” man—even though the former was technically “white.” To put this simplistically, just as in parts of urban America, so too in Britain, the Irish were regarded as off-white or darker of complexion than purely white Anglo-Saxons.Footnote 10

One of the trademarks of the revisionist school is the steadfast refusal to deal with the cultural and social implications of simianized Paddy on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus Alan O’Day has accused me of “exploiting this imagery” by placing it “within a traditional Nationalist outlook.” But in his zeal to dismiss the historical value of these images he fails to confront the impact of the Irish apemen found in the comic weeklies of London, New York, and San Francisco upon the Irish immigrant community—not to mention nationalist cartoonists in Dublin. In O’Day's view, my work on British cartoons of Paddy “failed to advance either understanding or methodology; indeed, the discrediting of his work may have retarded serious interest in these important sources.” However, the so-called logic of this point implies that Gilley is ultimately responsible for this retardation—whatever that may mean—because O’Day has anointed him as the chief architect of my supposed discrediting.Footnote 11 On the contrary, the cartoon images found in Apes and Angels seem to have aroused considerable interest in the subject and the source.

When dealing with Hiberno-African analogies Peatling alludes to Lord Salisbury's telling aside in a speech to staunch Unionists during the debate on the first Home Rule bill. However, Peatling fails to quote his exact words: “You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots for instance.” Following this observation, Salisbury accused the Irish of having become “habituated to the use of knives and slugs” and then denied that Asians and Russians were capable of governing themselves. In fact, only members of the “Teutonic race” really deserved this privilege. If Salisbury was not comparing “savage” Africans with the Irish masses, why would he bother to place them together on one of the lowest branches of the great racial tree of humankind? Of course, Salisbury was not the first to compare the Irish to Hottentots. In 1847 the Kentish Gazette railed against “the midnight plunder … open-day assassination … Hottentot ignorance, superstition, idolatry, and indolence” of the Irish, the only cure for which was “the strong arm of the law.” Other equally unflattering comments about the similarities between Paddy and the savage tribes of Africa, India, and Australia appeared in British newspapers.Footnote 12

The widespread habit of comparing Irishmen to nonwhite “savages” in Victorian England hardly strengthens Peatling's effort to write off my arguments about Paddy as “crude and exaggerated.” Perhaps those testy adjectives would be better applied to the racial denigrations of Paddy and also to the analogy drawn by social reformers like William T. Stead and General William Booth between the stereotypical African jungle and the slums of Britain—notably the East End of London.

After a number of false starts, Peatling finally enters the promised land of reductio ad absurdum when he likens my stance to the work of those two high priests of the Cambridge school of English political history, A. B. Cooke and John Vincent. In fact I embarked on my study of anti-Irish prejudice in the late 1960s precisely because the kind of cabinet-level political history that dominated so much of the English historical scene during my time at Oxford struck me as arid and at times stultifying. The invigorating environment of Berkeley nourished my growing disenchantment with the orthodoxies of British political history; and the result of my rethinking was Anglo-Saxons and Celts, wherein I deliberately eschewed the sources, premises, methods, and conclusions espoused by Cooke and Vincent. Even though Peatling concedes that we arrived at “a very different conclusion,” I can almost hear the howls of derision coming from those two English historians should they ever discover that someone had lumped our antithetical works together. Indeed, the whole point of Anglo-Saxons and Celts was to contextualize the Home Rule debate in the 1880s by going beyond or beneath the official discourse at Westminster to discover why so many politicians deemed the Irish unfit for self-government. Moreover, I pursued this subject without the benefit of the work subsequently done on scientific racism in Britain by Bolt, Stepan, and Stocking.Footnote 13

Historians who rely on the words of their protagonists to shed light on the subject at hand are, of course, following a well-worn tradition of documenting their argument with primary sources. No doubt someone will take them to task for having chosen the wrong sources. But what's sauce for the goose should also serve as sauce for the gander. While casting aspersions on the “progressive agendas” of his adversaries, and while quoting those Edwardian politicians of whom he approves, Peatling presumably considers himself agenda-free. But anyone who argues that educated Victorians refused to consign the Irish to the category of “lesser breeds” simply because they were white has got to have a huge agenda. Even D. George Boyce admits that race permeated the rhetoric of both Irish nationalism and British imperialism: “The idea of the two races, Celt and Saxon, locked in mortal combat, was the stock in trade of home rulers [sic] speeches.” And he quotes Maurice Healy as referring to “this great racial conflict, which has been going on so long, which began in blood and suffering 700 years ago, and has continued through seven centuries of oppression and misery.”Footnote 14

Anglo-Saxons and Celts posited a clear distinction between British ethnocentrists and environmentalists. The latter insisted that “historical circumstances” had made the Irish who and what they were and that they were just as deserving of “free institutions” as the British and Scottish people. Unlike ardent Anglo-Saxonists, Liberals and Radicals of the Gladstonian persuasion regarded agrarian violence in Ireland as symptomatic of a political disease that only Westminster had the power to cure. In sum, most British Home Rulers in the 1880s denied that hereditary (racial) traits made Paddy unfit for self-government, while others simply despaired of direct rule and were prepared to run the risk of allowing the Irish to sort out their own affairs.Footnote 15

As R. M. Douglas has shown, many of the Victorians’ choicest anti-Irish slurs lived on long after 1914. Postwar allusions to the “dark, dwarfish, long-headed race of troglodytes” found in Ireland vied with the belief of some Anglo-Saxon racists that the Irish were descended from an ancient Eastern Mediterranean tribe, the Attacotti, also known as Firbolgs, who indulged in “periodical outbursts of blood lust.” Distinguished by their “low foreheads, dark, coarse, and often kinky hair,” they also possessed “a strain of negro blood.” So much for the rich legacy of Victorian Hibernophobia.Footnote 16

Needless to say, Irishmen also racialized themselves—with enthusiasm. But they possessed a far different agenda. The racial attributes hailed by nationalist politicians and writers since the heyday of Young Ireland were saturated with all the virtues that John Bull had so long denied to Paddy. In other words, the Irish Gael or Celt was one of God's noblest creations. The descendant of fighting gods and goddesses as well as saints and scholars and heroic political martyrs, he was blessed with mental wit, courage, loyalty, spirituality, imagination, and compassion—qualities that the plodding and materialistic Anglo-Saxon sorely lacked. Young Ireland deserves much of the credit for helping to construct this idealized Irish identity that continued to be replenished in the next generation by politicians, writers, and dreamers as different as Michael Davitt, Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Sophie Bryant, Alice Stopford Green, Lord Castletown, D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, and A.E., or George Russell—not to mention the leaders of the Easter Rising.

If Lord Salisbury's affirmation of the Hiberno-Hottentot analogy represents a sample of one, so too does Erskine Childers's case for Home Rule. Curiously enough, Peatling devotes more than three pages to this Edwardian treatise on the necessity of conceding the Irish demand for some form of independence. However, the relevance of this part of Peatling's essay to the “racing” of Paddy in the 1870s and 1880s remains a puzzlement. Notwithstanding all his fine qualities and sympathies for the underdog, Childers was neither the leader of a major political party nor prime minister for over thirteen years. Lord Salisbury makes a far better spokesman for English views of the Irish Gael in the 1880s than does Childers, whose conversion to Home Rule in 1908—five years after Salisbury's death—owed much to his Bostonian wife. Surely, the Hottentot speech should weigh more heavily in the scales of Anglo-Irish attitudes in 1886 than does Childers's The Framework of Home Rule published in 1911. As for the burden of anti-Irish prejudice in England, no one put this more succinctly than Childers himself when he wrote in his “Home Rule Bible” that “the Anglo-Irish Union was created and has ever since been justified by a systematic defamation of Irish character.”Footnote 17 This would have made a fine epigraph for Anglo-Saxons and Celts. Convinced as he was that only white folk—especially the British people—were fully civilized, Childers could hardly be deemed free of race prejudice. However that may be, Peatling's reliance on this English Home Ruler makes one wonder if he has not exposed himself to the charge of “unconsciously reenacting partisan and unsatisfactory positions.” Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the sentiments of Lady Lilias Bathurst and Leo Amery, who called “the Irish race … weak, ignorant, emotional … [and] incapable of loyalty even to its own chiefs or leaders” and containing “a strain of ‘Celtic cavemen’” akin to gorillas. But then such comments from the Unionist camp might have undermined his argument.Footnote 18

What animated so many British responses to the demand for Home Rule was not just Paddy's adherence to the old faith but his Irishness. Central to the latter term was the realization that the southern Irish refused to be anglicized. If the glue that held together the ethnocentric Englishman's concept of Irishness was a compound of race, religion, class, and culture, by far the largest and most enduring ingredient was race or ethnicity, which accounted for most of its adhesive strength. If this had not been the case, then British and Irish Unionists would have spent far more time and money on weaning Paddy from his Roman Catholic ways.

Now not far off its fortieth anniversary, Anglo-Saxons and Celts is bound to contain some frayed edges and oversights—most obviously the absence of that vital ingredient called postcolonial theory—from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Gibbons. Nevertheless it has placed me in some rather good company. Among the leading proponents of the racialization process is Mary J. Hickman, who has argued that the cohesive strength of both Irish Catholicism and anti-Irish prejudice combined to form a “low profile [Irish] community” in Britain with its own “autonomous sub-culture.” Refuting O’Day's emphasis on the variety and heterogeneity of Irish experiences, she points to the “constant slippage” in his assertions about ethnic consciousness and politics.Footnote 19 Clare Carroll contends that the Irish were “subject to representation as racially ‘other.’”Footnote 20 In Philip Cohen's view, English ruling-class attitudes toward the Irish exemplified “race thinking.”Footnote 21 According to Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, racial prejudice permeated Anglo-Irish relations after the famine despite the similarity of skin color. And Kevin Kenny has argued that the dominant (white) classes in America—and by implication in Britain—regarded the Irish as a primitive and “savage race” in large part because of their reputation for violent or riotous behavior.Footnote 22

In his important new book, The Eternal Paddy, Michael de Nie has drawn on some ninety British newspapers and periodicals to show just how racialized the Irish were during the nineteenth century. The real trouble with the Irish according to most journalists and editors was their “Irishness” and not their religion. Given Paddy's stubborn refusal to be anglicized the government faced a hard choice between more coercion and Home Rule. De Nie also echoes my conclusion that “the Irish represented qualities the British sought to deny within themselves and their society—emotionalism, intemperance, violence, and ignorance.”Footnote 23 Instead of wasting time on the irrelevant question of skin color, he explores British press responses to four critical “moments” in Anglo-Irish relations and contends that all the negative stereotyping of the Gaelic Irish was bound to affect government policy.

Another insightful study comes from the English sociologist, Steve Garner, whose Racism in the Irish Experience provides a “sociological framework” for the operation of race prejudice on both sides of the Irish Sea. After discussing theoretical aspects of racism and the role of both racial and economic factors in Irish hostility toward new immigrants in the 1990s, Garner turns the clock back to consider English race consciousness during the Tudor and early Stuart conquests and settlements when comparisons between the aboriginal Irish and Africans or Indians were much in vogue. A subsequent chapter on the place of race in the Home Rule debates focuses first on the anti-Catholic riots and the “No Popery” movement in mid-Victorian England. Even though Anglo-Saxons and Celts does not appear on Garner's radar screen, he dwells on the social and economic “strands of racialisation” aimed at Irish immigrants in Britain who were considered morally and physically degenerate. “Not only were Irish migrants identified as culturally other,” he writes, “they also fitted into the profile of the ‘dangerous classes’ that was used by urban police forces.” As he puts it, “the hegemony of ‘race’ [was] a way of naturalising the social world” in order to “explain class differences.”Footnote 24 Garner goes on to criticize the denial by Gilley, Roger Swift, and D. G. Paz that racial Hibernophobia mattered because the idea of race was too “sophisticated” for ordinary Britons to grasp. Racist attitudes in Garner's opinion percolated down well below the middle class, especially after Darwinian theories infused the “Anglo-Saxon/Celt binary.” One might add that even if scientific theories about race were confined to better educated Britons, this elite contained the politicians and civil servants who ran both countries. Garner shares the view of Donald MacRaild that many Victorians conceived of the Irish Question “as a racial struggle fought between superior Anglo-Saxons on one hand, and inferior Celts on the other.”Footnote 25 Last but not least Garner writes off Gilley's definition of racism as “simply too narrow and one-dimensional to cope conceptually with its anti-Irish forms.”Footnote 26

To deny the ubiquity of race in British attitudes toward the Irish requires a calculated effort to ignore every contemporary allusion to the gulf between Anglo-Saxons and Celts found in Victorian scientific literature, fiction, and the print media. The revisionists would have us believe that only religious or sectarian differences signified in Anglo-Irish social relations, and apart from this sore point, the British people treated its Irish neighbors with goodwill. Implicit in this interpretation is the hypothesis that if only every Catholic Irishman had converted to Protestantism, then the category of Irishness would have been emptied of significant difference and the two peoples would have lived happily together ever after. But as de Nie makes patently clear, the British press was calling for the Anglicization and not the Anglicanization of Paddy. Needless to say, Victorian racists remained convinced that even if the Gaelic (or Celtic) tiger converted to Protestantism, it could never change its stripes. In fact, the noteworthy Scottish anatomist and ethnologist, Dr. Robert Knox, who regarded the entire Celtic race as addicted to both war and the spirit world rather than hard work and reality, inspired one disciple in 1868 to bemoan the refusal of the Irish to accept English laws, government, and constitution. For seven centuries they had been trying to “throw off the Saxon yoke,” he complained, and “the antipathy between the lower orders of Irish and English is proverbial—a matter of common observation. How long will politicians continue to sing the same song: ‘Oh, no, we never mention race?’” (my emphasis) Like Knox, this writer regarded religion as a function of race: “morals, actions, feelings, etc. flow surely from physical structure which never varies.”Footnote 27

Evidently, the revisionists find it hard to imagine the cumulative effect of all those Paddy and Biddy jokes, Irish bulls, and cartoon Gaelic gorillas on the sensibilities of the Irish people. They prefer instead to indulge in dismissive remarks about the “pieties of Irish nationalism” and the “straitjacket of historiographical piety”—to use Roy Foster's words—worn by historians with a “nationalist” or “liberal” or “progressive” agenda. To say the least, Foster's obituary of the revisionist controversy has proven premature because Peatling's essay reverberates with the same brand of Anglocentricity that permeated his mentor's landmark book, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1988). Peatling's essay, in short, makes it clear that the golden age of postrevisionism is a chimera.Footnote 28

Most Irish historians know George Bernard Shaw's remark in 1946: “And for heaven's sake don’t talk to me about that hackneyed myth, the Irish race. There is no Irish race. We are a parcel of mongrels: Spanish, Scottish, Welsh, English, and even a Jew or two.”Footnote 29 However, many years earlier he observed that “a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. … But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted.” And this was the writer who insisted that “there is indeed no greater curse to a nation than a nationalist movement.”Footnote 30 For countless Irishmen the English image of wild and unruly Paddy, so cherished by Unionists of all stripes, constituted a vital part of that nation-breaking process. Unlike his kinsman, genial and harmless Pat, the primitive and savage figure of Paddy posed a troubling threat to English institutions and civilization. With shillelagh or blunderbuss in hand, this semisimian creature served as an extreme example—reinforced by genuine agrarian violence, bombs, and political assassination—of why the Irish “race” could not be entrusted with the instruments of self-government. Seeking to counter this nightmarish figment of Anglo-Saxonist imaginations and to overcome feelings of abject cultural inferiority, the Gaelic (or Celtic) revivalists and nationalists of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras conjured up equally mythical images of Irish gods, fighting men, saints, scholars and beautiful Erins or Hibernias—icons that reminded them of the culture, the land, the respect, the language, and the freedoms they had lost through conquest and colonization over the centuries and were determined to regain.

In sum, rather like cholesterol, there is good and bad revisionism, and we have had too much of the latter in recent years. If only historians embraced the scrupulous scholarship and respect for evidence practiced by the late T. W. Moody and F. S. L. Lyons in their prime, the results would not be clogging the arteries of Irish history. No doubt Peatling's essay will gladden the hearts of neorevisionists everywhere. But to my way of thinking—and to change the trope drastically—it resembles nothing so much as a very dead and very red (or is it white?) herring.