Brendan Bradshaw has been one of Ireland’s greatest historians, though he has not been universally acknowledged as such in his native land. If, as Bernd Moeller stated, historians are ‘a herd of individuals’, then Bradshaw stood outside the herd, psychologically as well as physically distanced from the historical academy in the Republic of Ireland, at a time when its loudest members insisted that their ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the Irish past was the sole legitimate paradigm for Irish historical studies. When Roy Foster declared that ‘we are all revisionists now’, Bradshaw spoke out and declared that that was not true. This volume represents his final engagement in his long-running battle with the ‘revisionists’. It is mostly comprised of essays and reviews that were published elsewhere. The justification offered for their republication is the worthy one of making accessible important work originally published in ‘journals or edited collections that are unlikely to be generally familiar to academic historians’ (p. ix). However, several of the pieces were written in the heat of battle and the severity of the tone of criticism of some historians, Steven Ellis and Aidan Clarke come particularly to mind, might have been tempered rather than being reprinted verbatim in this volume. On the other hand, the combative spirit reflected in the original texts reveals Bradshaw’s passionate engagement with Irish history while he was based in the University of Cambridge.
Tommy Graham’s insightful interview of Brendan Bradshaw for History Ireland (1993) makes for a marvellous introduction to the man, and his anti-‘revisionist’ critique. However, it is Bradshaw’s paper on ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’, which was first published in this journal in 1989, that sets the scene for this volume. Bradshaw proposed, and re-iterated the argument in a number of other papers reprinted in this volume, that modern Irish historical scholarship, as it ‘developed since the 1930s, has been vitiated by a faulty methodological procedure’. He argued that it has been characterised by a ‘revisionism’ which aspires to produce ‘value-free’ history but has actually produced value-less history! In his 1989 paper, Bradshaw seemed to condemn the entire Irish historical establishment, with a few named exceptions, as guilty of ‘revisionism’, but in ‘Irish nationalism: an historical perspective’, first published in 2000, he narrowed his sights on ‘the secular liberal commentators – the “Dublin 4” lobby as they are derisively called’ (p. 253).
By any reckoning Bradshaw is an eminent historian whose observations need to be addressed by the Irish historical establishment: his challenges to Irish historians to give due consideration to the emergence of an Irish sense of nationality in the early-modern period, and also to consider the value and purpose of history for the society that wages its practitioners and finances its production, ought to engage wider attention. Unfortunately, his scattergun assault on the historical establishment blunted the impact of his critique, and the reproduction of essays from the last century may not be the best means of encouraging engagement with Bradshaw’s agenda today.
Bradshaw’s call for ‘present-centred history’ generated fierce controversy: Kevin Myers worried that it could make historians into ‘the sort of hacks and political toadies who supplied the historical gibberish which sustained the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. … in the hands of totalitarians, it could be a warrant for genocide, the intellectual authorisation for the liquidation of the kulaks or the exterminations of the Jews’ (Irish Times, 3 Sept. 1998). That is not what Bradshaw intended, obviously. His call should be understood in its United Kingdom context where successive governments have seen education not as an end in itself but rather as a vehicle for attaining wider societal goals, primarily economic but also as a means of fostering social and political cohesion. Britain’s past is also exploited as a means of exercising ‘soft power’ in the world today: Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the U.S.A., for example, has deep cultural as well as military and economic bases. Bradshaw’s call for ‘present-centred history’ is problematic, but not so outlandish from a British perspective as it might seem to Irish eyes.
The great irony of Bradshaw’s critique of Irish ‘revisionism’ is that he criticised its practitioners for not being ‘present-centred’ when, in fact, they very much were – albeit with a different agenda to his own. He failed to recognise the ‘revisionism’ of the late-twentieth century for what it was, a complex and complicated process of re-interpreting Ireland’s past against the backdrop of a prolonged period of economic crisis, political disillusionment, rapid secularisation, and general societal transformation. The Irish Catholic nationalist worldview imploded, not because of the cynicism of the ‘revisionists’ as Bradshaw believed, but because it was no longer relevant to the experiences of many Irish people. The angry writings of the ‘revisionist’ historians simply reflected the Zeitgeist of their day. With the advent of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ in the Republic and the unfolding peace process in Northern Ireland ‘revisionism’, in turn, lost its once-fierce relevance.
Nonetheless, this book has much more than historiographical interest. In its fourth chapter, Brendan Bradshaw tackles a subject of vital importance for Irish history and makes a compelling case that Irish ‘national identity, national consciousness and nationalism itself all emerged as dynamic forces in Irish political history’ from the mid-sixteenth century, under Renaissance and Counter-Reformation influences among others, with a pre-history dating ‘much further back in the medieval period’ (p. 114). By its very nature this subject is bound to provoke further debate. Nonetheless, Bradshaw has made a major contribution to this whole subject, and his work ensures that Irish historians will have to reconsider the importance of a sense of Irish nationality in making sense of Ireland’s past.
