Competing Histories

For reasons too complicated to go into, I spent a whole day last month in the National Library, scrolling through microfilms of 1846 editions of The Kilkenny Journal and Leinster Commercial And Literary Advertisor. The paper, as best as I could make out, was an organ of the Catholic middle classes, and a staunchly pro-Repeal one (Daniel
O’Connell was never referred to by name, only as “The Liberator???). My own knowledge of the politics of the period are fairly sketchy, having been learned in primary school. There was the Emancipation campaign, successful, and a long-running but ultimately unsuccessful campaign for repeal of the Union. I have no idea what the campaign’s downfall was. Did it just die with its leader? Wasn’t there something about a cancelled monster meeting? Clearly I needed enlightenment.

When my day’s researches were done, I sauntered over to Hodges Figgis to see if I could find a volume on O’Connell. But not one did I see. There were some general histories, which no doubt would contain a chapter about him, and there was oodles about the famine, which O’Connell lived through, but nothing dedicated to the man or the movement. Of Parnell, who was in many ways O’Connell’s successor, I found only a little more, one biography and one history of the split of the Irish Party. Why this gap? In terms of sheer numbers of followers, surely either Parnell or O’Connell would dwarf almost all of the other figures more lavishly represented on the bookshelves. Robert Emmett, for example, led a minor riot on a Saturday night in 1803, then made a stirring speech from the dock and is the subject of at least four books currently in print. I’m vaguely aware that there was a figure called John Devoy, because GAA clubs are sometimes named after him, but I don’t know what he did. Something to do with the Feniens in America maybe. He is subject of two biographies.

There are two competing narratives in Irish History, focused on the Romantic and the Democratic Traditions. The dominant narrative until comparatively recently was the Democratic, but more recently it has been the Romantic, Revolutionary school, exemplified by figures like Emmett, which gets all the attention. In this view, Irish history is unfinished business, an epitaph waiting to be written. The Democratic tradition is a dead letter, a story ended in 1916 when the smug elite-in-waiting of the Catholic middle classes were trumped by the blood sacrifice of the GPO.

The recent, deeply tiresome argument about whether or not we should commemorate 1916 was then, quite clearly about Sinn Fein in 2006. It was a fight over who gets to carry the banner of the Romantic Tradition into the new, post-Good Friday Agreement century. No one, not Fine Gael, not even Michael McDowell, is staking a claim to the Democratic Tradition. This is a shame, but it is easy to understand. No one talks about the Democratic Tradition, precisely because it was successful. It won, not in 1916, but somewhere in the mid-nineties. The Republic, the 26-county Ireland, became a success in the nineties, thus losing the romantic aura that applies to losers. Ruth Dudley Edwards wrote a book about Paidraig Pearse called “Triumph Of Failure???. Not being a fan of either Edwards or Pearse, I haven’t read it, but must admit that the title is brilliant. In a perversely Irish inversion, success is an orphan, but failure has many fathers.

Fianna Fail, founded when De Valera realised that abstentionism was a dead end, are a Democratic party in Romantic clothing. Haughey’s republican posturing was merely a flaunting of that clothing for electoral purposes. The true heirs to the Romantic tradition, the ones who have really stuck to the true faith, are Republican Sinn Fein. Even Adams and McGuinness have realised the jig is up, and joined the Democratic Tradition (though the threat of recidivism is always there, and not by accident either). The stolid, unglamorous work of getting, by peaceful means, a measure, albeit unsatisfactory to many, of independence is what got us where we are today. It may lack the poetry of the Romantic Tradition, but it was honourable and successful. We owe O’Connell and Parnell more than we are prepared to acknowledge.