Michael O'Hanrahan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Irish History Review
Mirian Nyhan Grey (ed), Ireland's Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (UCD Press, 2016, 400 pp, €40 HB, ISBN 978-1-91082-013-1) In the opening paragraph of his foreword to this lavishly produced volume, Professor J.J. Lee ponders how historians should approach the Easter Rising of 1916. He proffers an answer by way of asking another simple question: 'why do I think what I think about this?' What Professor Lee is asking is for rudimentary critical reflection on why particular narratives dominate and how have they been constructed over the years. Why do we think of 1916 in the way that we do and how has the commemorative extravaganza of 2016 reshaped what we know and what has been remembered/forgotten, emphasised/ignored or refashioned/distorted at both official and unofficial levels. Professor Lee's challenge is one that historians too easily avoid. (Remember that quip: History doesn't repeat itself, historians repeat one another). At a moment when both public and disciplinary certainties of 'truth' and 'facts' are under threat, then deeper interrogation of the structure of what, how and why we think about what actually happened is urgent. So, as I read through the twenty four essays comprising this book, I upheld this question as a kind of critical touchstone.
Scotland’s Easter Rising Veterans and the Irish Revolution
Studi Irlandesi : a Journal of Irish Studies, 2019
In 1916 members of the Scottish unit of the Irish Volunteers were deeply involved in preparations for the Easter Rising in Dublin and some republican activists travelled from the west of Scotland to participate in the rebellion. What follows is a limited prosopography of the revolutionary involvement of those members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Volunteers, or Cumann na mBan, who were resident in Scotland between 1913 and 1915 and who fought in Ireland in 1916, or who were prevented from doing so because they were imprisoned. By covering militant activity in both Ireland and Britain, this treatment will argue that Scotland’s Irish republicans were highly integrated with the wider separatist movement in Ireland and beyond, while being very much of the Glasgow, and Europe, of their time.
The Easter Rising (1916) in Ireland and its Historical Context: The Campaign for an Irish Democracy
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2019
This entry focuses on the Easter Rising in Ireland (1916), its causes, and its impact nationally and internationally. As such, this is a study of the development of resistance to British colonial rule in Ireland, the beginnings of Irish republicanism, its challenges to existing power structures such as the Catholic Church, the landowning, and emerging capitalist class and the British Empire, and the resulting tensions and conflicts which emerged within the Irish population and between it and British political and strategic interests. It also discusses the legacy of the Rising and its aftermath in relation to Ireland’s place within the world, the continuing uncertainty and unresolved issues around conflict, and peace within Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations today.
Niall Meehan analyses some aspects of the late Professor Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork (aka, 'The Bandon Valley Massacre'), confusion created by Hart and by his PhD supervisor on the question of 'ethnic cleansing', and errors of elision, omission and distortion that gravitated from Hart's PhD thesis into his book on the subject. The Year of Disappearances, Political Killing in Cork, 1920-23 by Gerard Murphy, published in November 2010 by Gill & Macmillan, excited considerable media and academic interest. It attempted to document in extensive detail a previous historian’s assertion that the IRA ramped up a campaign of anti-Protestant violence beginning in the summer of 1920. Despite an impressive initial flurry of favourable commentary from Eoghan Harris in the Irish Examiner, Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent and from Oxford University based historian John Paul McCarthy in the Sunday Independent (on 5,7,12 November, respectively), the book fared less well subsequently. A problem for Murphy was that, aside from documented errors, most of his disappeared Protestant victims were unnamed. They had no known prior existence. No archive reveals them, no relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. At the time of writing, Professor David Fitzpatrick’s commentary in the Dublin Review of Books (DRB) is the sixth consecutive considered response to argue that it cannot be seriously taken as historical research. Mine was the first to make this point. However, I expressed a similar conclusion about aspects of pioneering work by the late Professor Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s much-celebrated former student, and also the historian whose book, The IRA and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998), inspired Murphy. Perhaps for this reason, Fitzpatrick’s review went some lengths to separate what he termed Gerard Murphy’s ‘disorganised dossier’ from the ‘intellectual power and academic skill’ displayed by Peter Hart. Even some of Peter Hart’s harshest detractors concede the attributes Fitzpatrick rightly awarded him. Hart was capable of combining gifted and imaginative scholarship with exceptional powers of exposition. At its best, his work demonstrated a masterful integration of archival detail that drove forward a clearly structured and an elegantly composed narrative. However, while Hart’s academic skill and narrative presentation was superior to Murphy’s, problems associated with Murphy’s book have also been identified in Hart’s scholarship. This is most evident in the selection and presentation of sources appearing to imply that ethnic and sectarian hatreds drove the quest for Irish independence during the period, 1919-23. In that sense, Murphy’s book represents a kind of continuity with Hart’s work, rather than the binary Fitzpatrick suggested. For those who question Hart’s historical scholarship, Murphy’s book represents a logical, and a significant, decline in Irish historical standards. This is a subject I would like to further develop here. For more, download the PDF [See also in 'Papers': Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, November 2010 A response on use (and non-use) of sources to Professor David Fitzpatrick (TCD), HIstory Ireland, July August 2009]