Bannerman writes:
“Michael I think you were a bit harsh on Niall Meehan in your comments on his review given the exceptionally poor quality of Murphys research and the consensus reached by an overwhelming majority of his reviewers that the claims in his book cannot be taken seriously”
Padraig, reading my review over, I can see that I was a little intemperate, and might have phrased myself slightly differently had I taken a few deep breaths and held off writing for a while. I was annoyed at Mr Meehan, not for his criticism of Mr Murphy’s book per se, but for his conflating work by other historians with Mr Murphy’s, and other unfair rhetorical ploys. I have read another review by him since which is much more professional and fair comment, while being no less critical of Mr Murphy’s book.
But I doubt that I’d have done more than tone down my remarks, because whatever “the consensus reached by [any] overwhelming majority” I form my own conclusions, and these remain much as they were when I read the book—even before I’d finished it, as I see:
So far, it appears that Murphy is not agenda-driven—though it’s a certainty that he’ll be reviled as a “revisionist” by those who would deny [for instance] that “when it comes to brutality, the Irish can mete it out as well as anyone else” (pp. 15-16). Rather, he seems to be concerned with exploring “a dark part of Irish history [that] it has suited various interests to keep quiet about”, and he’s self-effacing in his preface: “It is the best I could do with what I uncovered, and some conclusions may turn out to be incorrect when more evidence becomes available. It is at best a theory or, rather, a series of interrelated theories. These may be refuted by future scholars. If so, good luck to them” (p. xi).
Perhaps your own initial evaluation of the book as “conspiracist” remains more accurate than “revisionist”, for Mr Murphy’s reach overwhelms his grasp, and his style is more suited to fiction. Now the book is labelled as “revisionist” (as I anticipated), and indeed has become a focus for “anti-revisionists”, and …
It seems to me that the revisionist school of history cannot produce sound work based on 'cause and effect history' and accepted research methodology to prove their sectarian thesis.
What is this “revisionist school”? Who does it comprise? What exactly is a “revisionist”, and the significance of the divide between him and a “real” historian?
Until perhaps a couple of decades ago there was a bitter split in the German historical community, the historikerstreit. This “historians’ quarrel” goes back to the turn of the Sixties when Fritz Fischer, working from Second Reich archives, revealed that Germany had engineered not just the Second but the First World War. The unfortunate Germans, recently bombed back to the stone age and then “denazified”, now found the one thing in their recent history they could be proud of—or at least not ashamed—taken from them too, and by one of their own! Many of Fischer’s colleagues had fought, like him, in the recent war, others in the First, some in both, and they perceived his claim as outrageous. Fischer was accused of being anti-German, suffered physical violence and had his office firebombed. As his former student Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann wrote in his mentor’s obituary, “It is difficult to imagine today how strongly the reaction in the public was against Fischer's challenge of a deeply entrenched national myth”.
Does this seem familiar?
For many years now the once-controversial “Fischer hypothesis” has been accepted as mainstream history and Fischer is usually regarded as the most important German historian of the twentieth history. Of course his work is debated still, on points of detail, and unreconstructed heel-clickers still might insist that Germany was the victim in 1914, but Fischer’s work was so professional and thorough that these are now few.
Am I implying that eventually “revisionism” is going to be accepted in the same way here?
I don’t think there can be quite such an outcome from our own clampracht na staraí (ceart? Níl ach cúpla focail agam anois). The difference between the two “camps” here is on points of detail and it always has been there under the surface. The essential points of our history are fairly transparent, it’s just that now more people feel confident to question points of detail, or to express views that up to the not-too-distant past might have attracted sneers of “West Brit!”—which they still will—if not requests for clarification from large, intimidating men, possibly wearing sunglasses and black berets.
In Germany, by contrast, a long propaganda campaign had succeeded in convincing a nation that they had been the victims of a policy of encirclement by enemies, one engineered by Britain; that the proposed empires of Mitteleuropa and Mittelafrika were purely defensive measures against future encirclement; that we are the victims here. Now they’re told, “No volks, it was our fault”.
We Irish will always be arguing on matters of opinion and points of detail. But with luck and greater maturity we’ll be judging works of history on merit alone; and perhaps we won’t continue to hold our heroes to impossible standards for very much longer, or feel guilt at criticising them.
As for the “sectarian thesis”: is there any such thing beyond individuals’ claims? Hart says that sectarianism was a factor in Cork, and so does Murphy (and I’ll have more to say soon on Niamh Sammon and her team’s Hidden History programme), but “revisionist” seems to be a derogatory term that includes not just these, but anyone who would question “traditional history”. Martin Mansergh, back in 1987, defined “revisionism” as
a work that sets out to upset the established version of events in a thoroughgoing and often iconoclastic way … sometimes purely for reasons of sensationalism, but often there is an ideological motive, that desires to challenge what is perceived as the ideology underlying the established version of events.
So what does it take “to upset the established version of events”? Is “perceived … ideology” to be sacred, as under Nazi and Marxist dictatorships? Is Sinead Joy, for instance, a “revisionist”, as well as Mr Murphy? Who decides? Is there any justification for reading past her introduction where Ms Joy acknowledges that she proposes to “scrutinise” the “traditional view” of the Revolutionary years in Kerry, to even get as far as her “research methodology”?
Was Father Shaw’s 1966 essay “revisionist” because it was critical of the Easter Rising? Is a “real historian” not allowed to criticise the Rising? What else is he not allowed to criticise?
Is it “revisionist” to say that individual events within an essentially non-sectarian campaign were sectarian (Altnaveigh, for instance)?
Is it “revisionist” to claim that the Castle Document was a forgery? (Grace Gifford did claim to have seen Plunkett deciphering it, don’t forget.) If so, is every mainstream historian therefore “revisionist”?
Reductio ad absurdum? Of course. But is there not something ad absurdum about the entire “revisionist” concept?
For if Mr Murphy is a “revisionist”, what about that decent man he cites, that genuine republican who refused to identify Protestant homes to his superiors, and instead mounted guard on them against possible attack by rogue elements within his own IRA (Murphy, p. 195)? Is that good man, too, a “revisionist”? Or, given that he—obviously—antedates the term, perhaps a “premature anti-anti-revisionist”?
At what point do we end up having history determined by ideology, and people’s worth and work evaluated by the labels we stick on them? Ad absurdum?
We need to be sensible in our judgement rather than doctrinaire; to eschew any ideology (insofar as this is humanly possible), burn all labels and judge each work by its own merit—i.e., by the support it offers its thesis, rather than how it conforms to any definition.
So, does Mr Murphy offer supporting evidence for his claims? Yes, but hardly enough to sustain them. He does, however, present enough evidence to warrant further investigation, which it seems is underway. At present he has no more than an hypothesis, as Fritz Fischer had fifty years ago; not a credible thesis.
Far more dangerous than Mr Murphy, whose claim lacks sufficient evidence, is the person who puts forward a claim and insists that by its nature it somehow doesn’t require evidence. One might argue that Peter Hart fits into this category, if as it seems he insisted to the end on his “eyewitness” accounts of Kilmichael. But—though I’m open to correction on this point—is the “list of helpful citizens” of Dunmanway not almost as apocryphal as Hart’s witnesses? (As I say, I’m open to correction here, but was that list not something that someone saw and told about, rather than a document that’s actually in the public domain and may be independently verified? Apologies if I’m wrong, and gratitude for any correction.)
A variation on this latter fallacy is where, rather than evidence being expected to provide support for the claim, the claim is presented as the yardstick whereby the admissibility of evidence is measured. This is a feature of totalitarian regimes, hence Nazi history and biology and Soviet Lysenkoism; but political correctness has slithered something like it under our radar here, and the hallowed halls of academe foster PC and may confer respectability on any fashionable nonsense. Calls for supportive evidence may elicit abstruse jargon, tautologous rephrasing and reiteration of the claim itself, appeals to arcane authority, such as some political scholar or dead hero, or, perhaps, an “established version of events”), and when all else fails, ad hominem attacks.
I’d be far more afraid of those who deploy such devices than a man who candidly admits that his book “is the best I could do with what I uncovered, and some conclusions may turn out to be incorrect when more evidence becomes available”, and wishes “good luck” to anyone who can improve on or disprove his theories.
