A scholar with passion on his mind

Hard-nosed scholarship and moral passion underpin Diarmaid Ferriter's work. It also drives his new series for RTÉ, re-examining dissenting voices and questioning the social vision of the founders of the State, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

IN THE third part of Diarmaid Ferriter’s new television series for RTÉ, he tells the story of the man who was the George Lee of the 1950s. In the context of widespread disillusionment and mass unemployment, a protest candidate called Jack Murphy was elected to the Dáil. “He had,” says Ferriter, “the shortest political career in Ireland until George Lee. There are interesting parallels there of someone who comes in on the crest of a wave. He can’t do anything. He can’t find a way of penetrating the system as it stands.”

With resonances like this, the series has all the hallmarks of a historian’s response to the current Irish crisis. While many people are discussing the idea of a “Second Republic”, Ferriter looks at what went wrong with the first. His themes – the emergence of a small elite that kept power to itself; the exclusion of dissenting voices; the failure to deliver on the social vision that the founders of the State signed up to – seem perfectly tailored for a society that is trying to come to terms with a monumental failure.

But The Limits of Libertywas never intended as a response to crisis. It was conceived as a TV series five years ago, at the height of the boom, and much of the material is based on Ferriter's groundbreaking book, The Transformation of Ireland, which he worked on in the years either side of the turn of the century.

“Historians,” Ferriter explains over a cup of coffee in a Dublin hotel, “are supposed to empty their minds of contemporary political baggage before embarking on projects like this. I’m not sure how possible that is, but I wasn’t looking for stuff that would reflect our current situation. I was actually looking for stuff that I thought was relevant during the boom times. When you look at some of the criticisms that were being made 40 or 50 years ago, they were still relevant during the boom years. People like Tom Barrington were writing in the 1950s about how this is a very badly governed country. There’s a dearth of ideas and a devotion to old ways of doing things. And that’s rooted in the early years of the State. A revolution is an opportunity to think about new ways of doing things but it quickly became clear in our case that that wasn’t going to happen. Whether in 2005, when we started talking about the series, or in 2010, it’s still patently obvious that either decisions were being avoided or that wrong decisions were being made. The same fundamental question about who wielded power was still there.”

Ferriter is a somewhat anomalous figure in Irish academia. He can be seen as, at the same time, the enfant terrible of Irish history and a pillar of the establishment. On the one hand, he is a 38-year-old upstart, more or less openly reviled by some of the doyens of his discipline, for his popular touch, his self-confidence and his insistence on prioritising the study of ordinary lives over high politics and diplomacy. (He followed The Transformation of Irelandwith Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland.) On the other hand, he is now at the pinnacle of the academic establishment, as professor of modern Irish history at UCD. He was even famously (or infamously) embraced by Fianna Fáil in 2007, when the then minister for education Mary Hanafin, decided to send two copies of his book on Eamon de Valera, Judging Dev, to every post-primary school.

Ferriter’s appointment to the prestigious UCD job was bitterly opposed by some senior figures in the department. Part of the resistance, he believes, had to do with the fact that he did his PhD in UCD itself (at the age of 23) and did not study abroad. “There’s a tradition attached to UCD that you go to Cambridge and then you come back. But I was having none of that, partly because I was researching 20th century Irish history. It didn’t make any sense for me to go to Cambridge for three years, when the sources were here.

“It was also partly because I had various clashes with powerful people in the history department because I had started to establish a profile that was independent of UCD and independent of them. It was extraordinarily petty. “I applied for a lecturing job in UCD four years ago and they turned me down, even though I was told at the time that I was overqualified. But there was that degree of resentment. You run up against big personalities, particularly if you are deemed to be a big personality yourself. You’re too big for your boots.”

Ferriter overcame such opposition simply because his record of original archival research is second to none. He has a passion for archives and in The Limits of Libertyinsists on doing what most television producers would hate most – showing the viewers original documents. Some of them, particularly when followed by visits to the places they refer to, are extraordinarily poignant.

Thus, the letters to various authorities written in the 1950s by a survivor of Letterfrack, Peter Tyrrell, underpin Ferriter’s palpable anger at what he sees as the greatest failure of the State: the abandonment of the strong pledges in the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil to make the welfare of children the central priority of the new republic.

“There’s a complete betrayal at a very early stage of some of the promises that were made around welfare and especially around children. It’s doubly galling that children were so much a part of the revolutionary rhetoric and yet everything we did flew in the face of the notion that children were meant to be prized.”

Ferriter also uses a document in which the first taoiseach, William Cosgrave, suggested that children brought up in workhouses could be of no use to the State and should either emigrate or be kept in institutions. The retention of the hated workhouse system (with the institutions merely renamed as “county homes”) directly contradicted one of the key promises in the Democratic Programme.

Filming in the old workhouse in Dingle, Ferriter found himself carried beyond his script. “The place is practically unchanged since the 19th century. You can really sense the desolation and the sense of abandonment.

“There’s a line in that scene where I say ‘The retention of these institutions was a sick joke.’ That line wasn’t in the script at all, but as I was standing there amidst all that, I thought I had to say it.”

This mixture of hard-nosed scholarship and moral passion is what marks Ferriter’s work, and it is rooted in a sense of personal connection to modern Irish history. His interest in the past was piqued by two aspects of his childhood. One was the domination of his summer holidays by historic sites. His parents – both primary school teachers in south Dublin – would take their four children to a cottage in some part of the country for a month.

“A big part of our holidays was going round to sites, whether they were monastic sites or graveyards. I loved graveyards, which some people found slightly disturbing, but that sense of there being such a huge history attached to these places – a lot of it started there.”

The other spur to his interest was, oddly enough, the absence of grandparents. His mother’s parents had died when she was young. His father’s father married late in life and died in the mid-1960s. And his father’s mother died in a car crash in 1980. The generational void was a vacuum that he felt impelled to fill by trying to understand the lives of his grandparents.

FERRITER DID NOT, NEVERTHELESS, see himself as destined to be a historian. He applied to do a law degree in UCD (like his older brother Cian, who is a barrister) but failed to get in because he didn’t get enough points in his Leaving Cert. It was a fortunate failure: he immediately found his niche as a history student, topping his class all the way through and getting a scholarship to do postgraduate work. Even though jobs were scarce in the early 1990s, he had two short stints as a temporary lecturer in UCD, a year of working on the Dictionary of National Biography and then nine happy years at Saint Patrick’s College of Education in Drumcondra.

This CV alone attests to the fact that Ferriter is not a cosmopolitan figure – aside from a visiting professorship in Boston College last year, the farthest he has strayed from his base in Dundrum is the northside of Dublin. He met his wife Sheila when they were both still at school and their two daughters go to the same school that Sheila attended. Not for nothing does he describe himself as a “real home bird”.

But the other side of this relative confinement is a relentless focus on the evolution of Irish society. Ferriter was fortunate to emerge at a time when more and more archives were opening up. He found the experience of delving into official records for the first time and testing what they revealed against the official narratives “incredibly exciting”.

This idea that official archives can be subversive hovers around much of The Limits of Liberty. In some ways, the series is a thesis on what didn’t happen – the ways in which the day-to-day concerns of the majority of Irish people were successfully sidelined by a highly centralised system of power. Ferriter points out, for example, that in the 1922 general election, the two wings of Sinn Fein were actually outvoted by Labour, farmers’ parties and independents. “So people were thinking in terms of bread-and-butter issues. But that group was far too disparate to be able to form an effective political force to challenge power.”

Instead, a social and political elite was able to consolidate itself. “They bedded down the institutions of the State very ruthlessly early on, which worked to their advantage because you get that sense that the institutions are very solid and we don’t want to be seen to rock them. These are conservative people. They’re products of Victorian Ireland. They’ve quite harsh attitudes to poverty. The idea that they were going to follow up on some of the radical rhetoric is hopeless. But isn’t that true of any revolution?”

FERRITER HIMSELF IS JUST bedding down in his new role in UCD. He is thus reluctant to make a judgment on the attack by Tom Garvin, emeritus professor of politics, on the current regime of alleged “gray philistines” in charge of the university. Garvin’s attack, though, has, Ferriter says “caused a great stir. I’m delighted he wrote that article because it started a debate which we need to have and we don’t need to have it behind closed doors because it is a national issue.

“There’s always going to be tension when you impose a new managerial layer and there have been concerns about whether or not the humanities are going to be drowned out in a language and an approach that are more appropriate to medicine or science. There’s been so much of a focus on fundraising that there’s a concern that the humanities are not seen as profitable enough.

“Sometimes when young academics are going in for interview, even for one-year posts, the interview is dominated by fundraising. That worries people in the humanities and it’s very legitimate.”

At the moment, Ferriter’s main concern is that people in academic life should feel free to engage in an open debate without fearing the wrath of their superiors. “If there are any repercussions of any of this in terms of freedom of speech or if there’s any attempt to intimidate anybody, then none of us in the humanities are going to stand by and allow that to happen. That’s the kind of thing I feel very strongly about.”

The Limits of Libertystarts on RTÉ 1 on Tuesday June 1 at 10.15 pm