How much serious thought and attention is really given to things Irish by the British establishment, academic and political? The question is prompted by the publication of the paperback edition of Prof Norman Davies's much-acclaimed The Isles: A History.
When Prof Davies's book first appeared in hardback last year it was hailed as "a masterwork" (the Times) and generally greeted as a highly authoritative and refreshingly new approach to the history of the British Isles and their peoples. It was praised, particularly, for its departure from "Anglo-centricity" and for its concern with the multinational nature of the isles. Coinciding as its completion did with the advent of devolution within the United Kingdom and with the agreement of new structures within the island of Ireland and between the Republic and the UK, it was, and is, a genuinely important book.
How, then, does it get startlingly wrong so many things about Ireland? Any comprehensive history on such a grand scale will inevitably be criticised on points of detail by specialists, but consider just some of the errors which appeared in the original edition, and which are left uncorrected in the "fully revised for paperback" edition just published.
On the Irish Civil War (1922-23) Prof Davies records that the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed at the end of 1921 "provoked a vicious civil war". He continues: "The pro-treaty party was defeated: Michael Collins was assassinated. The hard-line anti-treaty faction of another survivor of the Easter Rising, Eamon de Valera, triumphed."
As any (Irish) schoolboy knows, the result was the reverse. De Valera's republicans called off their military campaign and tried to sue for peace in 1923. The pro-treaty government forces triumphed, and the institutions of the Free State, based on the treaty, were firmly established. It was another nine years before de Valera and his new Fianna Fail party were elected to office.
Is it conceivable that a front-rank historian could publish a history of England recording that the Civil War of the 1640s ended in the defeat of the Parliamentarians and the triumph of Charles I?
On Northern Ireland, Prof Davies comments that from the creation of Northern Ireland (not in 1920, as he states, but in 1921) Protestant politicians upheld "a judiciary and a militarised police force recruited exclusively from Protestants". In fact the first Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland was a Catholic, and up until the beginning of the Troubles, at least 10 per cent of the RUC were recruited from the Catholic population.
More bizarrely, Prof Davies declares that: "In religious matters, it (Ulster Protestantism) was divided between the disestablished Episcopalians of the Church of Ireland and the more fundamentalist Free Presbyterians."
In fact the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland was, and still is, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, while the Free Presbyterians are a small denomination founded by the Rev Ian Paisley in 1951, 30 years after the creation of Northern Ireland.
These are inexplicable factual errors, as are the statements in an appendix that Eire joined the United Nations as a founder member in 1945 - it was excluded until 1955 - and that "Ulster seceded from Ireland" in 1920. It is a minor point, but also totally wrong, to state that "the Parliament of Northern Ireland first assembled at Stormont Castle near Belfast in 1921". The Parliament has never met in Stormont Castle, and Parliament Buildings, in the grounds of the Castle, were not built until 1932.
Prof Davies's footnotes give no clue as to the sources of such misstatements, though one can guess on what he bases his account of the Bloody Sunday incident at Croke Park, Dublin, in 1920. According to The Isles, "a British armoured car drove on to the pitch of a Gaelic football match and opened fire on the players". That is how the event was portrayed in the recent film, Michael Collins.
Most historians, including those writing from a republican point of view, record that Auxiliaries sent to Croke Park to search for IRA men who had that morning assassinated 13 officers suspected of being secret agents opened fire on the crowd after, they claimed, they had come under fire themselves. There is no mention of an armoured car being driven on to the pitch.
To some, that may seem nitpicking, but taken together with the inexplicable factual errors, it raises worrying questions. How did a highly respected historian come to include such errors in his work? How did the "specialist academic readers" to whom Prof Davies tells us he submitted every chapter miss them? More alarmingly still, how did all the reviewers who so warmly applauded the work overlook such errors, and most alarmingly of all, how is it that they still appear in an edition proclaimed as "fully revised for paperback?"
Is it that events in Ireland really command little serious attention in Britain? That despite the enormous cost of conflict in Northern Ireland in terms of lives and destruction, and despite protestations of great concern, the British public, including politicians and academics, just want a way out and are not prepared to give painstaking examination to the fundamental causes and realities of the problem?
The Isles: A History. Norman Davies. Papermac. 2000. (Macmillan)
Dennis Kennedy is a historian and lecturer in European studies at Queen's University, Belfast
