Irish society must “resist assaults on nuance” and those who “promote simplicities” in coming to terms with the darker corners of its past, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has urged.
Mr Ferriter, who is also an Irish Times columnist, was speaking at the launch of his book, The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020, in Dublin on Wednesday.
The book chronicles how Ireland was “transformed over 25 years” with “dramatic economic, social and cultural changes, including the Celtic Tiger boom and increasingly secular debate about abortion, the status of women and same-sex marriage”.
Mr Ferriter said a big part of the book is about “coming to terms with public and private pasts”.
“This book for me was not about crafting a narrative of a failed state and a failed society,” he said. “It is instead a reminder of the need for perspective and nuance. We do need to resist assaults on nuance.
“I want to speak loudly in defence of history – especially against those who promote simplicities and distortions. Propaganda that is masquerading as fact. Too often in a bilious and righteous manner. That has been one of the most corrosive developments of the period I am looking at.
“We don’t need that cynicism. We don’t need the suffocating judgmentalism that was identified by the Cambridge historian Richard Evans as involving lecturing the people of the past on how they should have done better.
“But we do need to illuminate devastating mistakes. We must remember that history would suggest that once an abuse of power is corrected, it can be replaced by a new intolerance.”
He said Irish society needs “to look at how alliances were built up over decades” and “how fault lines were established and often widened”.
He said Ireland “resisted some of the damaging excesses or trends that were apparent elsewhere”, and that the book raises questions “about how we might measure progress”.
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