The original Shaping of Modern Ireland, a collection of biographical portraits of 20 men credited with having contributed significantly to the shaping of modern Ireland in the period 1891-1916, was published in 1960. Edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien, the contributors were distinguished writers and historians, several of whom had known the subjects of their essays personally.
While the original basis for the 1960 selection of subjects was the accommodatingly imprecise requirement that “their influence was felt in Ireland in the interval between the fall of Parnell in 1891 and the Rising of 1916”, the underlying purpose of the volume, as the editor announced, was to prompt “an interrogation by a cross-section of contemporary Ireland of a significant cross-section of its own past”.
Cruise O’Brien’s introductory essay was unmistakably revisionist in intention and tone. The current version, no less interrogatory in intention, was conceived and is edited by the Cambridge historian Eugenio Biagini and the Irish diplomat (currently Ambassador in London) Daniel Mulhall. They discovered a shared interest in the topic and period and judged that a volume of re-evaluations along the same lines as the Cruise O’Brien volume would be timely in the current cycle of centenary commemorations.
The result, while more a traditional portrait gallery than, for example, Roy Foster's acclaimed Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland (Allen Lane, 2014), is a lively and engaging collection of essays.
This latest volume has a gallery of some 30 subjects, distributed through 16 chapters, with a penetrating introductory essay by Paul Bew. Apart from the journalist WP Ryan, none of the original cast has been dropped from the current volume, but there have been notable additions.
The most significant is the inclusion of a cohort of influential women, reflecting the spectacular and welcome flowering of a more inclusive social history, specifically women’s history, in recent decades. It includes the Gore-Booth sisters, Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Lynn and Dorothy Macardle (an essayist in the Cruise O’Brien volume).
Clearly, the shaping of modern Ireland is no longer an exclusively male project.
Dispassionate
Among the further additions that greatly enhance this volume is Martin Mansergh’s dispassionate and insightful comparison of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera (both of whom, it may be argued, only began to exert decisive influence after 1916).
Joe Lee, in an essay entitled The Guinnesses and Beyond, reflects on notable Irish business families and makes a characteristically challenging case for a more sophisticated treatment of business history within the wide arc of social history rather than simply as a sub-branch of economic history.
John Dillon has now been added to Redmond and Tim Healy (each the subject of individual essays in the 1960 volume) in the trio of home-rule parliamentarians considered by Frank Callanan.
Of course, in the decades since 1960 the historiography of modern Ireland, not least that of the revolutionary era, has been transformed, the outcome of an explosion of newly accessible primary sources, a huge increase in the number of professional historians writing on Irish history, and the changing perspectives that come with changing circumstances and the march of time.
The essays in this new volume, whether on the original cast or the new additions, reflect this transformation; most of the contributors comment explicitly on it. Although the general thrust of these re-evaluations, perhaps inevitably, is to supersede the original profiles, the more ambitious contributions are those that critique the 1960 essays in addition to reappraising their biographical subjects.
This extra historiographical dimension is present, for example, in Michael Laffan’s judicious profile of Arthur Griffith, in Patrick Maume’s reflective piece on Douglas Hyde and in Vincent Comerford’s reappraisal of the Fenian trio of James Stephens, John Devoy and Thomas Clarke. It is particularly evident in Diarmaid Ferriter’s essay on Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, which sparkles with sharp historiographical commentary, not only on its two main subjects but also on Dorothy Macardle’s original essay of 1960.
Apart from the total absence of women, the principal omissions from the 1960 volume, as Bew properly points out in his introductory essay, were its neglect of the central importance of the land question and the virtual neglect of the increasing prominence and intractability of the Ulster question in the decades before 1914.
Given the importance of the land settlement (the creation of a rural society of farmer owners) to the kind of society that characterised the Irish Free State after 1922, the omission of Michael Davitt (or William O’Brien) from the original collection of shapers was puzzling. Their continued absence from the current volume is even harder to understand.
One might also ask whether, if influence on their own society constitutes the basis of selection, James Larkin might not have a strong case for inclusion, given his impact on the spirit and structure of Irish trade-union activism in the early decades of the last century. On the other hand, as far as the earlier neglect of “Ulster” is concerned, Biagini’s sympathetic reassessment of Edward Carson goes a long way towards exploring the Ulster dimension of Carson’s impact in an insightful manner.
There is a further dividend in the new grouping of subjects in several chapters. For example, the decision to consider the industrialist James Pirrie and the agriculturalist Sir Horace Plunkett in the same essay allows Mary Daly to pursue a comparative approach that reaches beyond the biographical aspects of career and character, to draw attention to structural and regional aspects of the Irish economy.
In reviewing the outcome (post-1921) of the momentous events of the period 1891-91, in the original 1960 volume, Cruise O’Brien reflected on the failure of most of the thinkers and leading men of affairs profiled in his volume to see their cherished hopes and visions of a “new” or better Ireland realised. Death or disillusion was the fate of some of the most able. But Cruise O’Brien was in no doubt that “those who were destroyed” by the upheaval “were above all the moderates and the peacemakers”.
Although no single ideological position informs or dominates this latest collection, the prevailing intellectual temper is clearly in sympathy with “the moderates and peacemakers” of the decades of upheaval. In this it probably reflects the prevailing attitudes among historians and intellectuals in contemporary Ireland, as they interrogate this pivotal period of the Irish past.
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is emeritus professor of history at NUI Galway
