IN this book, Luke Gibbons is at pains to demonstrate the extent to which those seeking to promote what he terms "traditional values" have made effective use of television and other innovative media. A similar point might be made in relation to his own field, communications, and to other new academic areas, such as literary and post colonial theory, which have been widely used to give fresh life to traditional Irish nationalism.
Indeed, the distance from the lecture to the oration can be a short one, as in this quotation from "Ireland and Post Colonial Identity": "The transportation of the Irish to the New World features prominently in the white slave trade in the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Pedal code which systematically excluded Catholics from citizenship and political life rendered them, in Edmund Burke's phrase, `foreigners in their native land'."
These essays focus almost exclusively on what Gibbons terms "the indigenous population"; those who would seek to give all Irish cultural formations equal validity are referred to as "proponents of hybridity", a breeding metaphor peculiarly at odds with an earlier attack on F.S.L. Lyons and others for the "radical mode" used by them to analyse Irish nationalism. It is conceded that "there is no possibility of undoing history, of removing the accretions of conquest the English language, the inscriptions of the Protestant ascendancy on the landscape and material culture and so on", but there is no consequent inclination to include "the residues of conquest" among the subjects thought appropriate for study. A reference to "the closed culture of Loyalism" presumably indicates that there is little to be said. Indeed, neither religion nor class plays any significant place in these studies.
Much of the book is devoted to the concept of a "history from below", of which an alleged popular memory of the Famine forms an important part. Thus the re erection of a statue to Queen Victoria at UCC is criticised on the grounds that her role in the establishment of the Queen's Colleges cannot be separated from her role as "Famine Queen". A protester was, according to Gibbons, "seeking to register a profound loss of memory, a traumatic episode in Irish history that was no less effectively buried by officialdom . . . than Queen Victoria's moving statues". "History from below" has "nationalism from below" as its concomitant; thus Irish nationalism and state creation become naturalised processes and the ruling class in the Irish state is offered a foundation myth.
The historian, L.M. Cullen has spoken of "the general poverty of tradition in Ireland, even in intimate areas of life", and of "the Irish readiness to abandon traditions". The survival of a subaltern history, subsisting in tradition was always unlikely in such circumstances but its possibility of existence was made even more perilous by Ireland's long tradition of literacy in English, bringing with it, as it did, access to mainstream politics and written history. What is today regarded as the counter view to "revisionist" history was popularised by the national school teachers who played a crucial ideological role after partition, not only in creating a popular historical memory, but in collecting it through their work for the Folklore Commission.
The notion of Irish Famine memory can sometimes appear as contrived as the tears of the performance artist who could weep as she re-lived the trauma. Gibbons is at pains to link the Irish emigrant experience to black slavery and to the Jewish Holocaust, both very strained analogies, given that the Famine, for all the indifference and ineptitude of the government, was neither a systematic genocide nor a bureaucratically planned event. The source of such strained analogies lies not in the events of the 1840s but in the extent to which the present Famine commemoration has been influenced by the American Irish, a group needing a myth which would compete with those of ethnic competitors in a society where ethnicity and success are linked inextricably.
Finally, might one appeal to members of the post colonial school to drop the term "cultural schizophrenia": schizophrenia is a debilitating, lifelong illness and hardly appropriate to jokey metaphors.