Irish StudiesWas Edmund Burke Irish? The question seems absurd given that he was born in Dublin, and was educated at the Quaker school at Ballitore, Co Kildare and at Trinity College, Dublin. For heaven's sake, his whole connection - his "little platoon" as he put it - was not just Irish, but Irish Catholic and Jacobite.
His father was a Catholic who converted to Protestantism, apparently for professional reasons, but his mother was a Nagle and a Catholic, he himself married a Catholic, and he had cousins serving in the Irish regiments of France. Moreover, his first and last crusades were taken up with Irish issues: the Sheehy case in Tipperary in 1766, when a Catholic priest was judicially murdered, vexed him greatly; and in the 1790s he became obsessed with saving Irish Catholics from the embrace of the United Irishmen, and from the oppression of Protestant Ascendancy. And in between these dates, he was a notable if cautious critic of the Penal Laws. Certainly, contemporaries appear to have had few doubts about his provenance, and throughout his political career in England, he was regularly denounced as a crypto-Catholic or Jesuit, whose oratory, sniffed one observer, "stank of whiskey and potatoes".
And yet, for all that, the lengthy (and hostile) entry in the relevant biographical volume of the History of Parliament records him simply as "Edmund Burke, of Beaconsfield, Bucks"; on occasion, he called himself an Englishman - Mary Wollstonecraft was moved to rebuke him for using "we" when he was referring to the English; he rarely visited Ireland in the last 30 years of his life, and claimed he disliked even thinking about the country; his great crusades - on the side of the colonists in the American Revolution, against mis-rule in British India and as an implacable opponent of the French revolution - had nothing to do with Ireland; and his political career was entirely confined to England where he moved freely in the shades of the great oak trees, the Rockinghams and the Fitzwilliams, and where pronouncements such as "Ireland cannot be separated one moment from England without losing every source of her present prosperity and even hope of her future" were entirely acceptable.
More alarming than any of this, he has been hailed as the founder of the modern British Conservative party. Disraeli (an outsider) was an early admirer of what he saw as Burke's early version of one-nation conservatism. Latterly, John Redmond, Tory MP, policy advisor, and leadership candidate (and famously "the man with two brains") has identified Burke's espousal of popular capitalism, his belief in the wisdom of community and his defence of political freedom as the basis of modern British conservatism; while Margaret Thatcher (as much an outsider as Disraeli) enlisted him as the first member of the anti-Maastricht brigade and as a pioneer opponent of state-planning, and she was wont to quote his view that "all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". (An added common bond between her and Burke was that they were both turned down for honorary degrees by Oxford University.)
This new book on Burke, by Luke Gibbons of Notre Dame University, goes a long way towards resolving the apparent contradictions in Burke's life and towards reconciling the ambiguities in his legacy.
However, as its subtitle indicates, this is emphatically not a biography, and the reader seeking to learn of Burke's life would be advised to turn to Conor Cruise O'Brien's fine study, The Great Melody. That said, this remains a book about Burke and Ireland, for Gibbons's central and arresting argument is that the Irish experience of colonialism lies at the very heart of Burke's thought; that earlier attempts to separate his theory of aesthetics from his politics have failed to do justice to his searing experiences of fear and terror in the mid-century Ireland; and that his theories of violence, sympathy and pain provided him with a set of "diagnostic tools" with which to probe the dark side of the Enlightenment and its sponsorship of colonial expansion and political repression. Gibbons is especially insightful on Burke's childhood and youthful experiences of religious hatred and judicial repression in Munster: the execution of Sir James Cotter in 1720 (Burke's father was acting for the defence); the "artic winter" of 1740-1; the Whiteboy risings of the early 1760s; and lastly, the event that forever fixed the Ascendancy in his mind, the execution in 1766 on trumped up charges of Father Nicholas Sheehy - his kinsman. These "disasters in the moral sphere" traumatised Burke, and from his experience of fear and terror stemmed his theories of the sublime and its opposite, the beautiful.
Gibbons shows time and again how Burke's interventions in American, Indian or French affairs were predicated on his earlier Irish experiences, for each of these issues had its own pivotal or exemplary event, like the Sheehy execution. In America it was the murder and scalping of Jane McCrea by Britain's Indian allies; in India it was the rape of young women by agents of the East India Company; and in France it was the infamous violation of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber by the Paris mob.
For Burke all these were proof of how fatally easy it was for grand schemes to advance progress to relapse into the very barbarism which they sought to eliminate; and equally how colonial regimes can end up perpetuating the worst traits of the societies they were endeavouring to civilise. As we know all too well, but which Burke could only sense, "civilisation" would prove fully capable of perpetrating atrocities on an unimaginable scale. Gibbons concludes by stressing the importance and relevance of Burke's insights for contemporary debates on multiculturalism, globalisation and economic integration.
The book is for the most part lightly written with a number of humorous asides (and at least one good joke about the Rolling Stones and the blind harpists of Belfast in 1792): but it is not Burke-Lite, it makes demands of the reader and will hardly be read at a sitting. Economic historians will quibble at Gibbons's characterisation of the 18th-century Irish economy as labouring under "crippling economic restraints", placed on it as part of its colonial subjugation, though they will applaud his reassessment of Burke's attitude towards the state provision of relief in time of dearth and famine, which has been much misunderstood.
Political historians for their part will perhaps question Gibbons's emphasis on Burke's influence in bringing about the repeal of many Penal laws; they may also dismiss as misguided, if not perverse, Burke's own condemnation of the "jobbing ascendancy"; and they may emphasise Burke's dislike of the United Irishmen and his detestation of the Irish Presbyterians (rather overlooked here). But withal, Gibbons makes a compelling case for a much less eirenic, much more polemic view of 18th-century Ireland than that currently on offer; and overall, this is a bracing read, and a signal achievement, with much that is new to say about someone who certainly cannot complain about neglect, and with much that is insightful to say about issues that cannot be neglected.
Thomas Bartlett is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin
Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime By Luke Gibbons Cambridge University Press, 304pp. €40