MERRIMAN SUMMER SCHOOL:THE REJECTION of the Lisbon Treaty and the question of Irish identity had a parallel in the late 19th century when there was a similar debate about a sense of Irishness within the British empire, historian Dr Raymond Gillespie said at the Merriman Summer School yesterday.
Dr Gillespie, who is professor of history at NUI Maynooth, said the growth in local interest in local history and genealogy in recent decades also had a parallel in the late 19th century when there had been "a tremendous number of local societies".
Similarly, it had been a time of a a rising middle-class in the towns, a rise in the number of substantial farmers, a growth in education and an information revolution.
But the more important parallel was the concern with the nature of Irishness within the entity of the British empire.
"The concern was building a sense of what Ireland was either within or without this large political unit.
"We could draw the parallel between the debate about Irishness in the 1880s and 1890s and the explosion of the local which occurred then, and the explosion of local societies now with our own debate about the nature of Irishness now either within or without some European structure."
He said this parallel between the tension between local and global was again manifesting itself in a growth in local societies.
"We need to think a little bit more than we have done about what this project of doing local history in Ireland in the beginning of the 21st century is about.
"We need to have the confidence to juxtapose our local stories against those of the global. Our stories of our home places have to be told at least as well and perhaps even better than the stories of the history of Europe or of other large areas."
Journalist Marc Coleman, who also addressed the school, said that looking past the current economic downturn, there was every reason to be confident of achieving an all-Ireland economy of eight million people by the mid-century.
He said that while protecting existing immigrants from any kind of discrimination, "we have a right to encourage future immigration from the diaspora".
"Attempts by cultural elites to abuse the issue of immigration by calling for a reduction in the status of the Irish language and religion on grounds of so-called diversity are not only dangerously irresponsible but unsupported by immigrants, the vast majority of whom like us the way we are now."