It was always inevitable that the writing of modern Irish history would be a controversial task. This was true even in my schooldays, 65 to 70 years ago, when school history stopped around 1914-16.
That end-date was gradually brought forward to include the period of the National Movement, the Civil War, and the early decades of the Irish State, but the process of history-writing didn't get any easier.
However, in the late 1930s historians from the two Dublin universities, Theo Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards, launched a new and highly professional approach to Irish history, founding the journal Irish Historical Studies and starting to train a new generation of history graduates in research methodology. As a result a huge volume of historical research has been undertaken by very many scholars, which has, inter alia, made possible a revision of what over the decades since 1916 had become a somewhat mythical view of our recent past.
The patient and painstaking research that has made it possible to escape from what had in some measure become a populist historical mythology came in time to be described as revisionism. However, abuse of some of this research by people concerned for political reasons to create an anti-nationalist counter-myth, combined with resentment on the part of extreme nationalists at having some of their cherished myths demolished, has resulted in this necessary and valuable work of historical revision being denigrated. As a result, revisionism has become a term of abuse, directed not just at the counter-myth-makers but also unfairly at serious professional historians.
But, while the work of professional historians of the Moody/Edwards school needs to be protected from the kind of mud slinging and misrepresentation to which it has sometimes been subjected by those with an axe to grind, that school of history is not without its own weaknesses.
I am, of course, aware of the excellent work being undertaken by our small band of economic historians. But for decades past I have been puzzled and unhappy about what seems to be a kind of Chinese wall between these economic and political historians. The latter almost all write as if politics can be divorced from economics. As they recount the dramatic events of 20th-century Irish-British history, the rapidly changing economic relationship between the economies of Britain and Ireland throughout the 20th century never seems to get a look-in.
One could, in fact, read many political histories of early 20th-century Irish-British interactions without ever finding any reference to the fact that the Home Rule crisis of the early years of the century was preceded by a seminal change in the economic relationship between the two islands.
Throughout the 19th century, richer Britain had been the recipient of very large perverse financial transfers from much poorer Ireland. In its evidence to the Royal Commission on Financial Transfers in the mid-1890s, the British Treasury estimated that for much of that century only about one-quarter to one-third of Irish tax revenue was spent in Ireland, including spending on the RIC. (However, Sir Robert Peel and later Chancellor of the Exchequer Goschen had both asserted that, given that body's political role, it should more appropriately have been treated as an imperial charge).
That was the basis of the nationalist claim that an independent Ireland, freed from these perverse transfers, would prosper, because it would have required a much reduced level of taxation. However, 15 years after that commission, Tom Kettle, professor of national economics in UCD, in his book Home Rule Finance was deeply concerned that this key nationalist argument had been undermined by a combination of Balfour's early 20th-century transfers to Ireland designed to "kill Home Rule with kindness" and by Lloyd George's introduction of old age pensions and unemployment assistance. Between them these had radically reversed the 19th century transfer process.
From then on, Ireland became financially dependent on Britain. However, because, following the radicalisation of Irish opinion by the 1916 Rising and the conscription crisis of 1918, our State secured political independence before the emergence of the welfare state, the financial price we then had to pay for independence was still just about tolerable - a 10 per cent cut in public service pay and, for four years, also in the old age pension - the value of which nevertheless was then increased by a price fall of over 20 per cent.
Had we settled for Home Rule at that stage, then by the time, later in the 20th century, when Britain's strategic concerns might have abated to the point of being prepared to concede Irish independence voluntarily, the advent of the welfare state would have raised British financial transfers to our State to some 25 per cent of public revenue - the sudden loss of which would have been a price that a majority of our people might not have been prepared to pay.
The persistent underplaying - indeed in many cases actual omission - by political historians of these key economic issues seems to me a major distortion of the historical record.
Even today, when the Northern issue is discussed by historians, no reference is made to its similar massive dependence on the UK for financial transfers to maintain its living standards. But, if the violence of the IRA had not disrupted the North's economy and instead it had been allowed to continue on its growth path of the 1960s, that area could have ceased to be so financially dependent on Britain.
The political obstacle to Irish unity would, of course, have still remained - although perhaps at a lower level of intensity than is the case today in the aftermath of the IRA's prolonged murder campaign. But without that campaign the economic obstacle to Irish unity would have been greatly reduced, perhaps even eliminated.
While all that is of course speculative, and many may disagree with aspects of my analysis, I hope that I have at least made a case for the inclusion of economic considerations in any political history of Ireland. Frankly, I simply do not see how one can justify excluding economic factors from the recent history of our island.