Kevin Whelan

The Revisionist Debate in Ireland

Over the last three decades in Ireland, a vigorous, and at times vicious, historiographical debate has proceeded alongside the Northern Troubles. In a country where current political divides were based as much on the past as on contemporary social divisions, and where that past was claimed as a mandate for political action, the appeal to history was ever present in public discourse. The pressure on the past to explain and justify the present intensified the historiographical debate, propelling the anxious search for a history that would liberate Irish people from their history. In the 1990s, there was an audible collective exhalation of the national breath: with the advent of the Celtic Tiger, the IRA cessation, the public disclosure of long-hidden abuses within the political system and the Catholic Church, there was a palpable sense that modern Ireland was at last shucking off a baleful historical inheritance. In turn, that 1990s moment also threw into sharper relief the project of historical revisionism that had dominated the writing of Irish history from the 1960s to the 1990s. This debate itself requires