The UCC academics who created the Atlas: (left to right) Donal O' Drisceoil, John Crowley, John Borgonovo, and Mike Murphy. Years of Turbulence: the Irish Revolution and its Aftermath
ed. by Diarmaid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan
(UCD Press, €40.00)
Joe Carroll
As the centenary of the Easter Rising approaches, historians have been busy tapping newly revealed sources and archives for new angles on this landmark event and its aftermath up to the end of the Civil War in 1923. While the main politico-military narrative remains largely unchanged, research into the underlying social and cultural conditions of these “years of turbulence” is yielding valuable new information.
Essays
The 11 essays in this volume explore territory which includes Irish suffragists, the GAA, violence against women, the harsh economic conditions endured by aging veterans of the struggle and the chilling methods of the IRA’s execution of those dubbed spies or informers.
Other essays offer new interpretations of the demise of the Irish Parliamentary Party after the Rising; the portrayal of Padraig Pearse by biographers up to 1927; how the elections of 1921 and 1922 divided the electorate in Co. Galway; an account of the later career of Bulmer Hobson, a semi-forgotten figure of the Rising; a re-visiting of the extraordinary life of Michael Keogh who joined Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade in a German prisoner-of-war camp after a spell in the US Cavalry fighting Pancho Villa on the Texas-Mexico border; and the forces which helped shape a young Sean Lemass.
The essays are a tribute to Michael Laffan, the former Head of the UCD School of History. Most of the contributors are historians whose post-graduate work in modern Irish history he guided or supervised.
An introductory profile of Laffan himself, who is not as widely known to the general public as other more high profile historians, brings out his influence over a long teaching and writing career on the historiography of modern Ireland.
He was a prominent figure, probably reluctantly, in the “revisionism” war in academia in the 1980s and 1990s.
As the Provisional IRA tried to bolster their campaign of violence in Northern Ireland by claiming direct descent from the IRA of the “years of turbulence”, historians for the most part sought to show the danger of this mythologising. Laffan wrote in a lecture ‘Two Irish States’ that “the claim in the 1916 proclamation that six times during the past 300 years the Irish people has asserted in arms their right to national freedom was nonsense, but it was sacred nonsense”.
Laffan and other ‘revisionists’ were accused, sometimes by academic colleagues, of “partitionist rhetoric” and of responding to the Northern Ireland crisis rather than giving a dispassionate account of modern Irish history”.
The four-page elect bibliography of Laffan’s published work confirms his status as a leading historian. His seminal work is The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Fein Party 1916-1923.
More recently he has written an authoritative account of the life of W.T. Cosgrave.
It is to be hoped he has further contributions to our understanding of modern Irish history in his retirement.