Decolonising Irish History? A Panel Discussion

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, renewed attention has turned to decolonising the curriculum, a wide-ranging initiative which means different things to different people and in different contexts. As statues toppled around the world, similar dialogues have been underway about decolonising the public sphere, interrogating the frequently racialised assumptions which have underpinned monuments and statues, particularly from the Victorian era of high imperialism. As illustrated by the recent controversy surrounding the removal of the Shelbourne statues in Dublin and ongoing debates about the John Mitchel statue in Newry, these are also live issues in Irish public life.

Irish history sits in a complicated position in relation to questions around decolonising the curriculum, with the nature and extent of British colonisation, shifting conceptions of 'whiteness', Irish emigrant experiences, and participation in the British imperial project all posing difficult questions to be untangled. On the one hand, Ireland experienced a long period of colonisation by England and later Britain - this process began, with varying degrees of brutality, in 1169 but accelerated rapidly during the Tudor Conquest of the 16th and 17th centuries. From this perspective, Ireland has frequently been called ‘Britain’s first colony’, and Irish people and Irish society were highly racialised by the British state. This has had lingering and serious consequences to this day - not least in attitudes towards the Irish language and Gaelic culture, and for the position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. On the other hand, some parts of Irish society were heavily implicated in the expansion of the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, with its attendant brutality and in some cases were involved in slave-trading. After the Act of Union in 1801, Ireland was formally part of the United Kingdom (although some colonial trappings were retained), Irish men served in both the British Army and colonial administrations, and Irish people continued to migrate in large numbers to the Anglophone world. As such, whether Irish history can represent a ‘decolonised curriculum’ is not a straightforward question. Commonly held assumptions and definitions around ‘whiteness’ do not neatly fit; as we know, in Irish history ‘white’ is a concept with a long and problematic history which reflects a wide spectrum of identities.

As the academy diversifies and decolonises, this is an opportune moment to examine the extent to which perspectives around decolonising the curriculum might bring new insight to the approaches, methodologies and sources that historians of Ireland and the Irish world adopt. This webinar will bring together a number of scholars grappling with the imperial and colonial legacies of Irish history, in dialogue with each other and with the audience, to consider the challenges, opportunities and sensitivities that a decolonising lens can bring to our work as historians.


Our panel will include:

Dr Shahmima Akhtar (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Dr Dónal Hassett (University College Cork)

Professor Kevin Kenny (New York University)

Dr Laura McAtackney (University of Aarhus)

Professor Ian McBride (University of Oxford)

Dr Timothy McMahon (Marquette University)

Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid (University of Sheffield)

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College Dublin)

Organisers:

Professor Ian McBride & Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, Conference of Irish Historians in Britain

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities) and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland

[TrishaWotton]

What an enlightening and fascinating discussion. I am sorry to have missed it but caught up here today. As a second generation (mixed Anglo-Irish) child raised in London I have my own narrative and place it firmly in the working class communities in which I was raised. Now I am engaged as a primary school teacher with a geography specialism in decolonising the primary geography curriculum with a group of secondary and primary plus other specialists. My own living experiences and that of those around me lead me to a position that political and social history is not often written for the common man, indeed there is very little out there that represents the perspectives of those people wherever they hail from. So ultimately your research and ideas I take to read mostly as stories of people with money and power, who were decision makers, and their attendant conflicting pressures who were mostly Irish but not necessarily representative of the ordinary Irish person. My position makes me look at the ability of the ordinary (more representative majority) whose attitudes and actions have not yet been explored.

[arupchakraborty]

Hi.. I'm from india.. great discussion.

[bodbderg]

It began in 795. Normans and vikings are the same thing in Irish language. The brits broke the Good Friday Belfast Agreement. They are framing this conversation at Oxford so it isn't framed in Inis Ceithleann. Minus cork, those are all working for the brits.

[MoMO-mvtr]

You people are dangerous to try and bring IRELAND into this with these flimsy technicalities

[noneone.............]

Interesting title ! Republic of Ireland must be united if King Henry said "i don't wanna in control by this state !". The correct man could talk " this state should follows me ♥️" Live in love and equality make this world felt in Harmony 🇬🇧♥️.

[bodbderg]

Here you go, here is decolonised Gaelic History. I did all the work for yas.

[themaskedman]

Some of the critical flaws in the "colonial" discourse (which I'm guessing won't be corrected any time soon) are all the broad, sweeping generalizations made about "Ireland" and "Irish people". As Stephen Howe once argued, the question itself -was Ireland a colony? -isn't a good one not necessarily because it wasn't true (in some vague, extralegal sense), but because the analytical framework itself has little, if any, explanatory power, and is thus historically worthless in making sense of anything but the narrow little bubble of nationalist political history.

Ireland isn't, and never was, a homogenous island. Even in the broadest context of regional analysis, there were vast differences between the provinces, with Leinster and Ulster being the two most anglicized regions of British Ireland (and note that most of Leinster had been anglicized much longer than Ulster, since the High -Late Middle Ages), and the two biggest regional beneficiaries of economic and cultural relations with 'Britain' (read England), particularly during the Industrial Revolution (see Louis Cullen's work in economic history). Even in terms of education and literacy, Leinster and Ulster were on a level with British standards, with about 80% of men (and three quarters of women) aged 26 -35 being able to read and write on the eve of the Famine (in the other provinces, the literacy/illiteracy rates were essentially flipped -see Cormac O Grada's work in pre-Famine economic history). And, as one would expect, the more literate and educated provinces of Leinster and Ulster sent disproportionate representation to the Westminster government throughout the Union period, which parallels no colony that's ever existed in the Global South or even outside of Western Europe.

The "whiteness" discourse is similarly devoid of intellectual rigor. While it's true that 19th Century British eugenicists described certain classes of Irish people (in most cases the rural poor) as racially degenerate, what sense does it make to use this model to understand a Dublin or Waterford merchant, an aristocrat with English titles or, much worse, a slaveowner on Montserrat? Such an approach to social history not only runs the risk of racial insensitivity (by mostly white scholars), but also allows otherwise privileged people to appropriate the sufferings of the underclass. Even in a modern political context there have been attempts by certain nationalists to appropriate anti-Traveller racism (rebranding it as "anti-Irish" prejudice), despite having no real connection or association with this group.

Irish historical scholarship is not going to earn international respect until the historians themselves make it a point to stop the politicization of their field. The "colonized and colonizers" approach to Irish history is nothing but a hedge -not something that emerges logically from structured historical analysis, but a compromise (or even an insurance policy) between nationalists, unionists and their scholarly representatives.