By John Rodden and John Rossi
Perhaps no country has been so haunted by history as Ireland
A century ago, the War of Independence in Ireland broke out in late January — the Irish equivalent of the American Revolution. It led to a bloody civil war that exploded eighteen months later. The year-long Civil War proved, if anything, even more divisive and embittering than the revolutionary war. The Irish Civil War, which resulted in a divided Ireland, “ended” in 1923 merely in an official sense; practically speaking, Ireland was plunged until virtually the end of the 20th century into guerrilla warfare and terrorism. No lasting, final peace was achieved until the Easter agreement of 1998.
Almost every Irishman knows all this; hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens have grandfathers who fought in the War of Independence and Civil War of the early 1920s. Tens of thousands more, especially in the northern province of Ulster, have family members injured or killed in the internecine warfare between the IRA and the British Army and its Irish Protestant supporters.
Perhaps no country has been so haunted by history as Ireland. You will not go far — in Ulster above all — before stumbling across a heated debate, abetted by a few stout mugs of Guinness, not just about the War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s or the Easter Rising of 1916, but even about the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 (and victorious Protestant King William of Orange versus defeated Catholic King James II. Or further back, even about the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, which marked the beginning of more than 800 years of British occupation — or let us say, er, “involvement”— in Ireland).
Is all that soon going to change? Beginning this school year, as Minister of Education Ruairi Quinn told the nation last May, all 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland have instituted a new set of requirements for the Junior Certificate, which is the national leave-taking examination for 16-year-olds (equivalent to a pre-GED diploma from a U.S. junior high school). The most important, and controversial, curricular change was the decision to drop Irish history as a requirement and classify it as an elective.
Now an Irish wit might say (and probably already has in plenty of pubs) that this is a good thing — historical amnesia will soon set in, and nobody will remember 1922 or 1916, let alone 1690 and 1169. And so the nation’s long-standing and still simmering antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants, or Irish and Scots-English, will gradually dissolve of their own accord, thanks to the near-universal ignorance.
A nifty solution, eh?
Well, not exactly. Another historical fact is that Northern Ireland, which is where so many tragic and traumatic events in the recent past have occurred, abolished history as a school subject several years ago, along with the rest of the United Kingdom. (The six chiefly Protestant counties of Ulster, which make up the region officially known as Northern Ireland, are part of the U.K. and subject to its laws.) Just as prevails across the sea in Britain, fewer than 40 percent of Northern Irish students currently elect to study history.
Historical ignorance, anyone? Rather, the lesson would seem instead to be the famous warning of George Santayana: “Those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Prominent Irishmen are already voicing their concerns. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Mick Finn, fears that tossing out history as a required subject to pass the Junior Cert amounts to nothing less than “turning our back on history — local, national, and global.” He argues that the dire scenarios that we have already discussed — the wounds of history being so open and still festering — will only deepen as the years pass. For Irish citizens will indeed be imprisoned by Santayana’s dictum. They will be “condemned to repeat the past” if they “fail to remember” it.
The president of the Republic of Ireland, Michael Higgins — a history professor before his reincarnation as a national statesman — has expressed “deep and profound concern” about the already noticeable decline of historical knowledge among Irish youth, which will only worsen without the Junior Cert history requirement. Discussing the curricular change on the occasion of the publication of the grand new scholarly edition of The Cambridge History of Ireland, he reminded fellow Irishmen: “A knowledge and understanding of history is intrinsic to our shared citizenship, to be without such knowledge is to be permanently burdened with a lack of perspective, empathy and wisdom.”
Will a national amnesia indeed result in Ireland over the new generation or two? It is possible. Irish youth, one critic predicts, will soon regard the bleak west coast islet of Skellig Michael as nothing more than the set for the Star Wars films — as if Americans were to view the Empire State building as just the set for the King Kong movies.
Haunted history cannot be healed by pretending that a burdensome past is just a mere featherweight. Facing the past means facing it down — and that is done only through knowledge and awareness. Otherwise a free people becomes enslaved just as surely as the sheep-like zombie citizenry of Orwell’s 1984, who bleat in unison: “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!”
John Rodden grew up in Philadelphia after his parents emigrated from County Donegal. He has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas, among other universities. He can be reached at jgrodden gmail.com
John Rossi is a Philadelphia native and professor emeritus at LaSalle University. He taught courses in Irish and British history for 40 years.