Farewell to old Ireland

Abstract

Ireland's eighteenth century lengthens almost year by year as pioneers push back its start: first to I69I, next to i66o, now (in Sean Connolly's version) to I659, and soon no doubt to I64I. Meanwhile its terminus has been moved forward, at least by Tom Bartlett, to I 830.1 With this new liking for elasticity, Lecky's classic eighteenth century in effect the forty years after I 760 may soon snap. Poor Lecky is also blamed for introducing other distortions which still mar recent writing. The decades before I 760 interested him chiefly as a prologue to the turbulent I 780s and I 790s, which worse still he approached with patrician and unionist assumptions and from the angle of Dublin Castle and College Green.2 This damnosa hereditas, bequeathed to the authors of the political chapters of the eighteenth-century volume of the 'official' New history of Ireland, has similarly corrupted an otherwise canonical book.3 Add to this that trusted veterans, J. C. Beckett, J. L. McCracken, R. B. McDowell and J. G. Simms, cantered over the familiar ground rather than the mettlesome novices whinnying to be out of their stables and on to the turf, and we can understand why the New history recapitulates the approaches and insights of an earlier generation. Instead of a Richard Rogers factory with the utilities of graphs and tables exposed and dictating the style, the expectant entered an elegant historiographical mausoleum. However, the sometimes peremptory rejection of past learning misses the extent to which historical knowledge is constructed like an atoll, clearing the water and displaying its allure thanks only to the carapaces deposited by our predecessors. A recent flurry of publications on Ireland's 'long' eighteenth century accordingly builds on, even when it sometimes rejects, the body of work since Lecky's time: the very bulk of which confutes the verdict that this era has been unduly neglected.4 Yet the quickening tempo of parliamentary and popular politics in the I 78os, together with the revolutionary potential of the I 790s, still bewitch today's writers as much as they ever did Lecky or McDowell. Even the heroic reconstructions of the proportions and dynamics of demographic, economic and social change one of the most notable advances in the last twenty-five years have been conscripted into, when not directly