Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? by Liam Kennedy (review)

Abstract

quite ferocious.’ Clearly he didn’t suffer fools gladly. His acerbic wit is well illustrated in his response to a query as to how he would like the Corpus to be bound – ‘in the hide of Robin Dudley Edwards, the thickest and most impenetrable hide in Ireland’, was his answer. Like many, Binchy was disillusioned with post-war Ireland, and he viewed the state’s Irish languagerevival policy with scepticism. Daniel Binchy’s fine portrait by Sir William Orpen hangs in the DIAS. It might have been given a more prominent position in the book, where, reduced to a small scale, it is relegated to the back cover. However, it is surely appropriate that Ireland’s greatest portraitist should have been the one to paint perhaps the country’s greatest Celtic scholar. Although he is occasionally prone to digress, Professor Garvin has written a fine biography of Binchy that is at once rounded, readable and scholarly. The text is frequently enlivened by the author’s own pungent opinions. Dr Harman Murtagh is a Visiting Fellow at Athlone Institute of Technology. He writes on local and military history and is completing a study of King James II’s Irish army. Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?, Liam Kennedy (Sallins: Merrion Press, 2016), 272 pages. Liam Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Queen’s University Belfast. This book comprises a series of essays written over a period of twenty years, addressing some major aspects of modern Irish history. The title is based on a quote from Berthold Brecht – ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes’ – and the author casts a very cold eye on some of the heroes, and some of what he would regard as the myths, of Irish historiography. The first part of the book, under the heading ‘The Long View’, is the only one which explicitly addresses the issue of oppression. In the first chapter Kennedy introduces the concept of MOPE – the Most Oppressed People Ever – which he describes as the master template for writing about modern Ireland. In debunking this notion he observes that both Northern Ireland and the Republic are among the richest regions in the world and analyses the freedoms enjoyed in both places since the nineteenth century. He observes Spring 2017: Book Reviews 122 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 that most Irish emigration has been voluntary and resorted to for economic reasons, with none of the restrictions on freedom of movement which presented elsewhere in Europe. He concludes that whether it is location, climate, land occupancy, political and religious rights, economic welfare or violence, the Irish record is no worse than the modal European experience and is, in a variety of respects, more fortunate. The two other chapters in the first part of the book are titled ‘The Planter and the Gael’and ‘Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland’. The cultural revival of the late nineteenth century in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, placed a value on ethnic and linguistic purity and on racial origins. Yet Ireland, as a small island on the western edge of Europe, has been open to waves of warriors, predators and settlers riding in from western and northern Europe. Kennedy regards the idea of an original ethnic stem or a pure Gael as a piece of fiction and ideological make-believe. He looks at some of the cultural, ethnic and religious issues which caused unionism and nationalism to diverge in the nineteenth century. He analyses economic progress in both northern and southern Ireland in the period 1800-1914 and concludes that the north prospered over the south. He stresses the importance of industrialisation and urbanisation, without which there would not have been a sufficiently populous Protestant presence for effective opposition to home rule and the creation of the statelet of Northern Ireland. The second part of the book, ‘Famine in Ireland’, looks at comparisons which have been made between the Great Irish Famine of 1845-47 and the Shoah, and at the allegation that the British government was guilty of genocide during the famine. He makes a number of comparisons between the Irish famine and the twentieth-century Jewish Holocaust. He maintains that...