Modern Ireland

The tradition of writing the 'story of Ireland' as a morality tale, invented around the seventeenth century and retained (with the roles of hero and villain often reversed) until the twentieth, has been abandoned over the last generation. A vast number of special studies have appeared, revolutionizing long-held views in several key areas. These have been followed by some masterly books that are not general histories but present general arguments: riveting for those who know the basic material already and have been reared on the orthodoxies that they question. Where straightforward modern narratives exist, however, they tend to cover short periods, an inevitable response to the influx of so much new material, or to provide a schematic political-constitutional survey, invariably owing a large, and sometimes unacknowledged, debt to the pioneering work of J. C Beckett. This book does not compete with either genre. It is not an exhaustive catalogue of events or record of administrations; these sequences are more easily accessible in volumes specifically devoted to such things. Nor, however, is it a series of thematic reflections, though these occur. The intention is to provide a narrative with an interpretive level, stressing themes as much as events, and concentrating on areas that have come under recent re-evaluation - often with the effect of liberating them from the Anglocentric obsession that once led the study of Irish political and economic history so far astray. Much of Irish history as usually conceived concerns what did not happen: the theme of the missed chance, usually the reconciliation with, or complete separation from, England. Allied to this approach are the events that historians used to feel ought not to have happened and have therefore - in a sense - denied. 'Placed between memory and hope, the race will never conquer what is desired, and it will never discover that it regrets, wrote one of the romantic observers who have laid so many false trails for interpreters of Irish history. This book is an attempt to clarify some of the realities behind such supposed desires and regrets over the period since 1600.