Brendan Clifford

Colum Kenny, who gave the Irish Times line on events relating to the Decade Of Anniversaries, has now become a Professor at Dublin City University, and in that capacity he is setting the scene for the great achievement made possible by the Treaty:  the unification of Ireland by the Boundary Commission.

Of course the Boundary Commission did not actually whittle away Northern Ireland, but that was because of De Valera—and something that was prevented from becoming a fact by De Valera can be presented as a virtual fact, a moral fact:

“De Valera is at least partly to blame for the deaths of Griffith and Michael Collins in 1922, for the complete failure of the boundary commission that the latter pair were convinced would have at least seen Tyrone and Fermanagh join the Free State, and for widespread economic damage…  Can we still not recognise such culpability without fear of being accused of perpetuating or taking sides in Civil War politics?”  (Letter, Irish Times, DATE).

Professor Kenny puts the Treatyite case on the Civil War, but does not want it to be understood as being the Treatyite case!  He wants his statements of what was the case to be believed as facts which are beyond question, either on logical or empirical grounds.  In other words he is a dogmatist!

I have no experience of education either as educator or educated, but as an outside observer it seemed to me that education is training for some purpose, and that it begins as simple dogmatism, which gradually becomes argumentative, and may occasionally in the end enable the subject to shrug off the dogmatic wrappings.  But I know of no instance of the final stage happening in Irish academia, with regard to history.  

The histories from which one gets a sense of the reality of things do not come from academia.  The very idea—that history should try to represent the situation as it was—formulated by Von Ranke—has been rejected by one top academic after another over the past twenty or thirty years.  And all the worthwhile histories have been written by others.

Professor’s Kenny’s letter is a reply to an article by Professor Ferriter who supplied the Irish Times with an“even-handed” article about De Valera.  Ferriter at least conceded that no original research that might disturb established beliefs is done by Irish Universities.  

Professor Kenny is a guardian of the Treatyite orthodoxy, set out by Piaras Beaslai in his idolatrous life of Collins, published in the mid-1920s.  The established view is Beaslai’s view.  The Treatyites, after winning the war against the IRA, had complete “law and order” supremacy in state-making—including the Ideological State Apparatus (to use a phrase coined by Hardial Baines many decades ago), the Universities—and they held onto that supremacy in the Universities after loosing political power ten years later.  

But Beaslai’s Treatyite classic—a mammoth two-volume work that is worth reading—could never be republished because its central theme was that De Valera had destroyed himself politically by rejecting the ‘Treaty’, and would never be heard of again!  A reprint of that in the late 1930s would have been laughable and, as far as I know, the project was abandoned.

Here is Professor Kenny’s dogmatic complaint:

“Writers on Irish history feel an obligation to be ‘responsible’, to enfold within the all-encompassing story of the so-called ‘Irish Revolution’ those who inflicted a pointless and made Civil War on the state and crippled it at birth.

“Our inability to call a spade a spade was honed by Dev himself, facilitated by his friend Frank Pakenham who wrote two influential if poorly-sourced volumes…

“Again in Ferriter’s article we find Pakenham’s influence, as he is cited quoting de Valera that ‘it was the signing of the Articles of Agreement… without reference to the Cabinet that alone threw everything out of joint.’

“To believe this requires one ignoring the fact that three days before that signing all five plenipotentiaries subjected themselves to a gruelling overland and oversea race to Dublin for a cabinet meeting to discuss the draft agreement, a meeting demanded by Arthur Griffith to the irritation of De Valera;  that the agreement was signed by all five and then only conditionally on cabinet and Dail approval—and signed because the British four times refused Griffiths’ request for an adjournment and threatened immediate and outright war unless they signed.

“With de Valera’s bizarre refusal to go with them to London to confront Lloyd George, what else could they have done?”

Mention of “a cabinet and Dail” brings in “the all-encompassing story of the so-called ‘Irish Revolution’ and its“pointless and mad Civil War on the new state”.

This “new state” was presumably not the old state?  The “cabinet and Dail” were not the Cabinet and Dail of the state which commissioned the delegates to go to London and try to establish Treaty relations with the British.

What they brought back was an Agreement they had made with the British Government to establish a new state in place of the State that had appointed them.  They did this because the British threatened war if they did not do it.  “What else could they have done?”

They were under instructions from their Government not to do what they did—not to sign anything with the British without its approval.

They came back with an unapproved agreement with the British to establish a Crown Government in place of Republican Government.

If the Dail and Government that authorised and commissioned the negotiations had legitimate state power, then what they did was at least enact a coup d’etat against the Government that appointed them.  By signing the British document, they pledged loyalty to the British Government under threat of war.  One of them did so explicitly because of the threat of war, without pretending otherwise, as the others began to do after signing.

The sense one makes of all of this depends on what one considers the Dail and its Cabinet to have been.  The story-writer, Frank O’Connor, who played some part in the Civil War as a Republican, became a great admirer of Collins as a realist.  In his book on Collins in the late 1930s he treats everything done by Sinn Fein after winning the 1918 Election as nonsensical make-believe.  That is the only way in which Collins can be regarded as having done something admirable when he made an Agreement with Britain to set up a Crown Government under the 1920 Act—which the Dail had rejected.

When the Agreement went to the Dail, Collins proposed that the matter should be put in the hands of aCommittee of Public Safety—meaning in effect that the Dail should be set aside while strong men made a settlement on some other grounds.

But the Dail refused to be set aside.  It had become accustomed to see itself as a sovereign Constitutional body, and Collins had not until that moment hinted that it was living in illusion.

Collins and Griffith had not questioned the legitimacy of the Dail and its Government until they signed an Agreement with Britain to replace it with Crown Government. 

They had agreed at the meeting of the Second Dail in August that the Dail was sovereign, that its Ministry was Republican, that the President of the Dail was head of the Government, with the rights usually held by the head of a Government, and that he would have wide latitude in deciding whether a proposed relationship was compatible with the Declaration of Independence.  And, by electing De Valera on these terms, the Dail committed itself to be in earnest about the independence it had declared, even if the British returned to war against it.

All of that was dismissed as a kind of infantile stubborness by Collins/Griffiths supporters in the Treaty Debate.

But a War had been fought in the name of what was now being dismissed as a kind of delusion.  And the question was asked:  Were we a murder gang after all?  No answer was given.

And, because Professor Kenny does not say what public authority there was in Irish life between the 1918 Election and the Agreement made by Griffith and Collins with the British to establish Crown Government, what he tries to say about it all is just a morass of notions.