Jack Lane

Official Statement

The Irish Government issued the following Press Release on 14th November

“Tánaiste announces endowment of Chair of Irish History at University of Cambridge.

“Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Simon Harris TD [Fine Gael], on behalf of the Government of Ireland, today announced the establishment of a permanent Chair of Irish History at Cambridge University through a €4.3 million (£3.6 GBP) endowment.

“The Tánaiste said: 

“Cambridge has a distinguished tradition of research and teaching in Irish History. This work has played an important part in deepening understanding of the complex shared political, religious, social and economic histories of Ireland and Britain.

“This new initiative will ensure that Irish history continues to be studied in one of the world’s leading universities, and that new research will help us better understand our shared history. It will be a permanent bridge between our two countries, connecting people and illuminating the unique relationships across these islands, north and south, east and west.

“We have a shared responsibility to understand each other better, understand our past more clearly, and work together to build a better future. At times over the past decade, it has felt that such understanding has been missing from public debate. The Childers Chair will be an important and enduring contribution to that work.”

“The Professorship will be known as the Childers Chair in honour of Robert Erskine Childers and Erskine Hamilton Childers, both Cambridge alumni: and the latter the fourth President of Ireland.

“The University will have sole responsibility for appointing and managing the position.  An international recruitment process is ongoing, with the role expected to be filled in October 2026.

“Professor Lucy Delap, Head of the Faculty of History at Cambridge, welcomed the announcement: 

“The Faculty of History has long been home to innovative research and teaching on Ireland, but we have never had the chance to appoint to a permanent post in the field. The foundation of the Childers Professorship will galvanize our work in this area and enable Cambridge to emerge as a world-leading centre for the study of Irish History.”

“Professor Richard Bourke, Professor of the History of Political Thought and Fellow of King’s College, said: 

“This generous donation will have a transformative impact on the study of Irish history at the University of Cambridge and stimulate research both across the United Kingdom and globally, deepening academic contacts at all levels throughout these islands…”

“The announcement was made today during a conference organised by Churchill College and the Churchill Archives Centre on the 40th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed on 15 November 1985 by Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Agreement laid the foundations for British Irish partnership on Northern Ireland, a key foundation for the peace process and a crucial step in the development of British Irish relations more broadly.”

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 

Press Office

13 November 2025

Some Comments!

It is fortunate that we have an idea of what Cambridge thinks of Irish history from their multi-volume History Of Ireland published a few years ago.  A review of it was published in the Irish Political Review of June and July 2018 on which the following is largely based.

Thomas Bartlett is the General Editor of this history and, writing in the Irish Times in connection with the launch of Volume 4, he said:  

“I agreed to be general editor of this series because I had become concerned that the explosion in publications in Irish history over the past 40 years had rendered the subject all but inaccessible both to the student and to the interested reader.  Hence a new synthesis, drawing on the most recent scholarship, was badly needed, one that would pull together the most significant writings on Irish history and provide a stimulus to further research…”  (5.5.2018).

This four-volume Cambridge History begins in 600 AD!

 It is therefore silent on the great synthesis in Irish History—that between Gaelic Ireland and Christianity.  That synthesis is fascinating and constitutes the very DNA of Ireland and the Irish, and will do so, for some time to come.  

The Cambridge starting point means that all the founding fathers and mothers of Christian Ireland do not appear!  How and why this synthesis happened is an unanswered question.  

For example, it is quite amazing that the only recorded spilling of blood in this development was at the High King’s baptism, when St. Patrick accidentally stuck his crozier into the King’s foot:  the High King didn’t complain as he thought it was part of the ceremony.  No need for conversions here like those of the ‘muscular Christians’ such as Charlemagne!

And the Irish were not softened up and adjusted to Roman ways by Roman Legions.  They made a transition of their own free will.  

Was there a sort of mutual conversion between the two?  Was it collaboration as much as a conversion?  And then Christian Ireland went on a mission for centuries that shaped Europe as we know it;  and that much underestimated Kerryman, St. Brendan, attempted to do the same in the New World. 

Where did all that zeal come from?  One thing is certain;  do not look for answers in Cambridge (or Oxford)—as this publication makes clear.

Of course there are many more issues in recent academic history that beg for synthesising, if it were possible. 

Are there one or two nations in Ireland? Cambridge is silent. 

Can the revisionism of recent decades be synthesised with the traditional views of Irish History?  Again silence from Cambridge!

Another contributor to and Editor of this Cambridge ‘history’, Jane Ohlmeyer, explains the approach to history taken as follows:

“Until the 1930s Irish history writing was vigorously partisan, and was used to win an argument or to prove a case.  The Norman invasion was either a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’, for example;  the same held true for the plantations of the early modern period. There was little interest in carefully evaluating evidence or searching for appropriate sources. As a result, nuance, complexity and measured judgments were rigorously avoided…” (Irish Times, 5.5.2108).

This seems an effort at a ‘synthesis‘, in that an invasion or a plantation should be treated as a sort of symbiosis:  easily done if the ‘appropriate sources’ are used! 

Human experience of such things becomes an abstraction.  A current example could be the colonisation and plantations by Zionists in Palestine—which is a replica of a typical Plantation in Irish history.  It seems that this is neither good nor bad!—it depends on your sources, nuances, the complexity etc. 

Dealing with the period after the Irish Genocide/Holocaust of the mid 19th century, euphemistically called the “famine”, we are told that: 

“Though the nationalist frame of reference has long since been abandoned by academic historians, its lingering influence is reflected in the modest scholarly interest in Irish politics after the Famine—with the telling exception of Fenianism which continues to command significant attention and to generate sometimes heated debate” (p714). 

The argument is that it was ‘sectional interests’ that dominated from then on, and “the Home Rule party provided a vehicle to pursue sectional interests by nationalist means” (p715).  But surely it would be too absurd to ever suggest that the Fenians were sectional!  They were nothing if not national !

It is no doubt a perfect summing up of the approach taken by modern academic history that “the nationalist frame of reference has long since been abandoned”.  And that explains in a nutshell why that ‘history’ has become so irrelevant! 

What terms of reference have replaced the national outlook in academia?  Academia is probably under the illusion that history can be written ‘objectively’, without a standpoint;  and, indeed that history itself has none either!!  It’s just a collection of events. 

Irish politics and society was at its lowest ebb after the Genocide/Holocaust of 1845-52 and, despite the best efforts of Young Ireland, it was indeed like “the corpse on the dissecting table”, as graphically described by Gavan Duffy—who was to leave the country in despair. 

But not long afterwards the corpse became alive again—as reflected in Fenianism and Home Rule.  These were very different movements, but they cannot be explained or understood except within a nationalist frame of reference.  They can by no stretch of the imagination be described as ‘exceptional’ or ‘sectional’. 

But more interesting and more to the point than either, insofar as a ‘nationalist frame of reference’ is concerned, was the creation of the Home Rule movement by Isaac Butt.  Butt was the leading and staunchest Irish Unionist before the Irish holocaust, but the conduct of the Government during that catastrophic event convinced him that there was no Union in reality, and that Ireland was a separate nation—and treated as such.  To him this had been proved beyond all doubt.  He came to accept a “nationalist frame of reference” because it became blindingly obvious to him that that was the reality of things. 

Our academics cannot explain his behaviour with their dismissal of “nationalist terms of reference”:  and neither can they explain all that followed—leading to national independence. 

How in the world can all that be explained while abandoning a nationalist frame of reference—as that was the essence of all that subsequently happened?

So what use is their academic ‘History’ ?  It is these academics who are reduced to ‘sectional interests’, as they cannot see the wood for the trees from their vantage point.  Their ‘history’ becomes a rag-bag of events!

If they avert their eyes to that reality when they form a view of Irish and world history since that very period, would they also dispense with the most blindingly obvious fact that nationalist frames of reference are the central fact—and the most consistent fact—of that history:  and remains so with increasing force with every passing day?  But there are none as blind as those who will not see” (Irish Political Review, July 2018).

Some Further Comments

So now we have been presented with a Government of a  supposedly independent nation-state that is giving away the writing of its own history and promoting an institution that glories in denying that Irish history has a “nationalist frame of reference”!  A Government that is giving over the writing of its own history to an institution of its Imperial coloniser—which views the history of its former colony as something other than the story of the birth of a nation!  

Such history, coming from a foremost intellectual institution of the coloniser, therefore lacks context of any sort :  it is something like a blank slate:  to be filled out as occasion requires. 

No self respecting Government would contemplate such an attitude to the writing of its own history and its very raison d’être.  Franz Fanon was spot on when he wrote:

Jack Lane

British Liberalism And Ireland:

“The Liberal solution for Ireland has always been to give her everything except what she asks for.  She asks for her own soul;  they offer her a brand-new sanitary water-supply and a seat on an international commission.

– G.K Chesterton

(Irish Impressions, 1919, Chapter 3)