Emily Hahn - Fractured Emerald: Ireland

Ireland, one occasionally feels, has suffered as much from her historians as from her oppressors. In the Irish schools, the nations history is taught as if it were a medieval morality play; Irish newsstands are cluttered with poorly written paperbacks by old patriots, each of whom explains in detail how he wrested Irelands freedom from Englands grasp; and even gifted amateurs (civil servants and barristers who should know better) write as if Irelands national experience has been the result of one long anti-Hibernian conspiracy.

Fortunately, since the Second World War, a professional counter-point to the amateur intermeddling in Irish historiography has developed. The professional historians have worked quietly and patiently to uncover what really happened in the Irish past. Sometimes their results have been acutely embarrassing to blindered nationalists and, often, cherished myths have been exploded. But just as often the professional workers in Irish history have led us to understand the complexity and richness of Irish life which had been hidden previously beneath the cloud of sentimentality.

I am especially happy to introduce Miss Hahns book because it is based on her reading of the professional historians and, more important, on her personal discussion with many of the same historians. Her book is Irish history for the general reader, but not for the reader who wants to rehear the romantic nonsense he heard from his IRA grandfather. It is an informed, lively, and highly readable book that will be enjoyed by anyone with even the slightest interest in Irish history.

Were I to single out the section that I find most fascinating, it is the authors discussion of medieval Ireland. The Middle Ages in Irish history are incredibly confused. Hibernicized Englishmen, Anglicized Irishmen, and Dublin Castle officials swirled about in a political-social game that appears to have had no rules and no winners; somehow everyone lost. Miss Hahn has delineated the patterns beneath the confusion without simplifying to the point of distortion.

Most readers will, I imagine, be interested in the material on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of its proximity to our own times and because of the interest in the development of modern Irish nationalism. Herein is food for thought about the nature of nationalism in general, for the Irish nationalist revolution was the first of the wars of national liberation that have become so prevalent in our times. Ireland seems almost to have been the template for the now familiar revolutionary pattern: national revolution against an external oppressor, followed by civil war, culminating in a long period of domestic repression. Inevitably, I am reminded of the comment of a former student who, after sitting through a full year of lectures on Irish history, commented, bewildered, after the last class: Sirall that history for this?!

Still, and all, Irelands story is a good story and this version is well worth reading.

Donald H. Akenson

Associate Professor of History

Queens University

Kingston, Ontario

Canada