Looking through green-tinted spectacles
C. D. C. Armstrong
THE TRANSFORMATION OF IRELAND, 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter Profile Books, £30, pp. 884, ISBN 186197071 r £26 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 There is no shortage of recent works on 20th-century Ireland: Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600/972, Joe Lee's Ireland: 1912-85, and Alvin Jackson's Ireland 1798-1998 are all still easily available. Henry Patterson's magisterial Ireland Since 1939 was withdrawn after a threatened libel action and has not been republished even though the case was settled out of court. Foster's recent Wiles Lectures in Belfast on Ireland since 1972 will, when they are published, provide a valuable continuation of his earlier account (though it is to be hoped that Professor Foster will restrain his tendency to sound like an Irish Times editorial). Finally, Paul Bcw's history of 19thand 20th-century Ireland is nearing completion.
Diarmaid Ferriter's monumental The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000 therefore enters a crowded marketplace. So it is hardly surprising that the publishers make bold claims for its originality and importance. The dust-jacket carries puffs from not only Marianne Elliott (the distinguished historian of 18th-century Ireland) but also the columnist Fintan O'Toole and the novelist Calm Te"■ibin (the 'Hinge and Bracket' of modern Irish liberalism). Mr TOibin (a sometime co-author with Dr Ferriter) goes so far as to declare this 'a landmark book'.
But is it — in anything other than its size —a landmark book? Dr Ferriter is by background a social historian, in contrast to his predecessors, who are political or economic historians. The Transform-ation of Ireland is thus at its most original in its treatment of social life. The reader will learn from it much about women's history, feminism, emigration, demography, poteen distilling, sport, child abuse and so on. Dr Ferriter manages to be interesting, too, on the much studied subject of Irish censorship, and not only on the notorious cases of Joyce's Ulysses and McGahern's The Dark. We are told that The Importance of Being Earnest was banned at University College Dublin as late as the 1930s (though Ferriter does not mention that Wilde's old school, Portora Royal, was happy to stage the play a decade before); and that Halliday Sutherland, the English Catholic author, found his Laws of Life suppressed because it mentioned the rhythm method. The Catholic Church receives more extensive coverage than in other histories of modern Ireland, although the (Anglican) Church of Ireland and the main Protestant churches receive scant attention or none.
If Dr Ferriter had confined himself to his specialism, then it would be possible to give this book a qualified welcome. Alas, his treatment of political history, and in particular of Ulster, is so deficient as to make this impossible.
In many respects, The Transformation of Ireland is simply slipshod. Typographical errors abound, and the factual mistakes are still more worrying. Sir Edward Carson did not retire in 1921, he became a law lord. Not did he live in Sussex. And he was buried in 1935, not 1937. Ronald McNeill wrote Ulster's Stand for Union, not Ulster's Stand for Freedom. J. R. Fisher was not Sir James Craig's representative on the Boundary Commission, because Craig nominated no one to that body. And Craig never spoke of 'a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people'. Dawson Bates was Home Affairs Minister in Northern Ireland, not Home Secretary. Bernadette Devlin was not the youngest ever Westminster MP. Mo Mowlam ceased to be Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 1999, not 2000. Seamus Mallon, not Brid Rogers, led the SDLP talks team before the Good Friday Agreement. Cabal Daly was not Archbishop of Armagh in 1983. It is not true that there is no biography of James Molyneaux.
Errors of interpretation or dubious arguments arc no less common. Home Rule meant devolution, not 'a limited form of independence'. To call Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson (a former Chief of the Imperial General Staff) a 'loyalist army officer' is rather like calling John Paul II a traditionalist clergyman. Carson is accused of indulging in 'emotional sectarian rhetoric'. He may have been emotional — Lord Birkenhead said his speech on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 'would have been immature on the lips of a hysterical school-girl' — but he was notably unsectarian.
Dr Ferriter also displays a tendency to caricature in his treatment of anything to do with British politics. Difficulties between the United Kingdom and Ireland in the 1930s arc blamed on 'myopic British politicians'; Eamon de Valera, it seems, had nothing to do with it. De Valera's colleague Sean MacEntee is pictured in the Shelbourne Hotel 'sipping dry sherry, looking like a Tory straight out of the House of Commons' — ah yes, those dastardly Tories and their secret weapon, dry sherry. Churchill's speech attacking Irish neutrality in the second world war is 'infamous'; but Dr Ferriter's thesaurus apparently suggested nothing comparable for de Valera's visit to the German Legation in Dublin to offer condolences on Hitler's death. Sir James Craig is 'parochial', which some might think a strange word for a veteran of the Boer and Great Wars, sometime junior minister at the Admiralty and friend of Churchill. The somewhat obscure Frederick May is lauded as 'the most important Irish composer before Sean O'Riada in the 1960s'. Dr Ferriter, we must conclude, does not know of Stanford or Field. His penchant for hyperbole does not desert him when it comes to an Irish Times cartoon of the last decade: 'one of the most important images of the 20th century'. One would never have guessed.
It is in its treatment of Northern Ireland that the book is at its worst. Ulster gets short shrift throughout, and the account of some aspects of the history of the Troubles is skimpy in the extreme. Two pages are given to Irish-Nigerian relations, but barely two sentences suffice for James Chichester-Clark, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971, even though his premiership was of crucial importance. The Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974 figures as nothing more than an explosion of atavistic loyalism'; the failure of Harold Wilson's administration to give adequate support to the powersharing Executive which the strikers opposed, or to seek to end the strike by negotiation, is simply ignored.
Worst of all, Dr Ferriter can be a little soft on Republicanism. The IRA, we are told, failed 'to give adequate warning' before the La Mon Hotel bombing of 1978. In fact, no warning was given at all and 12 Protestants died. The IRA hungerstriker Bobby Sands was 'martyred': rather, he died of his own will. It was somewhat unwise of Dr Ferriter, in advance of the publication of the findings of the Saville Tribunal, to assert that on Bloody Sunday the British Army tried 'to entice the IRA into battle'. Given that evidence presented at the Tribunal shows that many soldiers believed that they had been fired on, it might be no less fair to say that the IRA tried to draw the Paratroop Regiment into a fight. Nor, finally, can Dr Ferriter resist a touch of conspiracy theory. The 'loyalist' bombings of Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, he states, demonstrated such a degree of expertise as to 'suggest collusion with others' (by which he means M15). In fact, the 'loyalists' had by 1974 already shown their murderous capacity for bombing in both Dublin and Belfast.
There are other problems with this book. Omissions from the bibliography are too many to note. The prose is flat and undistinguished except for the occasional purple passage. The Transformation of Ireland is an unstructured book; some of the ingredients may be rich, but the pudding lacks a theme. This is not a landmark book but another damned, thick, square one. Readers may return to Foster, Lee and Jackson, pray for the reappearance of Patterson or wait for Bew.
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