The revision and sanitation of 1798
By Eoghan Mac Cormaic
WHO Fears to Speak of Ninety Eight? It was with that
challenge, years after the `98 Rising, that John Kells
Ingram began the task of restoring some sanity to the
history of Irish Republicanism.
When the famous ballad was written, a great blanket of
revisionism had already settled on the country. All of
Ireland was still under the yoke of English rule, the
chain had yet to be broken.
The offspring of some of those who had struck out for a
Republic in the final years of the 18th century and in
the opening decade of the 19th had by then become the
opposite of what their fathers and mothers had fought
and died for, and promoted Orange divisionism rather
than egalité, fraternité and liberté.
Political amnesia wiped out the activity of the last
generation. Others, nationalist, had adopted a program
which was church led, curtailing and postponing for
generations any attempt at uniting Catholic Protestant
and Dissenter. Tone's ideal, `98 and all that it stood
for, was almost taboo.
Once published, the ballad allowed for a celebration
and a reawakening of the `98 memory, and historians of
balladeering note that a sizeable share of the `98
ballads we sing (or don't sing) today were in fact
written long, long after the event.
While certainly some of them are ripe sources of
information for students of the period, containing the
emotion and the incidental detail the passing of time
has blurred, other songs are revisionist. The almost
solitary figure of Father Murphy, responding to the
burning of his church by joining the United Irish
forces and being excommunicated by his bishops for
doing so, is airbrushed into a glorious participation
by the priest as representative of the sentiments of
the whole church.
Times change, but the work of revisionism continues. I
suppose it goes with the job. A revisionist is merely a
propagandist with a degree in history. What is worrying
me now, however, is not so much `Who Fears to Speak of
Ninety Eight' as `I Fear Who Speaks of Ninety Eight.'
The `98 industry is already in full swing. Pageants,
programmes, CDs, re-prints and new editions. By the end
of this year `98 will have made an impact of one sort
or another on every one of us, but the danger lies
therein. An impact of one sort or another allows for
quite a range of dubious impacts.
A hundred years ago the job was to get people speaking
about the Revolution, now the job is to get them to
speak the truth about the Revolution. The risk of
sanitising the whole process, of blunting what radical
edges the leaders were proud to expose, of minimising
their tactics and maximising their dreams, of
canonising their leaders and marginalising their
methods ... this is the risk of too much `98.
Government money is available for projects to celebrate
the Year of Liberty, but a lot of that money will be
spent on re-thatching the roof and burying the pike
under a lot more straw. Events organised have to be
safe. Don't mention the war. Prepare for the 1798
coffee morning.
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