Let us begin in an attic rummaging through stories of Irish history that have been passed down through generations.Footnote 1 It is a symbolic repository of histories stored out of sight, protected, almost forgotten but not discarded. It lies outside the official archives of states and beyond the reach of the over-arching narratives of nations. In this repository are scrapbooks holding the looks, smiles and gestures of belonging, alongside stacks of books in which the rules are written between the lines, there to be seen or missed, understood or overlooked. It is where those of faint voice go to speak, bodies sigh in pain and where those who leave only a light trace have left their mark. Nothing has been put into a recognisable order. Sorrow, longing, joy and love linger under a layer of dust. The repository contains the literal and metaphorical clutter of the past. The sediments of being. Histories. This article considers the implications for writing twentieth-century Irish history when the story begins in this attic archive.
Ireland’s historical coordinates are shifting, generating new histories. Numerous reports investigating the incarceration, stigmatisation and abuse of women and children, debates on empire (and on who should be commemorated during the decade of centenaries), combined with rapidly changing contemporary realities, from Brexit to Covid, have prompted a re-examination of national narratives and of the assumptions and anxieties that have kept them in place.Footnote 2 Historical narratives can preserve the ideas of nation and community they often centre, but they can also exclude and silence disruptive stories. Reflecting on her family history, the sociologist and writer Claire Mitchell wrote of her great-great-grandmother, ‘an ordinary Protestant’ and weaver who grew up on the Shankill in Belfast: ‘Hers was a state of being that moves alongside politics — created from it, and unable to find agency within it.’Footnote 3 This article is a recognition that twentieth-century Irish history, as it has sometimes been written, did not accord with or reflect many people’s experiences of the past on this island. Increasingly, however, stories that disturb rather than coalesce with grand narratives are the focus of historical study. In reflecting on past characteristics and ongoing shifts within the discipline, this article underscores the significance of these underrepresented experiences for historical understanding, recognising the value of diverse evidence and arguing that power is key to interpretation. This is not a proposal to turn away from writing political histories of Ireland but instead an appreciation that what is political, and how it constitutes the intimate nature of being and belonging in Irish history, is being imagined in new and revealing ways.Footnote 4
The article begins by addressing the dynamics behind the grand narrative that have reflected and bolstered political fraternities and religious communities. Inherent in this narrative is the political category ‘we’, that Rob Boddice and Mark Smith argue is founded on ‘the most fundamental assumption in historiography’ of a ‘universal human’ that obscures difference.Footnote 5 In order to probe this category of ‘we’ and make visible differentiation, we propose thinking in terms of encounters and what we are calling ‘imagined encounters’, interactions that reveal the relational nature of power and its impact on experience. We then analyse respectability, a concept with both imagined attributes and tangible impact, as an example of how power functions. Finally, to return to the metaphorical attic, we discuss the impact of the continuing expansion of what is understood by ‘the archive’ and the questioning of a hierarchy of source material. The archive, in this view, is neither static nor stable, allowing the historian to embrace the ‘unreliable’ witness, listen for and hear silences, touch the material and acknowledge imagination as a force constantly at play in the encounters that shape history and history writing. While the focus of the article is twentieth-century and contemporary Irish history, it is informed by developments in adjacent disciplines and by innovative and creative work undertaken on earlier periods. However, in looking back at the evolution of the discipline and in capturing more recent developments in the scholarship, our hope is that this article will serve as a touchstone for historians of twentieth-century Ireland.
I
Irish historiography has reached a significant juncture, inside and outside the academy. Funding for historical research in the early twenty-first century and the growth in the number of those working on Irish history have seen expanding ranks of historians (although many experience precarious employment)Footnote )6 explore new subject areas, employ inter-disciplinary methodologies and challenge received ideas.Footnote 7 Inherent in this work, which is often characterised as ‘post revisionist’, is a greater focus on conceptual issues and, with the transnational turn, a growing resistance to the idea of an Irish Sonderweg (the idea of a nation having a unique historical path).Footnote 8 A willingness to write within a space of ambiguity and incongruity has opened up new areas of study and disrupted the previously commanding tone of the discipline. Reflecting upon this, Roy Foster noted that the ‘Olympian, assured, decisive tone of [F.S.L.] Lyons’s path-breaking work [Ireland Since the Famine] no longer comes easily; themes of fracture, paradox, change and unreliable memory have come into focus, along with the sense of an unforeseeable future’.Footnote 9 He previously recognised how ‘the narrative drive has ruthlessly eroded awkward elisions’, identifying that there ‘are other models, tales within tales, which might allow more room for alternative truths and uncomfortable speculations.’Footnote 10
The search for a stable historical narrative which provides a linear course was not unique to the historiography of Ireland. Indeed, most national histories attempt to find lines of continuity amid changing territorial, demographic and constitutional arrangements.Footnote 11 The writing of history as a ‘national history’ was not a given, however; it was a choice, a response, to a communal need that emerged most strongly in the nineteenth century, to provide context, meaning and legitimacy to political imperatives. In Ireland’s case, that imperative was the creation of an Irish nation within an imperial framework.Footnote 12 The imagined nation became the core of the master/grand narrative in academic history and in public discourse, with significant and tangible political consequences. The live nature of the constitutional question and the role of jurisprudence in determining the relationship between people, communities, nations and states has meant, as Richard Bourke observed, that ‘modern Irish historical writing has, understandably, largely been concerned with establishing authoritative narratives of the development of society and politics’.Footnote 13
During the twentieth century in Ireland, violence, political instability and economic uncertainty sharpened academic debates over the role of historians in society. Many historians writing in the early decades of the century worked under a strong imperative to produce history that countered communal division by using evidence-based research to debunk history as indistinguishable from popular memory. Theodore Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards, who founded Irish Historical Studies (I.H.S.) in 1938 and were credited as the architects of modern Irish history, argued that historians should be scientific in approach, not present-minded or partisan, liberated from servitude to myth, and bolstered by the archives of documents that formed the ‘real quarry’ of research.Footnote 14 In 1973, F. S. L. Lyons described everyone as ‘prisoners of our history, but also of our individual biographies’, noting that historians are ‘uneasily aware of skeletons in the cupboard of the unconscious, even if as yet they are often unable to identify them’.Footnote 15 For Lyons, the historian offset these dangers by subjecting the evidence ‘to the most searching scrutiny’; being aware, therefore, of personal limitations and biases was always central to the historian’s approach. Refraining from ‘idle speculation’ and subjecting passion ‘to reason’ would not make historians ‘angels of objectivity’, he argued, but would prevent them ‘from sinning too grossly against the light’.Footnote 16 This recognition of striving for objectivity in the face of natural limits was implicit in the discipline, as was an understanding of an accompanying methodology that involved an immersion in and critical analysis of enormous amounts of source material. With such a strong evidential base and in its appeal to the public, a legalistic approach to history that focused on ‘authority’, and eschewed an acknowledgement of the historian’s subjectivity, often prevailed. For that foundational generation of Irish historians, the idea of history as a social good was ever-present. As Moody explained: ‘if history at its best is not made available to the educated public as a whole, it fails in one of its essential social functions.’Footnote 17
The ‘revisionist’ approach represented a challenge to the myths of Irish history promoted by the independent Irish state through its rhetoric and education system, in a manner that bolstered the idea that the state was the culmination of the efforts of a singular Irish Catholic nation. In 1977, Moody responded to violence in the north of Ireland by denouncing the ‘predestinate nation’ revived by the Provisional I.R.A. ‘in its irredentist war to abolish partition’.Footnote 18 Certainly, the northern Troubles weighed heavily on the writing of Irish history in the last decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 19 A fear of disorder intensified the drive for authoritative historical narratives, and Moody and Edwards had sustained a belief in the conciliatory potential of historical research in the hope that it might be a means of dismantling prejudice.Footnote 20 However, arguably a fear of narrative and theoretical frameworks that might disrupt the status quo shaped the development of historiography into one that avoided risk and that emphasised the importance of constancy and balance over conflict and volatility in social as well as political history. The result was often the writing of centralising histories which were territorially bounded and subject to the gravitational pull of the state.
Central to understanding the shape of Irish history is the Irish border and its unsettling impact on the island’s politics.Footnote 21 A line of some 250 miles, the border is a fixed legal entity that is nevertheless physically porous and politically contested. Necessitating for many decades a landscape of checkpoints and ‘approved roads’, the technology of the Irish border was a performance of stability and authority in the midst of local contraventions and violent attacks. As with all borders, its impact was profound in part because it ‘spacialised’ or ‘territorialised’ difference, revealing and perpetuating societal fissures.Footnote 22 Initially understood by many as temporary or negotiable, the border, as it was agreed in 1925, could lead to the occlusion of imagined alternatives and shape the narrative arc in histories written of the preceding and following centuries. Underlying this occlusion was a fear that conflict in Northern Ireland would destabilise the Republic. Indeed, Ciaran Brady suggests that partition had become ‘fixed in Irish history writing’ by the early 1920s.Footnote 23 By the late twentieth century, Margaret O’Callaghan characterised debates surrounding the border as ‘the fossilised disinterred bones of a cartoon partition debate that has been frozen for decades’.Footnote 24 This petrified historical enquiry had implications far beyond the border itself. Not only did it lead to histories that legitimised the status quo, it missed what have been described as ‘the prosaic geographies of the state’: the ways in which states are made and remade through ‘routine and pervasive practices’.Footnote 25 The state — like the border — is not a fixed or abstract entity; it is in fact the product of multiple interactions, regulations and negotiations. Footnote 26 Nevertheless, the distinct history of two states, their establishment, performance and potential collapse, has shaped the nature of history writing. Violent instability in the north and fear of the same in the south contributed to the exclusion and marginalisation of stories that were potentially disruptive. Timothy McMahon summed up the impact of this on twentieth-century Irish historiography recently when he described it as ‘a field that was too long the creature of a statist approach’.Footnote 27
Irish history has of course been shaped by international trends and developments in the discipline beyond domestic concerns. Internationally, the ‘new social history’, as it emerged in the 1960s, was associated with attempts to include communities and people often left out of grand narratives, while in the 1990s the cultural turn allowed for an appreciation of subjectivity, and not just the representative example, and provided new ways of conceptualising power and analysing discourse. This resulted in a growing focus on class, race and gender as analytical lenses, while more recently a focus on space, memory, everyday life, emotions and senses has expanded the boundaries of what has been subject to historical analysis. In the Irish context, social and economic history flourished from the 1950s, and studies of land, population, emigration and the diaspora transformed understandings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brady highlights the work of a previous generation of female social and economic historians (Alice Stopford Green, Alice E. Murphy, Margaret Donovan O’Sullivan, Constantia Maxwell and Ada Kathleen Longfield), suggesting that their ‘determination to break out from the constraints of traditional political history and to explore the field of social and economic analysis might in part be seen as a declaration of independence from the dominant narratives deployed by male historians, Nationalist and Unionist alike’.Footnote 28 Through journals such as Irish Economic and Social History (est. 1974) and Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History (est. 1975), historians shed light on groups that had rarely been central in modern Irish history. Methodologically, however, a focus on archival evidence and synthesis was often retained, with analysis emphasising the importance of events and circumstances, rather than power and ideas.Footnote 29 Alvin Jackson has noted that for much of the twentieth century, Irish historical scholarship was not so much under-theorized as ‘increasingly characterized by a set of conservative theoretical models’. He suggests that, bolstered by the conservatism of post-war Irish society, the 1930s reformers and their successors became ‘detached from wider intellectual trends’ in a way that ran contrary to the reformers’ original intentions.Footnote 30
A broad reluctance to engage explicitly with power, ideology and political thought had a significant impact on mainstream historiographical debate, and in twentieth-century Irish history this led to the marginalisation of historical approaches that centred power in their analysis. Recent exceptions include Richard Bourke’s work on political thought and the Irish Revolution, Ciara Breathnach’s examination of the Dublin City Coroner’s Court, Ciaran O’Neill’s exploration of Union Ireland and Tomás Finn and Tony Varley’s edited collection on rural Ireland.Footnote 31 A focus on power was always key to those engaged in Marxist and postcolonial analyses and central to the development of Irish Studies, and also to women’s history. The last-mentioned was stimulated by the second wave women’s movement of the early 1970s and in Ireland sought to assert women’s place in what has been described as a ‘preordained national narrative’.Footnote 32 While the first edited collection to focus on women’s history did not appear until 1978, throughout the 1980s and 1990s the volume of work addressing women’s social, economic and sexual history grew apace, fostered by the Women’s History Association of Ireland, established in 1989.Footnote 33 However, in 1991 David Fitzpatrick pointed out that ‘Irish academic historians’ had been ‘culpably sluggish in rising to the conceptual provocation of gender’.Footnote 34 Over a decade later, Linda Connolly argued that, what she termed, ‘mainstream Irish historians’ continued to ‘presume that women’s history is designed to support their narrative rather than challenge it’; she also critiqued Irish postcolonial studies for having been overly focussed on high political history. Footnote 35 This revealed a frustration that the central conceptual insight of women’s history — that gender was a key means of signifying powerFootnote 36 — had been slow to percolate the general histories of modern Ireland.Footnote 37 Nonetheless, women’s and feminist history’s recognition that ‘the personal was political’ represented a paradigm shift and a slow process of erosion of the boundaries that demarcated political, socio-economic and cultural histories into distinct categories. This blurring ultimately expanded definitions of what was considered political history. A recent example of this can be seen in debates on empire by historians of Ireland, some having traditionally eschewed the post-colonial lens. In a roundtable entitled ‘Decolonising Irish History?’, McMahon makes the point that the debate on Ireland’s relationship with imperialism ‘sits at a nexus connecting post-revisionist scholarship and transnational histories’. This agenda, he argues, seeks to ‘understand Irish history as lived within multiple webs of relationships — that incorporates without focusing solely on the specific politics of Anglo-Irish tensions’. He calls for a history that seeks to understand ‘lived experiences’, using ‘social history, gender history and critical race theory’.Footnote 38
A focus on experience disturbs grand narratives that centre political and religious communities. In these communities the imagined ‘we’, a powerful device, can solidify social bonds but also exclude individuals, conceal internal differences or disguise commonalities across groups.Footnote 39 In turn, it can serve to isolate ‘deviants’, marginalise groups and/or create collectives of ‘ordinary people’.Footnote 40 The sense of belonging the ‘we’ affords, obscures its relationship to power and its contingency on compliance, collaboration and silence, which simultaneously embed and deny differentiation and hierarchy.Footnote 41 Despite its broad extension there were many who, by virtue of their sexuality, colour, religion, poverty or geography, could not behave or perform in ways that would allow membership. At the same time the ‘we’ also obscures the different levels of sacrifice made by individuals to remain or become a part of this apparently undifferentiated group. A centring of human experience in everyday life provides a way of understanding structures and ideologies often obscured by political and religious identities. John Brewer argues that the trends in critical theory and historical investigation since the 1960s, particularly evident in microhistory and the history of everyday life, are united by ‘a commitment to a humanist agenda which places human agency and historical meaning in the realm of day-to-day transactions and which sees social reality as grounded in the quotidian’. Footnote 42 As in Mitchell’s work on her great-great-grandmother, examining experiences of the everyday can reveal facets of the past that lie beneath or alongside community identity.Footnote 43
II
Individual lives are shaped by a nexus of political thought and political action, and, as Simon Gunn notes, ‘power and power relations are located in the fabric of everyday life and are not confined to “politics” in the narrow understanding of the term’.Footnote 44 Experience of the everyday, as with all areas of historical enquiry, can only ever be imperfectly and partially known. Capturing the experience, the ‘lived, meaningful reality of historical actors’,Footnote 45 is to search for something elusive that when glimpsed provides a deeply rich vein of information about the individual and the society in which they lived. Boddice and Smith noted the expansive nature of this approach in that it requires a consideration of cognitive, emotional and sensory perceptions, and their relationship with meaning-making by individuals and by groups.Footnote 46 In this section, we suggest that a focus on encounters allows for analysis of human experience.Footnote 47 We then analyse the concept of respectability, probing its personal and structural ramifications (including institutions of confinement), in order to provide an example of how power operates. Respectability, much like a grand narrative, provides an ostensible order that belies ‘the ever-present danger of disorder’. Patrick Joyce describes it as ‘the name so often given to that fragile possibility of control’, noting ‘its price was often terrible.’Footnote 48
Everyday life is made up of a series of encounters, sometimes fleeting or subconscious, when people meet the world around them in a myriad of ways, through other people, ideas, laws and institutions. For example, Mark Peel has focused on encounters between people, in particular charity workers and welfare recipients, while Peter Mandler explored charity as a ‘site of encounter’. Paul Steege et al. have focused on movement and space, arguing that a sense of identity is formed as people move into different places, picking up ‘cues from the symbols they encounter’, combining this with the information they already have, shaping possibilities for action.Footnote 49 Through these encounters individuals respond and adapt, continually making and remaking a sense of identity. Alongside these social interactions are those that are imagined. These imagined encounters occur in our internal world, shaping behaviour, judgment and expectations of others. Social anthropologist, Sabine Bauer-Amin describes how ‘even encounters that have not (yet) happened can create an affective space filled with strong emotions such as fear or desire’; engagement with a group in the imagination ‘precedes and influences actual person-to-person encounters’.Footnote 50 Imagined and lived encounters are inherently dynamic and relational. What can be imagined is rooted in what is lived, as past experiences impact and shape our future interactions. This opens up a way of considering what shaped people’s action or inaction, their conformity and/or resistance.Footnote 51 It is in encounters with the world, its values, its political economy and its cultural representations that life happens, self is created and the likelihood of continuity and possibilities for change materialise. It is often in relation to others that the ideological scaffolding of everyday lives becomes visible.
One of the most compelling depictions of what can be conveyed and transacted in a lived encounter is contained in the opening pages of Carolyn Steedman’s autobiographical history, Landscape for a Good Woman. Footnote 52 Steedman recalls the words of a health visitor surveying the home she shared with her mother and new-born sister: ‘This house isn’t fit for a baby.’ In a curtainless room with bare floorboards, one woman passed judgement on the other. Steedman writes: ‘And I? I will do anything until the end of my days to stop anyone ever talking to me like that woman talked to my mother.’Footnote 53 Later, she remembers being in a bluebell wood with her father who was picking flowers. The forest keeper arrived and, angry and shouting, he grabbed the bluebells from her father’s hand and scattered them among the ferns. In her memory, Steedman’s father stood ‘quite vulnerable’, a diminished figure as they retreated down the path. ‘All the charity I possess lies in that moment,’ she writes. ‘Any account that presents its subjects as cold, or shivering or in any way unprotected recalls the precise structure of its feeling.’Footnote 54
These encounters shaped Steedman’s subsequent attitudes, behaviour and capacity for empathy, none of which can be understood without attending to the structure of how she felt. The searing mixture of shame, vulnerability and humiliation were imprinted on Steedman’s memory. It is also, however, in these encounters that the young Steedman witnesses what she describes as the fracture between social and domestic power: experiences that also frame her subsequent understanding of the world.Footnote 55 These recounted moments were formative not just because of how they felt to Steedman but also because they conveyed important information about the fluid nature of power, providing layers of experiences that were projected onto future real and anticipated encounters. As Boddice and Smith note, events are experienced through ‘a constructive process that includes the prior experience of the individual and the social relations … and the cultural conceptual web in which the individual is caught’.Footnote 56
Landscape for a good woman is an exploration of ‘lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don’t quite work’.Footnote 57 Steedman is interested in these histories in part because her mother’s story could not be understood within the traditional narrative of the lives of Lancashire mill workers and because of the impact on the family of her parents never getting married. She conveys the vulnerability inherent in living a life which does not conform to perceived standards of respectability, follow a narrative of ‘progress’ or indeed find alignment in a larger historical narrative. Respectability (status in relation to perceptions of moral, social, presentational and behavioural standards) offered a protection against this vulnerability, although Steedman demonstrates how claims to it were often precarious and regularly threatened.Footnote 58
Respectability also functions as an individual struggle for internal order and restraint.Footnote 59 Ostensibly eliding the importance of class differences, respectability offered a practical strategy for coping with life, one linked to expressions of human dignity and self-worth. In his study of late nineteenth-century York, Charles Walter Masters suggests it represented ‘a whole way of experiencing the world’.Footnote 60 Its all-encompassing nature and stress on orderliness made respectability a compelling aspiration, and sanctions for those who did not conform made its strictures extremely difficult to resist. As a result, respectability often masked the complex systems of power and economics it kept in place. Invisible too were the different levels of sacrifice necessary to adhere to certain codes of behaviour, and the different ways in which some groups were heavily monitored while others were afforded the benefit of the doubt.Footnote 61
Miles Taylor describes how the concept of ‘respectability’ became the main explanatory tool for some historians of the Victorian period, resulting in a focus on ‘decoding attitudes, values and prejudices’ with less emphasis on ‘political ideologies, the practices and policies of institutions’ and the agency of those affected. Footnote 62 Historians of twentieth-century Ireland are alive to the relevance of notions of respectability in shaping both urban and rural society. However, there have been few attempts to interrogate the concept with exceptions including Maura Cronin, Gavin Foster and the anthropologist Marilyn Silverman.Footnote 63 In view of the centrality of the rise of nationalism to the grand narrative of Irish history, George Mosse’s identification of the connections between respectability, nationalism and sexuality is instructive when considering encounters and lived experience. Mosse’s seminal work demonstrated the ways in which the modern nation provided an ideal that legitimised the imposition of behavioural norms, restraint and moderation.Footnote 64 The idealised nation acted as a force for control and integration in the face of rapid socioeconomic change and, Mosse argued, in this way political ideologies of the nineteenth century ‘absorbed and sanctioned middle-class manners and morals and played a crucial part in spreading respectability to all classes of the population. Nationalism helped respectability to meet all challenges to its dominance, enlarging its parameters when necessary while keeping its essence intact.’Footnote 65
A complex and often vague concept (for Mosse it was a bourgeois set of norms defining proper behaviour for men and women), respectability provided a way of rationalising corporate political identities and was deeply embedded in European and colonial societies.Footnote 66 Its use solidified social and economic hierarchies while simultaneously obscuring or normalising them. The multifarious relationships between respectability, religious faiths, political allegiance and economic realities were part of the intricate nexus which shaped lives across Ireland and influenced personal decisions and determined public sanctions.
By the nineteenth century, the compound systems of power and influence that underpinned colonial and religious networks enabled a new ‘modern’ consensus for governance rooted in a different way of seeing order.Footnote 67 Respectability was a key idea around which the construction of an Irish nation coalesced — emerging with the economic progress and political developments that produced a new middle class.Footnote 68 Indeed, the notion of respectability was rich soil for the making of Irish modern sexual culture rooted as it was in middle-class ideas of ownership, progress and control.Footnote 69 Consequently, respectability became an organising principle in modern Ireland, providing a basis for governance and behaviour, and rationalising the processes of ordering, protecting and confining the population.Footnote 70 Its power lay in the fact that it provided a way of belonging (and not being ostracised) but also that it promised an access route to social (and possibly economic) capital. In theory these rewards were open to anyone who behaved according to the hierarchical and moral dictates of groups representing authority and influence in society.
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of respectability was how it masked the violence used to hold it in place, rendering that normal and in service of an apparent greater good. In this way, implicit and even explicit violence were converted into reasonable corrections, actions used to protect the whole.Footnote 71 As respectability became a central benchmark for social performance, it provided a rationale to identify who belonged and who did not, and the rules were as opaque as they were cruel. A network of institutions, including Magdalene laundries, industrial schools and so-called Mother and Baby Homes were used to detain those considered to have deviated furthest from their ordained path and who therefore threatened social order, before and after partition in Ireland.Footnote 72 The permission this ordering gave for the embedding of violence at the heart of social structures had real and physical consequences for thousands of people.
Traditionally, discussions of violence in Irish history have focused on warfare and political resistance. Much less attention has been paid to the intimate and everyday violence embedded in the technologies and social architecture that underpinned the modernisation of Ireland or the way in which the state (in its various forms) had, with the help of the churches, systematically rationalised the violence of maintaining order. This brings us back to the ways in which states are made and remade through ‘routine and pervasive practices’.Footnote 73 When we shift the focus away from the state as an abstract concept towards something which is experienced through a series of interactions and relationships, we concentrate instead on multiple encounters, real and imagined, shaping individual lives. More visible then are the ways in which, what Joyce has termed, the ‘micro-technologies and micro-operations’ of power might create ‘zones of ostensible self-regulation, in individuals, families, “publics”, markets.’Footnote 74 That the ideal of respectability could not always be reconciled with people’s lived experiences was not a weakness in this system but a strength, because the stress caused by this disconnect fostered shame and silence. Footnote 75 This structural violence, the space between actual and potential violence, was often not visible, rarely tangible, but omnipresent, working to limit some people’s life opportunities, quality of life and actual life. As Johan Galtung observed, ‘[T]here may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.’Footnote 76
The behaviour of individuals and communities was not only delimited by external forces but self-regulated in anticipation of the consequences of leading an unsanctioned life. As Mary Evans has noted, it was ‘through the use of the powerful concept of “respectability” individuals could be persuaded to behave in ways more aligned to the interests of others rather than their own.’Footnote 77 Focusing on encounters enables us better to understand how this took place and see the operation of power as it existed in the fabric of everyday life, allowing us to catch sight of subjective experiences and asking new questions about how social, cultural and sexual selves were formed. Centring these encounters illuminates not just the experience of disadvantage but its design. It exposes the complex ways in which privilege is constructed, maintained and legitimised through a series of structures, institutions and ideologies. History as a discipline can be complicit, too, in writing within narrative confines and conventions that sustain existing power structures and, as Steedman’s work shows, barely accommodate the stories of those who do not quite fit, banishing them to the narrative borderlands of history.
III
As Ireland’s historical coordinates shift, so too have considerations of what constitutes legitimate source material. An unspoken hierarchy, and sometimes a narrow definition of what constitutes a source, led to many facets of the past simply not registering as ‘history’. In her collection of essays detailing her life experience as a Traveller woman, Rosaleen McDonagh writes ‘[Travellers] may not be formally recognised in Irish history, but we are here.’Footnote 78 Angeline Kearns Blain makes a similar point in her memoir about the history of those who lived as Ireland’s ‘poor’.Footnote 79 Jim Smith’s work on Magdalene asylums likewise suggests that these institutions existed in the public mind at ‘the level of a story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archives records and documentation)’.Footnote 80 The written archive was of course central to the operation of imperial/state power and then key to the development of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century; it was only in the twentieth century that scholars began to explicitly address its power ‘in presenting and distorting the past’.Footnote 81 The same logic applies to historians and the positionality and ethical considerations they bring to all sources. Subject to interpretation, sources are fodder for explanations. They are also a manifestation of ways of being and thinking, of a past world that bleeds logic into future worlds. Historical sources contain not just the iteration of ideas or reflections of mentalities and realities, they are also expressions of choices and a performance of intentions.Footnote 82 They have the potential to be transformed, reimagined and renegotiated in each encounter with the worlds they pass through. This includes encounters with historians.
The allure of narrative structures can sometimes lead to the stripping of sources for parts and to the mining of them for ‘content’, which minimises their inherent instability and their contingency and fixes them to an argument that implies finality. It is the imaginative component of history writing which allows for what Julia Laite refers to as the purposeful ‘destabilizing’ of the meaning of sources.Footnote 83 This conscious engagement with the contingency and fragmentary nature of sources also enables us to consider the ways we and people in the past make meaning and obscure it, and how continuity and change are intimately related to each other. ‘Dwelling’ on sources, as advocated by Paul Steege et al., allows for the examination of power relations in the everyday, but working with these ‘fragments requires patience’:
the historian of everyday life introduces a story, an anecdote, a paradox, a fragment, an incident—and dwells on it. In this “way of reading,” of thinking it through from different angles, of lingering, the detail becomes the focus of inquiry itself, because in these moments meaning is made
It is this that allows historians of everyday life to tell ‘a bigger story from a smaller one’ and to identify the political in the personal.Footnote 84 For example, Richard English has argued that the ‘energy and momentum’ of the Provisional IRA movement were provided ‘primarily by the day-to-day northern experience of Catholics; there may have been an elaborate political theology, but (as, indeed, with other kinds of theology) it would only have continued meaning for people if it somehow related to lived daily experience’.Footnote 85
It is possible, therefore, to see source material as by-products of encounters, imagined and lived, which begin before a source’s creation and continue into its future as new eyes and minds discover and rediscover it over the course of history. For example, the legislation that oversaw committal to industrial schools or the rules and routines that governed the working day in a Magdalene laundry were based upon past encounters and existing social knowledge with a view to future interactions. The implications of how individuals might experience the ramifications of these rules was considered by those who created them, consciously and unconsciously, because their creation was an attempt to reflect and mould a known world, to create processes, to inscribe values and to shape relations between people in the everyday. Interaction with laws and rules varies for individuals and groups, and changes over time. Some are involved in making or overseeing rules and laws while others live within their grip or shadow. However, even those who appear unaffected by a carceral system, for example, are shaped by its existence. Fear is rooted in knowledge and imagination as well as direct experience. Research on the sensed experience of conflict — hearing, seeing and feeling violence — has illuminated the ways in which it can be experienced in non-physical ways, shaping behaviour to mitigate fear and in anticipation of danger.Footnote 86
In order to understand the often intangible processes that inform how individuals interact with the world around them, historians of twentieth-century Ireland have been broadening what constitutes source material and what is understood by the archive. Enda Delaney has noted that the study of the twentieth century was often shaped by a focus on biography and the male political figure, as well as an over-reliance on the archives of government departments. He argued that the transnational turn, with its focus on people and movement, opened up opportunities for new areas of study that naturally implies analysis of a diverse source base.Footnote 87 Similarly, Guy Beiner’s concept of vernacular history recognises the need for the use of a broad range of sources, from oral accounts to popular printed literature, ephemera, ethnology, material and printed culture, ballads and songs, fiction and audio visual sources, as well as reading more traditional sources against the grain. These are sources which, as Joan Redmond has noted, have long been a staple of historians examining earlier periods.Footnote 88 However, Beiner’s analysis related to what traditionally predominated in modern Irish history writing. In a recent reflection, Deirdre Foley highlights the increasing diversification of source material in Irish twentieth-century social history, which is facilitating the historicisation of the experiences of marginalised groups.Footnote 89 Interdisciplinarity has also been a crucial factor in the expansion of historical enquiry to include the material world and embodied experience, developing an awareness of the sensorium of past lives, illuminating the complexities of human existence.Footnote 90 In her study of her family’s response to a pregnancy outside marriage, Clair Wills describes how the sacrifices made for respectability ‘rarely take place out in the open’,Footnote 91 noting that it was tempting to see her ‘family saga as a secret history — hidden away out of shame in a chest shoved up in the attic, or buried somewhere, in a ditch or on the boundary between two fields’. ‘After all,’ she continues, ‘I’ve had to dig.’Footnote 92 Analysis of fragments, material objects, documents, stories and memories were all required to attack ‘the culture of reticence that gave people the resilience to survive’ and the ‘habits of discretion and reserve that made day-to-day life liveable in a small community where everyone knew everyone else’s business’.Footnote 93 It is through creative approaches to deepening our understanding of human subjectivity that we can challenge a reliance on existing scripts and traditional sources, generating more imaginative readings and allowing multiple new narratives to emerge and co-exist.Footnote 94
The value of personal testimony was recognised by the ‘new historians’ who established I.H.S. In 1943, Robin Dudley Edwards wrote of the need for ‘a scientific collection of the oral evidence of the Irish people regarding the history of the last one hundred years’.Footnote 95 In her study of the establishment of the Bureau of Military History by the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, Evi Gkotzaridis highlights that Dudley Edwards displayed a healthy scepticism of history based entirely on official sources. He wrote: ‘official records and newspaper reports are notoriously misleading. This will readily be appreciated if it be remembered how insufficient and inaccurate would be any account of the Irish revolution (1916–23) if based exclusively on existing documentary material.’Footnote 96 The recent release of the Bureau of Military History’s witness statements and the ongoing release of the Military Service Pension files has unleashed new sources with which to understand the Irish Revolution and the independent state in the decades which followed. They provide detailed and personal accounts which provide insight into everyday life during and after the revolution, but also into the ways people imagined, interacted with and negotiated with the meaning of that revolution, the new states forged in its wake, and their relationship with both.Footnote 97 The urge to gather oral evidence about the Troubles or of people’s experiences of industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and Mother and Baby Homes similarly reflects the understanding ‘that our epistemic resources depend on our position within systematic structures of power’ and that the nature and availability of evidence that is key to social knowledge differs for different groups and individuals.Footnote 98 In this way, the written records composed by those who create or implement regulations and laws are only as valuable as the fragments and accounts that shed light on lives impacted by them, not more so.Footnote 99 This broadening and diversifying of the source base, including a much greater use of oral history and a growing volume of digitised material available online, has meant that ethical considerations have become more explicit in the discipline. Footnote 100 Beyond the legal requirements of GDPR and university ethics processes, individual historians grapple with the perpetual challenge and responsibility of using the details of individual lives to create histories.Footnote 101 While oral historians have been at the forefront of ethical approaches to history,Footnote 102 sources found in the written archive often require ethical consideration, with the issue of naming individuals the subject of recent academic discourse.Footnote 103 This reflects the acknowledgement that the archive often captures people, particularly those who are marginalised, in ways they may well have contested and that were often dictated by power structures that they had little influence upon. The challenge for historians is often how to acknowledge and account for this inherent power dynamic, while also working against its reinscription in our work.Footnote 104
The privileging of particular sources naturally shapes historical narratives, and this has added to the controversies surrounding contested or traumatic events. While not academic histories, public inquiries or reports on failings within states and society have often served to expose the incomplete and partial character of official (institutional or state) records. The unjust nature of the findings of the Widgery Report (1972) into the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 compounded the trauma of the original event.Footnote 105 In the case of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (2009), written evidence from the Department of Education, and some of the findings of the commission, did no more than restate what had been asserted for decades by those who had grown up in these institutions. Memories and accounts, such as those by Peter Tyrrell, Mannix Flynn, Christine Buckley and Paddy Doyle, had all provided records of abuses within the system.Footnote 106 The tragic death by suicide of Peter Tyrrell, whose burnt remains were found on Hampstead Heath, is a stark illustration of the sometimes catastrophic consequences of refusing to listen or to acknowledge the importance of personal experiences to our understanding of the past. Tyrrell’s memoir, along with an introduction by editor Diarmuid Whelan, outlined both the abuse he experienced in Letterfrack Industrial School and his numerous attempts to have the abusive nature of those institutions exposed.Footnote 107 The rejection of Tyrrell and others who spoke about abuses in the industrial and reformatory school system is an example of how historical narratives, if dependent on narrowly defined archival sources, reinforce the power dynamics that shaped the archive which, in the case of many institutions, has remained inaccessible to the public.Footnote 108 Beiner’s theory of social forgetting reflects on this collaboration — noting how ‘official history’ can silence the past by censoring marginalised voices.Footnote 109
The process of addressing epistemic injustices embedded in certain historical narratives is ongoing and imperfect.Footnote 110 The 2013 Report of the inter-departmental committee to establish the facts of state involvement with the Magdalen laundries (known as the MacAleese report) was criticised for its failure to report on all available records and for ignoring 796 pages of survivor testimony submitted by Justice For Magdalenes (JFM), the advocacy group whose campaign for a redress and restorative justice scheme began in 2003.Footnote 111 Gathering the testimony of those who experienced institutions was also a key element of the work of the Clann Project (a joint initiative of the Adoption Rights Alliance and JFM Research), established in 2015.Footnote 112 In 2021, the Final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was similarly challenged for its handling of survivor testimony and the fact that this evidence was not used to shape the commission’s findings.Footnote 113 In this way, the power hierarchies of the past were reinscribed in the present and the evidence produced by one social group was validated and that of another sidelined. While power is at the heart of all narrative construction, it is important not to elide official reports or inquiries with academic histories.Footnote 114 Legal scholars Fiona Donson and Darren O’Donovan describe the public inquiry as having a complex and largely pragmatic relationship with administrative justice. Shaped by terms of reference and ‘fundamentally dependent’ on a ‘supportive political culture’, these investigations pose challenges for historians who contribute to them, particularly with regards to the value ascribed to different kinds of evidence.Footnote 115
Historians are not required to respect the hierarchies of evidence inherent in traditional legal practice — in fact, the opposite; they must be open to a multiplicity of imperfect source material, accepting the contradictions and ambiguities of a past that will never be known in its totality. There is then an inherent tension between the legal constraints and purpose of state-sponsored reports and the historical research that underpins them. The flaws and limitations in recent official investigations into institutions of containment have challenged historians of twentieth-century Ireland to reflect again on the nature and responsibilities of their influential discipline, learning from its historiographical journey and striving for methods and practices that recognise what Paul Connerton has termed the humiliated silence(s) of the past.Footnote 116
In this evolving landscape, the authors of the recent report into Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland, commissioned by the Department of Health, have noted that a review of the McAleese Report, ‘including its methodological weaknesses’, guided their own research design.Footnote 117 Moreover, their expertise in oral history was not only fundamental in shaping the report but informed their defence of the inclusion of testimony representing multiple and contradictory views. The authors were ‘cognizant of the asymmetries of power between individual victims and survivors and those they seek to challenge — the state and the churches/religious organisations’ and also of their own position and connection with institutions, the state and the university.Footnote 118 Crucially, too, they brought an understanding of the ways in which trauma disrupts memory processes and narrative cohesion.Footnote 119 It is in these memory ruptures, the historical ellipses, that historians might find a truthfulness which eludes legal or archival certainty.
IV
This article began in an attic archive searching through the impossible untidiness of human experience to see what it might reveal about politics and power in twentieth-century Irish history. Surveying the scene, we considered the benefits of organising this knowledge base, having reflected on the histories produced by more structured archives. A fear of political and social disorder permeated both jurisdictions in twentieth-century Ireland, creating an environment for historical narratives that were grand and centralising, and rarely focused on those who lived lives outside of an imagined, normative ‘we’, or on the different levels of loss and sacrifice needed to remain inside. However, as Ireland changes, the anxieties that kept that grand narrative in situ have been replaced, for some, by a recognition of its gaps and omissions and of the injustice of many of its underlying assumptions.
The dominant historical narrative, Pertti Haalpala argues, ‘serves readily as a script … that gives collective meanings to individual experiences … its relevance depends on how it justifies the present societal relations and political practices and connects them to history’.Footnote 120 When the script fails to make sense of the experiences of the very people it describes, and, more seriously, when it is seen to act as a justification for the current eco-system of power which embeds and maintains inequality, then we need to ask different questions of sources, broaden our source base and examine the relationship between our analysis of evidence and the narratives we produce. Historians can make explicit the politics of unifying categories in order to discern the kinds of power they serve, challenging, for example, simplistic explanations of the 2008 financial crash that argued ‘we all partied’, or probing explanations that place responsibility for abuse in institutions at the door of ‘society’.Footnote 121
In this article, we have suggested that a focus on imagined and lived encounters facilitates an examination of power and its impact. This does not kill off the subject, deny historical facts, undermine the centrality of sources or undo the need for narratives, but rather it allows for a history that ‘explores, accepts and lives within ambiguity and fragments’.Footnote 122 As Alf Lüdtke reminds us, a history of the everyday does not ‘mean a retreat into the particular but rather it allows big questions of process and structure to be posed’.Footnote 123 Even for the discipline of history’s overarching preoccupation, the tension and relationship between continuity and change, centring human experience and the power dynamics that shape it, stands to reveal the granular and collective workings of the process of living, the relational nature of thinking and making meaning of the world, while not losing or forgetting the subjective and the possibilities of agency.Footnote 124 Historians are not just interpreters of historical records; we are also active players in society, diviners and conjurers who bring versions of the past into the present, imagining a world that is gone. We make footnotes central to our craft so that our evidence can be tested and our trail followed, inviting challenge and conversation in a process that is ongoing and ever changing. It is in the space between our divining and conjuring that the argument lies, the debate happens, history is written and the story gets its endless quality.
Open access
