Brendan Hoban: We need to find a new way to teach history
Western People 6.6.2023
Here are a few questions that won’t appear on the Leaving Cert this year. In a country obsessed with its history, how come so few, relatively speaking, will sit a history exam in the next few weeks? Is it that history is not important? (Of course, it is). Is it that we’re not interested in history. (No, it isn’t.) Is it that a never-expanding curriculum is squeezing history out of its traditional space and importance? (Possibly). Is it that we need to re-examine our priorities? (I would argue that it is). Do we need to do something about it? (Absolutely).
If we had any doubt about the answer to the last question, a recent Sunday Times/Behaviour and Attitudes about memories of the Troubles, would soon put that doubt to bed. The survey was taken up some months ago as Ireland prepared to celebrate 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement.
The effort to deliver peace (or the nearest to peace that the North experienced for decades) was painstakingly and tortuously slow. By common consent, it only got over the line because so many leaders of different political groupings took so many risks by stepping outside the comfort zone of their own narrow political constituencies.
Standing head and shoulders above everyone else was John Hume, who worked might and main to bring the IRA in from the cold, to convince them (and Sinn Féin) to swap the bomb and the bullet for the ballot paper. He won the Nobel Prize (with David Trimble) for his efforts, a bust was unveiled this year in Dáil Éireann to honour his contribution and he is widely credited as the key individual who drove the peace process for years.
Evidence of the respect and even awe in which Hume is held for his ground-breaking work for peace is contained in one finding of the survey mentioned above:
90% of those in the over 55 age-group gave Hume the main credit for bringing the violence and the killing to an end.
Why such a stunning percentage? Because the over 55s remember the early years of the conflict when reports on the RTÉ Six One television evening news regularly presented images not just of the devastation caused by bomb explosions but the dreadful and gradually embedded image of RUC officers gathering body parts into plastic bags. The celebrated poet, Eavan Boland, in her book Object Lessons, described her memories of the violence in the North in the early 1970s: ‘Our front room was a rectangle of white walls, hardly any furniture and a small television chanting deaths and statistics at tea-time’.
Here’s another statistic from that survey. Over 40% of those under 35 admitted that they did not know what role John Hume had played in the peace process. Less than half of those surveyed who were under 35 had any idea of President Bill Clinton’s role in the peace process though Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern regarded him as instrumental in the signing of the agreement and the academic Gary Murphy described him as ‘the midwife of the peace process’. Others who played vital roles, like David Trimble, hardly register at all.
The stunning conclusion of the survey is that in the memory of the under-35s the architects of the Good Friday Agreement were Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, that Sinn Féin and its leaders took all the risks for peace and that, in the words of Professor Gary Murphy, ‘democratic politicians who preached an alternative to violence are side-lined to the position of supporting actors’. In the memory of the young, so many who facilitated the IRA ceasefire have been airbrushed out of communal memory and Sinn Féin and the IRA get the main credit for the peace process.
How could the truths of history be so upended as to leave us with such a bizarre conclusion?
While many might be forgiven for not being familiar with historical truth in the early centuries, it is unconscionable that so many of today’s adults simply do not understand what happened in the last half century of our troubled history.
But, in truth, how could they know it, if they hadn’t the opportunity to learn it? Which brings me back to the questions at the top of this piece about the neglect and virtual exclusion of history from our school curriculum.
It seems to me – and I accept that my own interest in history pushes me firmly in this direction – that what we need to do is not just give history more attention and more space in our schools but that Irish history shouldn’t start at the earliest times and move forward century by century but rather start at the present time and move back bit by bit, first starting with the years of the Celtic Tiger and then delving into ‘The Troubles’.
One of the problems with history is that it loses touch with both the present and the local. We go too far back to retain interest and we try to paint too comprehensive a picture to make a living connection. One of the results of my recent research in the Great Famine in Killala diocese was the experience of (i) learning how little people knew about the most traumatic event in our history and (ii) how easily their interest could be engaged by opening up what happened in their own parish and townland.
A third impulse is the conviction that a study of history led by historians has the best chance of understanding the truth about what happened in our troubled history.
A recent period of Irish history in which 3,500 people were killed – 52% of whom were civilians, 32% members of the security forces and 16% paramilitaries, with republicans responsible for 60% of the deaths, loyalists 30% and security forces 10% – deserves to have its story told and the truth to stand its ground. Not to do so is to tempt fate.
Inevitably the ‘heuristic’ or lens we receive in early life will tend to colour our approach to the subject and even defeat all objectivity. We tend to look for simple meta-narratives – such as ‘seven hundred years of British oppression’ – as though no Irishman had ever oppressed another before 1169 CE. This historical simplism made it totally bewildering that a second-generation Irish revolutionary could wind up in an 18th century Gandon mansion in our own time, financed by an Irish Catholic business elite.
And so the history of the church also needs a radically cleansing heuristic, to explain why in 2023 it has to insist that the Christian imperialism that gave us African slavery and the Canadian Catholic-run residential schools were never faithful to the Gospels, despite what the popes and churchmen of the modern era did to indigenous peoples.
In Ireland in the era of Vatican II the church could simultaneously teach (a) that all people are equal in dignity and (by) that they are nothing of the kind because the children of the poorest are so likely to wind up among the criminal classes that they need to be contained in residential schools so poorly resourced, managed and supervised by the state (waved through by Catholic bishops) that the direst cruelty can happen.
So how did it happen that such hypocrisy could become institutionalised in the church? We need surely to begin with the forgetting of much of the Gospel in the alliance of churchmen and political elites that set in at least as early as 312 – to count the cost of all that. The heuristic of James the Apostle, which forbade the making of class distinctions, is still ready to hand. And now we have also got Girard’s lens for covetousness as mimetic desire – the desires we borrow subliminally from the materially endowed.
Do our bishops still covet the social power they have only recently lost, and fail to see the victory of secularism as providential? That could well be part of the problem, but nostalgia for Christendom casts a much wider net. It’s time to realise that the era of Christian ascendancy is the ever-fertile seedbed of secularism, and to begin all over again.
What an excellent article, Brendan.
Seán,
“This historical simplism made it totally bewildering that a second-generation Irish revolutionary could wind up in an 18th century Gandon mansion in our own time, financed by an Irish Catholic business elite.”
This I don’t understand.
Nor this:
“…despite what the popes and churchmen of the modern era did to indigenous peoples.”
Perhaps, I don’t understand what do we regard as the modern era — is it from Vatican I (1870) on?
#2 James Gandon was the foremost influence on the architecture of 18th century Georgian Dublin. One of his designs was for the mansion Abbeville, in Kinsealy near Dublin – in which Charles J Haughey of Fianna Fail came to reside in his pomp. How he was able to afford this lifestyle became a subject of speculation and then scandal. Could there be a more stunning historical example of mimetic desire (covetousness) than this adoption by a strident Irish nationalist of the desires and material ‘style’ of the reviled Anglo-Irish ascendency?
In my time historians dated the modern era from c. 1450 CE. In 1452 came the papal bull Dum Diversas, a papal permit for ‘Christian’ expropriation of lands abroad not occupied by Christians. This was the era of European exploration and colonisation and Dum Diversas is seen as part of the ‘doctrine of discovery’ that became the subject of a recent Vatican document insisting that papal bulls should not be seen as defining ‘church teaching’. (How European imperial adventurers encouraged by Dum Diversas were supposed to know that they shouldn’t have taken it seriously is as yet wholly unclear.)
Thanks, Sean.