Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 by Tom DunneReview by: Keith JefferyIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 137 (May, 2006), pp. 129-130Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20547418 .

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Reviews and short notices 129

Where, then, in Bishop Synge's census are the grandparents, brothers, sisters and other relatives sharing houses with a married relative? One possibility is that conjugal units

sharing the same house may have been listed separately, perhaps with other relatives being counted as servants. This would explain why the apparent number of households is so

large, in comparison with the 1749 and 1753 hearth-tax returns. But in that case it is difficult to understand why we do not find more frequent pairs of listings with the same surname. A second possibility is that additional relatives were generally omitted from the

count, because there was no column in which they could be entered. At first sight this seems perhaps the more likely of the two. However, the population figure yielded by the census (76,484, allowing for invisible wives) suggests a subsequent rate of population

growth roughly equal to that seen in the country as a whole (p. xxxvii). For a diocese located in Connacht, that is already surprisingly low, Under-registration on the scale

implied by a general failure to record family members other than parents and children would depress the rate to an even less credible level The balance of probabilities h thus

by no means clear. What can be said? however* is that in either of these cases it is likely that one of Mr Gurrin\s main findings, namely his calculation of average household size? is seriously in error.

A further point conceras the number of marriages between Catholics and Protestants. Mr Gurrin puts the total at 144 out of 16,84.1 households, or 0.9 percent of all marriages. The figure is in fact wrong, since the table from which it is derived omits three parishes (Roscommon, Kilteevan and Kilbride) where the compiler gives no information about

wives, but indicates by a cross in the margin a total of fifteen Protestant men married to

Catholics. (The table also errs in confusing the two parts of the parish of Killukin.)

Moreover, this variation in format raises other doubts. Would this vicar have been equally concerned to mark out cases of Catholic men whose wives were Protestant? And can we

assume that the absence of similar marginal marks in the returns, by other hands, for the

further twenty-five parishes that give details of husbands but not wives, indicates that

there were no mixed marriages in those cases? One reason for this scepticism is that 96

out of the 144 mixed marriages in Mr Gurrin*s table appear in just seven parishes. That

mixed marriages should be more common in the urban parishes of Boyle and Sltgo, where

22 and 32 per cent respectively of the inhabitants were Protestant, is understandable. But

when we rind ten or more mixed marriages recorded in a handful of otherwise

unexceptional and predominantly Catholic parishes (Ardcarn, Fucrty, Kilmore), while so

many other such parishes return none at all, the question has to be whether the compilers of the first group are recording data that others did not think it necessary to note. Once

again, it is difficult in a short review to do more than speculate. But enough has been said to make the main point. The Elphin census is indeed a source of great potential But it is

likely to yield up its secrets only when statistical manipulation is linked to the more traditional historian's art of a close scrutiny of the original text.

S. J, CONNOIJLY

School of History and Anthropology, Queen 's University of Belfast

Rebellions: memoir, memory and 1798. By Tom Dunne, Pp vl, 336. Dublin: Lilliput Press; 2004, 20,

This important: book comprises three parts, though they are not quite as suggested by the subtitle, Th$ book, however? certainly begins with a memoir, in which the author recounts

his own journey from a small-town upbringing in conservative New Ross* education by the Christian Brothers (and, for a while? the possibility that he might spead his life wiih the order), and then to U.CD. at the tinie when the so-called "revisionists' app?irendy held

sway, But Dunne, although from an fepeecably nationalist bac?grouad? categorically

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130 Irish Historical Studies

denies the relentless hostility to nationalism and republicanism which Brendan Bradshaw

has identified with the teaching of history at U.C.D, On the contrary, Dunne asserts that. 'even the younger lecturers operated largely from within a basic nationalist position, anxious, in part, to rehabilitate it by putting it on a better scholarly footing' (p. 51). From

U.C.D. Dunne went to study for an MA. under the inspiring guidance of Oliver

MacDonagh at U.CC, and from there he went to Cambridge as a Ph.D. student, based at

Peterhouse, That the serious and conscientious Dunne found it hard to adjust to that most

self-consciously idiosyncratic of colleges is not surprising; yet Dunne is more generous than he ought to be about Cambridge, especially bearing in mind the cruelly casual way he was treated as a doctoral examinee ? a sobering tale of how it should not be done,

Dunne returned to Ireland, settling back in Cork, where he spent the rest of his academic career. He says less about this period of his life than he does about the earlier years, but

he does include a thoughtful discussion of the 'revisionism* debate, and a sharp critique of

the once-fashionable, and often facile, counter?revisionists.

Part II comprises both an historiographical review of the literature on the ?79H rising, and an extended consideration of the commemoration of the 1798 bicentenary5 and what

Dunne suggests is 'commemorationist history" (p. 130). The former is acutely done, and

Dunne does not pull his punches in a stimuiatingly vigorous survey. It would make a

marvellous study for graduate students, or even the brighter undergraduate, which would

reveal to them (unlike the bulk of the revisionism controversy) how debate can proceed on

the basis of a close, forensic reading of historical evidence and interpretation, rather than

with an often ill-informed parade of tendentious attitude-striking. In the rest of Part 1} Dunne embarks on a sustained critical exploration of how (as he sees it) there was a 'drive to commemorate an acceptable, that is largely non-violent, version of the Rebellion,

reducing it to the anodyne of "heritage", pre-packaged, simplistic and politically correct, fit for mass consumption" (p, 116). There is a real passion here, which, while it sometimes

threatens to generate a little more heat than light, does demonstrate the continuing public importance of history in Ireland and the extent to which we remain vitally engaged with our past,

Dunne concludes with a detailed exploration of 5 June 1798, dwelling at length on the battle of New Ross and the killing of 126 people at Scullabogue, an event marked (as he puts it) with a

* traditional and lethal mixture of sectarian animosity and agrarian

grievances' (p. 249). Yet Dunne also seeks to discover the "human aspect of this tragedy not normally visible' (p. 250), and in part finds it in the social intimacies of community and locality wherein neighbours could do terrible things to one another, while at the same

time performing unanticipated acts of kindness. Above all, however, he argues that we

cannot understand the event of 1798 without acknowledging that the rebellion in Wexford "was an event soaked in blood, and marked more by cruelty and fanaticism on both sides

than by the ideals of the United Irishmen' (p. 6). While the shadow of Leopold von Ranke falls across this book ? Dunne tells us that

'the role of the historian should be ... to tell what actually happened' (p. 148) ? Dunne's

mixture of autobiography, historiography and history takes us beyond Rankean certainties. In fact Dunne asserts that his account of 1798 'makes no claim to truth, only to being as

true as possible to the evidence' (p. 276), which could be a useful quotation for an

examination question or a student seminar. Finally, Dunne hopes at the end of his book

that by 2048, if the 'dead of '98* are still remembered, they 'will have been freed from the tyranny of the living' (p. 277),-an eloquently expressed aspiration, but, alas, impossible, since only living scholars (like Dunne himself) can write their history. While Dunne may wear his intellectual biography on his sleeve perhaps a little too ostentatiously for some fastidious colleagues, the result is both a wholly engrossing and bravely revealing personal story, and a powerfully-argued exercise in historical scholarship.

Keith Jeffery School of History and Anthropology, Queen's University of Belfast

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