Revisionism

The Past Was Certainly A Different Country… But That’s Entertainment

Ciaran Ward on July 10, 2020, 7:00 am

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“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (British novelist LP Hartley, 1953) In the months following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a whole new debate has opened up on how we should perceive the events and actors of the past. History is undoubtedly awash with shameful events. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s statues of …

We Always Kill Our Heroes – The legacy of Winston Churchill…

Samuel Thompson on June 11, 2020, 8:31 am

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There is a whiff of revolution in the air. As I write these words the White House is under virtual siege and a statue of a long dead slave master has been unceremoniously dumped into a river. In London, the cenotaph and a statue of Churchill have been defaced. It is easy to dismiss such actions as mindless vandalism but they were calculated to gain attention by striking at Britain’s very idea of itself and by extension, many British people’s …

Ronan Fanning and the resonances of the history of a century ago

Brian Walker on January 19, 2017, 11:06 am

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A few years ago at a conference in King’s College London, the Irish historian Ronan Fanning who has just died could still get hot under collar about how the British politicians Asquith and Lloyd George exploited Irish Home Rule for their own political ends. We were about to enter the decade of commemoration culminating in the centenary of the anniversary of the Easter Rising, when these tumultuous events were being relived and tested for their relevance to the Troubles and …

For all the goodwill breaking out in Belfast, there was precious little of it in the Dáil…

Mick Fealty on June 28, 2012, 2:55 pm

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Okay, so partitionism reigns in Leinster House. As Miriam Lord notes beyond a presser at the Plinth, there was only one mention of that handshake in the Dail yesterday… …and that was only so Enda Kenny could deliver a vicious one-liner to a flat-footed Adams. On the eve of the Brussels summit, he heaped scorn on the what he saw as the Taoiseach’s lack of negotiating ability, and accused him of supporting a federal Europe. After a lengthy reply from …

Yes, IRA violence was remorseless, but what caused it? And who brought it to an end?

Mick Fealty on October 6, 2011, 8:59 am

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Martina Devlin with a timely observation: A debate about the North has become intertwined with the presidential race — one which should have taken place at the time of the Good Friday Agreement more than 13 years ago, but was sidelined amid euphoria about peace in our time. Quite so. It is an important debate. The problem is that partition has worked to the extent that the largest body of opinion in the Republic, feels ‘the North’ is an embarrassment …