What on earth did Tim Pat Coogan mean by saying ‘. However, for those among us who spurn Whiggish history and seek a more balanced and rational view of Ireland’s past, then Mr Coogan has little to offer except, if I may continue with the culinary metaphor, food poisoning! His avowed disdain of so-called ‘dehydrated, dull’ history allows him to place emotion at the heart of his ‘historical representation’, thus enabling him to obfuscate and relegate as background colour events, themes and trends which are normally more centre-stage in modern historical analysis.įor those people who like their Irish history piping hot, combined with a nauseating self-righteous, Anglophobic moral indignation, overlaid with a layer of very thick green sauce to sweeten their very sensitive Gaedhil nationalist palates, then Mr Coogan is for them. Mr Coogan’s emotive obsession with personality is very revealing of his attitude to historical inquiry. Inside the last twenty years or so, so-called ‘castle historians’, to use but one term of denigration, have succeeded in breaking through the hard-walled core of Irish nationalist historiography to reveal a complex, surprising, and untidy reality that challenges traditional assumptions about Ireland’s past. Mr Coogan’s rant against revisionism was puerile, disingenuous, and akin to skeleton-rattling rather than a genuine critical onslaught. The nationally minded renowned academic Professor Bradshaw afforded the green light to Mr Coogan in every sense of the word, allowing him to propagate, unchallenged, his Gaedhil distorted nationalist image of Irish history. ,-Brendan Bradshaw’s interview technique in relation to Tim Pat Coogan (HI 12.2, Summer 2004) was anodyne in the extreme. Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Issue 3 (Autumn 2004), Letters, Letters, Volume 12
0 kommentar(er)
