The growth of interest in the study of history that so characterised the nineteenth century was in Britain marked especially by the idea that, throughout past ages, things had, on the whole, got better and better; in Ireland it was largely marked – and especially so in what might broadly be called nationalist circles – by the notion that things had got worse and worse. Thus historical wrongs lay at the centre of nationalist interpretations – Cromwell’s massacres, the betrayal of Limerick, the penal laws – wrongs which were in no way mitigated by the passing of time. Indeed Thomas Davis ‘saw this nurturing of grievance as one of the key uses of national history: so long as Ireland remembered her betrayals “her conscience will smite her, and her pride irritate her” until she was driven to right these wrongs’. And the Young Irelander who, as James Quinn points out in this excellent and pioneering book, came closest to developing an explicit theory of history, John Mitchel, attacked Victorian historical complacency from precisely this angle, dismissing Macaulay as writing what amounted to self-congratulatory propaganda revolving around, as he put it in his Jail Journal of 1854, ‘reverential flattery to British civilization, British prowess, honour, enlightenment, and all that, especially to the great nineteenth century and its astounding civilization’.

James Quinn shows that, while such ideas concerning the reading, uses, and writing of Irish history certainly pre-date the 1830s and 1840s, it was Young Ireland that shaped them into a distinct philosophy in which particular interpretations of the past could be used as weapons in contemporary political debates, a process which found a notable apotheosis in the 1916 Declaration of Independence’s insistence that ‘in every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty’, that, indeed, ‘six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms’.

None of this, however, meant, as Quinn makes clear, that the chief actors involved were either close or knowledgeable students of the past. Indeed, few Young Irelanders made any bones about the fact that their historical endeavours were designed to serve immediate political ends and were based on interpretations that were of a strongly ‘present-centred, doctrinaire and determinist’ character ‘in which complexities, contradictions and discontinuities were ironed into a grand narrative of heroic resistance’. Those who wrote in the Nation thought it more important that works concerned with the past should be lively and inspire rather than that they should be ‘comprehensively researched’. Quinn valuably analyses the reasons why this should have been so and why Young Ireland was, in this respect at least, by no means out of step with certain contemporary developments elsewhere in Europe where too were to be found writers intent on the creation of notably ‘national’ historical moods and dispositions among those who read their works. In this at least Davis and the others were at one with Macaulay and Carlyle, an identification they would undoubtedly have rejected with very considerable force.

The Young Ireland view of the past not only grew out of particular historical circumstances but was indeed part of a universal phenomenon enjoying a persistent and lengthy afterlife in which it became both common and even at times respectable to bend historical ‘facts’ to the requirements of ideologies of various, and by no means always beneficent, kinds. What lies at the centre of such developments is the plasticity of the very concept of what ‘history’ is and should be, whether a discipline with internal rules of procedure and propriety or a myth kitty from which to extract arguments attractive to contemporary political gladiators of various kinds. That the Young Irelanders, like so many of their English contemporaries, largely followed one of these paths is a reflection of the times in which they lived and of their very human inability to escape from its shackles and influences.