The Hist and Edmund Burke's Club: An Anthology, edited by Declan Budd andRoss Hinds, Lilliput, 4l7pp, £30
This is a collection of history, minutes and reminiscences of the CollegeHistorical Society of Trinity College, Dublin. Its publication is part of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the foundation of a club whose moving spirit was Edmund Burke, one of the tributaries whose confluence created the Historical Society in 1770.
It is an admirable and varied anthology, whose significance and appeal extend beyond its core constituency of old buffers and young fogies, and constitutes an intellectual and political history in its own right. The waves of the history of modern Ireland repeatedly broke against and washed through its cavernous, and slightly hideous, Gothic premises.
Eoin ("the Pope") O'Mahony recalled T.M. Healy as Governor-General in 1925 stepping into the breach when his old crony Lord Birkenhead shrank from setting foot on Irish soil. At a supper afterwards, Healy became brazenly indiscreet, and referred by name to the alleged murderers of an English soldier some months previously. The youthful Irish state responded with impressive decisiveness: "His two uniformed and immaculately dressed ADCs immediately jumped to attention, seized him by the shoulders and the legs and conveyed him out of the Supper Room and down the Dining Hall steps to the waiting Viceregal Rolls Royce."
O'Mahony himself, as auditor five years later, showed consider-able prowess as a controversialist by proposing a toast to "Ireland" instead of "The king". This prompted an entertaining and indulgently protracted campaign to impeach him.
A speech by Harold Laski in 1934, recalled by Owen Sheehy Skeffington, activated the swings which make political debate in Ireland mildly addictive. Laski began:"There is one thing at least that Mr de Valera will have to admit, and that is that we English are always ready to forgive." This received a great cheer from about half the audience, and in particular from those who did not favour Mr de Valera. Laski's sentence however was not yet finished. He went on: ... those whom we have most greviously wronged." There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a wild cheer from the other half of the audience.
Conor Cruise O'Brien recalls the society in the closing stages of its formal period ("astringent, cerebral, a little musty, quite formidable"). In time it would unwisely succumb to a pretence of raucousness in which it had no hope of emulating its hated rival, the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.
The motions are quite instructive. The carrying of a resolution on May 30th 1906 that the Gaelic League was deserving of general support is balanced by the defeat of a resolution on February 26th 1908 that Ireland should be governed by nationalistic ideals. In 1947-8 the Historical Society deplored General Franco, disapproved of birth control, and asserted its belief that Eire (sic) should revert to full membership of the British commonwealth. In the 1960s it came round on birth control, bravely espoused the legislation of abortion, and held that "Merger [with UCD] means murder". Having pronounced in April 1964 that the United States should get out of Vietnam, the society showed unexpected martial ardour in resolving (on January 22nd 1969) to march on Stormont.
The piece de resistance is unquestionably a transcript of R. B. McDowell's address of 1970 on "Personalities of the Hist", which wonderfully captures his halting, staccato wit. The cultivated garrulousness is a foil to his debunking of cliched rhetoric which is a little suggestive of Samuel Beckett (who is absent from this somewhat spectral banquet, as he had evidently been from the grave deliberations of the society). Having referred to Lecky, Professor McDowell concluded:
I myself think that those are the sedate virtues which today tend to be overlooked. I mean we live in an age where there are sections of the world which pride themselves on the immobility of their convictions, on the fact that they are totally deaf to argument and that they are ready for ruthless action. Now, I must say I feel that the more sedate and less spectacular qualities which the eighteenth century and the Victorian age cultivated knowledge, reason, persuasion, the capacity to listen and to try to comprehend - are of more value than these qualities which attract, are bound to attract, adherence and attention. And I hope this society will continue to practise and defend the se-date qualities which were, which are associated with its past, which I believe are the cement of our civilization.
These modest verities may yet outlast the heady excitements of our time, the river-dancing and the "bridge-building".