The issue of trust is crucial for the professional historian, writes Tom Dunne in response to Kevin Whelan's review of his book on the Wexford rising of 1798
I was saddened, though not surprised, by Kevin Whelan's intemperate and personalised assault on my book, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 (Weekend, March 6th).
He travesties even the memoir section that he pretends to admire, stating, for example, that I spent "three deeply traumatic years" in the Christian Brothers, whereas my account of my seven years in that order is of a largely positive and enriching experience.
Whelan's version is part of a sustained, insidious attempt throughout his review to portray me as a bitter throwback, "maimed" and "deformed" by my early life into a "despairing revisionism", making me one of "a handful of diehards" left high and dry by the "rapidly maturing Ireland", which he, of course, represents.
He also depicts me as proclaiming arrogantly that I had "cracked 1798", whereas he was "liberated into uncertainty".
What I actually wrote was that my account "makes no claim to truth, only to being as true as possible to the evidence. It is my version, at this point of time, of these stories."
Readers of the review, and indeed of any of Whelan's recent writings on 1798, may feel that the assertion of unwarranted authority, amounting almost to a claim of ownership of 1798, is one of Whelan's besetting sins.
Acknowledging that my book includes "a sustained attack" on his dominant role in the official 1798 bicentenary commemoration, spearheaded by Wexford's "Comóradh '98", he claims that he wants to "lay out clearly the points at issue". Apart from its venom, the most glaring feature of his review is that it completely failed to do this, so that The Irish Times reader who had not read the book could have no idea what these issues are.
It seems only fair that I should be allowed to outline them briefly. My detailed, often admiring and mainly respectful analysis of Whelan's writings focuses on the sources we have for what actually happened in Wexford in 1798, on the interpretation of these sources, and ultimately on questions of trust and professionalism.
I show how he silently abandoned his initial complex source-based analysis of the rebellion as primarily a sectarian/agrarian conflict, for a highly speculative and politicised model of "United Irish Revolution", the catchy slogan of Comóradh '98. Readers of the book can decide about how well or persuasively I make that argument.
However, the most serious issue I take with Whelan is not simply a matter of the interpretation of sources. I charge him with going far beyond what is acceptable in professional historical writing, by his ever more blunt and reckless endorsement of two key claims of Comóradh '98 - knowing, as he did, that there was no substantial evidence for them - that is, that the Wexford rebels established a "Republic", and that this was presided over by a "Senate" of leading Catholics and Protestants.
These are not trivial or incidental matters, but go to the heart of the issue of trust. By lending them his authority, Whelan, I believe, subordinated his role and his responsibility as a historian to the political goals of the official government-sponsored commemoration.
In his review, Whelan asks the reader to ignore his contribution to "the dreary 1980s debates" and to focus instead on his "current thinking on 1798", published in 2003 (and written after the bicentenary) in the large volume of bicentenary essays, which he co-edited (thus silently eliding his contentious 1990s writings which endorsed the claims of a Wexford republic and senate).
He tells us grandly that, "I do not think the same now as I thought five years ago: that is what happens with the life of the mind".
Unfortunately for him, it is not what happens with historical writing. You cannot adopt a series of contradictory positions as the mood strikes or the zeitgeist demands.
Historical understanding develops through a cumulative engagement with sources and with previous arguments.
This admission that he has, yet again, changed his mind and wants to walk away without explanation from interpretations which he put forward as authoritative during the bicentenary betokens a curious failure to understand the standards of professional history writing.
His excellent early research, steeped in the historical geography in which he was trained, is still relevant and useful because it engages closely with the sources, and I drew on it extensively in my own account, especially of the rebel massacre of over 100 mainly Protestant men, women and children, locked in a barn at Scullabogue.
His post-1998 writings have little relevance to my study of his contribution to the bicentenary, especially as they do nothing to explain his changes of mind over the previous 20 years. But the commemorationist history he produced, from 1996-98 particularly, is immensely significant and seriously flawed, and he cannot be allowed to simply wave it away without comment from other scholars in the field.
I concluded a letter published in this paper on April 24th, 1998, at the start of the Comóradh '98 celebration, thus: "I can only repeat that there is not a shred of evidence ... for the Wexford 'Senate', or for the Wexford 'Republic'. The onus is on those historians who continue to mislead the public in relation to these matters to either put up or shut up. Let us see some genuine, convincing evidence; and meanwhile, stop shooting the messenger!"
This challenge has been ignored once again by Kevin Whelan, despite the gift of a whole page of The Irish Times to make his case. Nor does he contest a single one of the specific claims I made about his writing, despite their seriousness. What we are offered instead is the distraction of an elaborate and acrid smokescreen. His review, in effect, confirms my case against him.
As for his distortions of my book, I am happy that readers can make up their own minds.
• Tom Dunne is author of the recently published Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798.