" 'interpretive distortions' with 'value-free history'. "
Keith
What Kineally said, in full
"interpretive distortions'
Your interprative distortions" referred to the fact that up to independence, no history including the Irish point of view was taught - none whatever.
Following independence, the new regime began to teach the bit that was banned - filling in the gaps and including the national Liberation struggles
These were filling in the gaps left by British censorship – the famine, the mass evictions, the forced emigrations, the land wars of the late 19th early 20th century, the centuries of national liberations rebellions – all the facts that had been left out of the British history books and had never taught in schools prior to independence
They were "simplistic" because, thanks to British administrations, they had never been deeply researched – they were there to give the Irish the culture that had been suppressed – no historian has ever at any time claimed that the facts were inaccurate, just that they were "simplistic".
This form of education, as Kinealy point out, went on till the late 1930s when, thanks to 'The Emergency', Ireland entered into economic crisis and needed a place to send its emigrants – Britain was the natural place to go
That's when the revisionists moved in and began writing history without blaming anybody 'value-free history'
All the bad deeds under British rule were totally ignored and an anodyne account was taught in schools
A typical example was that, up to that point, there was not a single work dealing with Ireland's great disaster - which included gross mismanagement, an accusation by the relief administrator that the famine was "God's Punisment"
The first book totally dedicated to "Ireland's Holocaust" ' The Great Hunger' did not appear until 1962, nearly 120 years after the events – and written by an Englishwoman, and that, while it castigated Britain for its cruelty, avoided political analysis – It certainly never CONTAINED ANY OF THESE DETAILS
It was not until the 150th anniversary of the famine in 1995 that Britain's role was examined in any depth and revealed the deliberate nature of the mismanagement.
The same with the 1917 uprising – it has taken a century to deal with it in any detail – now the Irish shops are full of scholarly studies.
Kinealy, who you quote without having read what she has to say , now totally supports Tiim Pat Coogan's view that the Famine was deliberately mismanaged. – but you have already agreed that
Britain has now officially apologised for its deliberate mismanagement o tha famine
For Christ's sake, if you are going to quote historians, read what they have to say instead of grabbing unrelated passages and quoting them out of context.
Irish historians are now back to examining Irish history in full and her Maj has all but apoliogised for history Britain's part in Irish history as a whole .
"It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss ... with the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we wish had been done differently, or not at all." "It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss ... with the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we wish had been done differently, or not at all."
MADGE SAYS SORRY
Al
If you believe Caement was a criminal, then so was Ghandi, Mandela, Moishe Dayan….. and every other national liberator who has fought for their country's cause
If any of you lot have any evidence that what was taught in schools was false – feel free to point it out.
Jim Carroll