History is a subject that often arouses strong emotions.
What seems to some people to be a topic of limited academic interest is for
others the source of deeply held and passionate feelings. The task of the
historian is to try to establish, as dispassionately as possible, what actually
happened in a given time and place and to give an explanatory account of why
and how what happened came to pass.
It is at this point that the trouble starts since this
inevitably involves an evaluative judgment, which can be controversial. It is
nowadays fashionable in some circles to assert that the idea of honest or true
historical accounts is a delusion, that all historical narratives are driven by
an agenda and should be seen as mythical or quasi-fictional. This view is
persuasive insofar as many widely accepted historical narratives are of this
kind and are constructed with an eye to having an effect in the present rather
than explaining the past. This does not mean, however, that historical
scholarship as traditionally understood is impossible, merely that it is
difficult. The study of history can actually undermine popularly accepted views
of the past and reveal that, in Artemus Ward’s expression, much of what people
know “just ain’t so.”
The history of Ireland is a case in point. Until
recently Irish history was dominated by an account of how the Irish resisted,
and eventually threw off, the oppressive rule of the English and their
collaborators. Recently this has been questioned by a new generation of Irish
historians and a new, more nuanced picture has appeared.1 This has led to a deeper understanding and has
meant that we now draw very different conclusions and lessons from the past.
The classic example of this is the Irish Potato Famine
of the 1840s. The basic facts of the event, one of the most tragic in modern
British history, are not in question. In 1845 the Irish potato crop became
infested with a fungal parasite (Phytophthora infestans), causing a partial
failure of the crop that year.