Revisionisms and the Story of Ireland: From Sean O’Faolain to Roy Foster

• Main Author: Alfred Markey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses 2005-03-01
• Series: Estudios Irlandeses
• Subjects: Revisionism; History; Historiography; Identity; Ireland; Sean O’Faolain; Roy Foster
• Online Access: http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AlfredMarkey1.pdf

The telling of the story of Ireland, the received nationalist tale replete with heroes, villains and a host of stock elements, has a long history and has exercised a particularly important influence on the development of Irish identity. Yet, when the revisionist historian Roy Foster claimed in the late nineteen eighties that the telling of this traditional tale had come to an end it did seem as if, finally, Irish people were beginning to see themselves through different more complex narratives. Recent evidence, nonetheless, suggests Foster was precipitate in his claims and issues of the competing merits of history and myth remain to the fore. In 1994 Foster delivered a lecture to the University of Oxford entitled “The Story of Ireland” in which he looked in depth at the history of the traditional narrative through books of the same title. Of these he only briefly mentioned a particularly interesting example of the genre, The Story of Ireland, written by Sean O’Faolain, for many Ireland’s first revisionist. In this paper I consider the importance of this omission and through a look at both texts, as well as at other influential contributions to the revisionist debate, I suggest that O’Faolain and Foster practice fundamentally different revisionisms.