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Ethnic Cleansing, Ethical Smearing and I rish H istorians
Author(s) -
Fitzpatrick David
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/1468-229x.12002
Subject(s) - credibility , narrative , ethnic group , scholarship , politics , silence , history , sociology , law , literature , political science , aesthetics , philosophy , art
Abstract Do most academic historians of twentieth‐century I reland conform to a ‘constitutional narrative’, driven by a moral imperative to subvert republican interpretations? Has their shared political agenda led to widespread distortion, suppression, ‘elision’ and falsification of the evidential record? Is it high time to root out ‘the insidious influence of I rish public histories presented as objective historical evidence'? In the view of J ohn M . R egan, the answer in all cases is an emphatic ‘yes’. This riposte to his recent article in History examines the credibility of R egan's critique, with particular attention to his claim that the late P eter H art was guilty of ‘academic fraud’ in his controversial analysis of republican sectarianism and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the I rish revolution. When closely examined, R egan's analysis seems perverse and untenable, implicitly relying on a reductionist conspiracy theory which ignores the rich variety and sound scholarship displayed by several generations of historians of modern I reland.