Few works of history remain ongoing sources of debate and discussion 35 years after their first appearance. Joe Lee’s Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (1989) has that rare distinction. Recognised from the start as a major contribution, and selling 35,000 copies over the decades, it still commands attention and rewards the effort of reading its 700 pages.
In A Tract for Our Times, editor (and former colleague of Lee at NYU), Miriam Nyhan Grey, brings together nine scholars to provide a ‘retrospective’ on the book and to engage again with its major themes. The freshness of the contributions testifies to the ongoing significance of Lee’s book, making this collection much more than an affectionate Festschrift.
Adjectives used by the contributors to describe Lee’s book indicate something about its impact: searing, ambitious, scalding, blistering, iconoclastic, trenchant, provocative. Without the weight of research and interpretive complexity that informs Lee’s study, the bevy of opinions and judgments it conveys might appear eccentric. Instead, he retains the ability to challenge.
What comes through from these chapters is Lee’s refusal to adopt the traditional focus on high politics and diplomacy and a framing around Anglo-Irish relations; his attention turned instead to the possessor mentality that thwarted entrepreneurship in Ireland and led to risk-averse underperformance; the critique of the “Treasury mind” in matters of policy; the forceful attack on the culture of the begrudger (usefully defined here by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh as “the enemy of all who show ambition to perform”); and Lee’s cosmopolitan and comparative outlook, shaped by his studies in Mainz and Cambridge after undergraduate years in UCD, which makes his major book far from a confined account of a small nation’s fortunes.
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Lee was committed not just to statistics and sources, but to an interpretation of the Irish mind, informed by sociological analysis and cultural anthropology. His unusually dextrous and at times bracing style sets the book apart (”nobody writes quite like him”, as Cormac Ó Gráda remarks). He emerges not just as a sharp observer, critic and resourceful interpreter but also as a moralist. There is something of the fierceness of Hamlet’s mirror in the book’s way of forcing us to look at ourselves. We also see the mixture of radical confrontation and conservative tendency. It was written during the Dark 1980s, with emigration high and the economy in terrible shape, but published at a turning point unknown to the author – with the Celtic Tiger in the offing, among many other changes.
Key questions that feature in Lee’s book come up for renewed consideration, including his economic analysis, discussed by Ó Gráda; issues of emigration, explored by Andy Bielenberg; Lee’s often unsettling judgment on ordinary Ireland, addressed by Anne Dolan (whatever the faults of an insular ruling class, the responsibility lay with ourselves in Lee’s view for any disappointments in unrealised hopes of revolution); his account of the Catholic Church along with other social issues, the subject of Diarmaid Ferriter’s chapter; Lee’s brief but incisive analysis of the Irish language, discussed by Nicholas Wolf; and his take on the quality of Irish leadership, tackled by Ó Tuathaigh. Lee’s family origins and youth are considered by Marion Casey; and a valuable intellectual biography of Lee’s work leading up to the publication of Ireland 1912-1985 comes from Richard McMahon and Niall Whelehan. The book closes with an appreciation by former student (and later ambassador) Daniel Mulhall.
Lee’s ambition was to write a “total history”, but there are inevitable gaps made apparent by time, new sources and new perspectives. Ferriter notes the significant absence of women’s history from the volume (and the inattention to the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae). Dolan raises the fascinating question of what a wider history of Irish emotions might look like, beyond attention to the spitefulness of begrudgery. Ó Gráda ponders how the seemingly “dreary decades” of Irish history covered by Lee might look if it were possible to index happiness (as opposed to misery).
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Some of the inflections come from the dramatic irony of knowing what came after. While noting Lee’s critical analysis of the rentier mentality and aversion to risk, Ó Gráda notes the subsequent financial disaster brought about in the banking sector precisely by unbridled risk-taking by Anglo Irish Bank among others. But the authors adjudge many features of Lee’s wide-ranging argument to have endured, including the critique of the “overbearing, destructive Catholicism”, the “cover-up techniques” of the Church and supporting culture of bourgeois respectability.
Writing a historical classic is an elusive proposition. We’re more comfortable with identifying the phenomenon in literature where it is bound up with something singular and great emanating not just from a moment but from a particular mind. To achieve this in history, a work must also pass a test of truth and answer to the judgment of time, while asking us to think again about our assumptions and categories. Lee’s feat deserves that accolade, confirmed in this valuable appraisal.
Daniel Carey is Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy and teaches at the University of Galway.
