Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?

by Liam Kennedy

In Unhappy the Land Liam Kennedy poses fundamental questions about the social and political history of Ireland and challenges cherished notions of a uniquely painful past. Images of tragedy and victimhood are deeply embedded in the national consciousness, yet when the Irish experience is viewed in the larger European context a different perspective emerges. The author’s dissection of some pivotal episodes in Irish history serves to explode commonplace assumptions about oppression, victimhood and a fate said to be comparable ‘only to that of the Jews’. Was the catastrophe of the Great Famine really an Irish Holocaust? Was the Ulster Covenant anything other than a battle-cry for ethnic conflict? Was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic a means of texting terror? And who fears to speak of an Irish War of Independence, shorn of its heroic pretensions? Kennedy argues that the privileging of ‘the gun, the drum and the flag’ above social concerns and individual liberties gave rise to disastrous consequences for generations of Irish people. Ireland might well be a land of heroes, from Cúchulainn to Michael Collins, but it is also worth pondering Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.’

Genres: Politics, History

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 21, 2015

About the author

Liam Kennedy is Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History at Queen's University, Belfast, and the author of several books on modern Irish history, including The Modern Industrialisation of Ireland, 1940-1988 and Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland.

In 2005, Kennedy stood against Gerry Adams as an independent candidate for Belfast West, to protest against IRA violence especially punishment beatings in their own community.[3]

Reviews

[Eamonn Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

An antidote to anniversary excess.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just more of the revisionist ideal of playing devils advocate in attempting to dismantle Irish claims to national sovereignty.

[AE Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A critical collection of essays discussing the Famine and the establishment of the new Ireland that pokes a lot of holes in pop history. Hinted at throughout the whole book but never explicitly stated is the intriguing suggestion that the end of Union was in effect reactionary, serving to reinforce religious differences, stem the advance of women's rights, and block the emergence of a meaningful labor movement. Kennedy goes closest to saying this when he notes that the Lagan Valley economy the most industrialized and internationalized, praises Ulster unionism for organizing 200,000 women to sign its Declaration, or is decrying Sinn Fein and the loss of rights and provincialism that occurred in Ireland after all was said and done.

The titular essay confronts the typical English domination paradigm and asks "compared to what?" The answer is fairly convincing: compared to continental Europe, Ireland had been relatively peaceful, ecumenical, and prosperous up until the Famine, and then from after the famine until around 1912.

Also useful is the chapter comparing the Famine to the Holocaust, during which Kennedy discusses the role of Irish-Americans and the development of curricula for schoolchildren based on ethnic suffering. Ironically, figures such as de Valera sought to downplay death camp photographs when they were first published while contemporary partisans are eager to include the Irish among the wretched of the earth by reaching for these Americanized narratives. Kennedy's analysis of the intentionality, duration, causes of death, scope of death, and run up to both events leaves no doubt that they are two tragedies of different types. An unexpected point was the two events' effects on thought: the Irish Famine, although inspiring a good deal of fiction, barely budged the expansion of capitalism and Whiggish thought, while Holocaust revolutionized the world: the West vowed "Never Again" and works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Authoritarian Personality entered the academic canon. Kennedy will surely frustrate many by going on to say that the resulting Israel-Palestine conflict and Famine survivors' participation in anti-black and anti-Draft riots in 1860s New York shows one thing the two events do share: past victimhood is no guarantee of future performance.

The chapter on "The Revolutionary Decade" also casts doubts on many common pieties but is less convincing in sweeping them away. Kennedy seems to lay the blame for the island-wide violence on the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising and Ulster unionism's gun-running and latent bellicosity in their Covenant. The latter faction surely explains a large part of the regional violence, but how it relates to the larger island-wide conflicts is unclear. Kennedy spells out his stance on the Easter Rising much more explicitly: he sees it as bloodthirsty and self-aggrandizing minority ignoring the varied but overwhelmingly pacific desires of most Irish people, and particularly contrasts the 2,000 odd participants in the Rising with the 200,000 Irishmen abroad in Europe. Kennedy spends a great deal of time dissecting the history and anthropology espoused by the Proclamation but completely overlooks its propagandistic or instrumental value. Perhaps announcing the Proclamation a propagandistic victory would be is reading history backwards, as Kennedy likes to warn against, but in the long term it seems that the Proclamation was part of a stream of events that indeed led to an Irish Republic. In his following summaries of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War, the primary function of the Proclamation is seen to be inspiring partisans to arms! Kennedy also dislikes this nomenclature, which bring us to the second heartbeat of this book: ideologues sought to advance a primordial and purely Irish nationhood while Irish people varied in politics, language, religion, region, class, and (very importantly) willingness to see violence between all these different currents.

[Gerry Kirwan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Liam Kennedy’s book is nothing short of infuriating. It reads like the work of someone deeply uncomfortable with Irish identity and allergic to the idea that this country ever had the right to stand up for itself. His tone toward Irish nationalism drips with condescension — as if demanding dignity, self-determination, and freedom were some kind of historical embarrassment rather than a justified response to centuries of exploitation.

But what truly leaves a sour taste is his treatment of the Great Famine. The way he dismisses and downplays the argument for genocide feels like a moral failure, not just a historical one. To gloss over the policies, the deliberate negligence, the ideology that let a nation starve while food left its shores — that is not revisionism, it is erasure. It is a refusal to recognize suffering on a scale that scarred the Irish psyche for generations.

This book is colonial cringe distilled into print — the kind that bends over backwards to excuse empire while scolding those who dare to remember its consequences. Kennedy seems more horrified by Irish people claiming their history than by the history itself.

It is revisionism not to illuminate truth, but to dilute it.