Two Mid-century Narratives

There are two powerful ways of considering Irish history in the midnineteenth century. One is to regard it simply as post-Famine Ireland. The other is to see it, in a much more buoyant way, as mid-Victorian Ireland. Both approaches are important although angled very differently. The former is the traditional strand, very much emphasised by classic general histories and also in histories of agriculture and rural life. F. S. L. Lyons' magisterial Ireland Since the Famine (1973) takes the event as its point of departure, not only because of its severe immediate effect which was ‘to impose an overwhelming burden of suffering upon an impoverished and defenceless people’ but also – and in his reading, more importantly – because of its profound ‘psychological legacy’, which consisted, he claims, in a deep-rooted and long-lasting hatred for the English connection. For scholars focusing on agricultural history, the Famine is the dividing line between two land economies. Moreover, an interpretative emphasis on the legacy of the Famine lends itself to studying the politicisation of the Irish diaspora and also to studying the groundwork for a politics of discontent, which surfaced in the emergence of the separatist Fenian movement. Both are highly interconnected because the radical initiatives often came from the Irish living outside Ireland. The narrative of near-universal exile discontent has been questioned by Akenson, however, who interrogates the conventional wisdom that the exiled Irish always bore hatred for British institutions when they went abroad.