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Post by cato on Aug 22, 2019 20:39:11 GMT
Olivia O Leary is fronting a two part documentary on Daniel O Connell on RTE tonight. O Leary a long term RTE veteran gushes she would love to meet O Connell the man who" fought for rights for all and for the seperation of church and state". It will be interesting to see how much King Dan will resemble a 2018 pro Repeal politician.
In another RTE news story tonight we hear how those traditional Irish thugs and all round bad guys, the Vikings helped reverse a 200 year population decline. What makes this significant is that it implies traditional Saints and Scholars Ireland was in serious decline prior to the Viking invasion. Recent scholarship has stressed the positives to the Viking presence contradicting the traditional narrative sometimes to the extent of sometimes ,becoming ridiculous by minimising the savagery and barbarism of the new comers.
Of course historians and archaeologists aren't immune from ideology and it is interesting that what previous generations viewed as traumatic invasions are now re-interpreted as normal population shifts over time , "proving" modern immigration is nothing new.
Modern secular Ireland is literally rewriting Irish history.What was that old cliche again about the victors writing history?
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Post by kj on Aug 23, 2019 8:17:42 GMT
Things like this are driven by a couple of motivations at least:
A) As you say, the need to refit the past to suit current ideology.
B) In academic circles, new 'theories' or 'interpretations' are needed to justify a person's lectureship and so on. Hence everything needs to be re-written with a new 'paradigm' and 'more sophistication.'
Personally, I've reached a stage where I just want facts, dates and numbers and I'll make up my own mind, thanks. It reminds me of a letter by Samuel Beckett where he complained of a book he picked up when wanting to learn about Martin Luther - paraphrasing, but it ran roughly, "I want a good old-fashioned history book that gives me dates and names and places. I say all of talk of 'German historical destiny' starts the vomit moving upwards."
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Aug 23, 2019 9:09:32 GMT
Olivia O Leary is fronting a two part documentary on Daniel O Connell on RTE tonight. O Leary a long term RTE veteran gushes she would love to meet O Connell the man who" fought for rights for all and for the seperation of church and state". It will be interesting to see how much King Dan will resemble a 2018 pro Repeal politician. In another RTE news story tonight we hear how those traditional Irish thugs and all round bad guys, the Vikings helped reverse a 200 year population decline. What makes this significant is that it implies traditional Saints and Scholars Ireland was in serious decline prior to the Viking invasion. Recent scholarship has stressed the positives to the Viking presence contradicting the traditional narrative sometimes to the extent of sometimes ,becoming ridiculous by minimising the savagery and barbarism of the new comers. We are always told the Vikings benefited us by founding the first cities. What's so great about that? I don't see anything wonderful about cities. And they would have appeared soon enough, anyway. Even the impeccably leftist Simon Schama, in his "History of Britain" series, complains about the modern-day sanitising of the Vikings. In these days of heightened cultural sensitivities, I demand my right to be offended by the Viking tour buses of Dublin, where the passengers wear Viking hats and let out a cheer at regular intervals. It's pure post-colonial triumphalism. |
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Post by cato on Aug 23, 2019 11:50:53 GMT
I recall a high profile atheist professor linked to people before profit (charity prevents me naming him) claiming an account of the Vikings desecrating the church in Clonmacnoise by performing pagan rites on the high altar was most likely clerical propaganda.
He also couldn't understand the "big deal about the row in the early Irish church over the date of Easter. Historians at one point were asked to be impartial or more realistically to attempt to understand why people thought and acted as they did in the past by trying a little humble empathy.
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Post by Tomas on Aug 25, 2019 20:45:06 GMT
I recall a high profile atheist professor linked to people before profit (charity prevents naming him) claiming an account of the Vikings desecrating the church in Clonmacnoise by performing pagan rites on the high altar was most likely clerical propaganda. He also couldn't understand the "big deal about the row in the early Irish church over the date of Easter. Historians at one point were asked to be impartial or more realistically to attempt to understand why people thought and acted as they did in the past by trying a little humble empathy. If modern day atheist professors were to meet the people of history they would no doubt be humbled down fast enough when they saw and felt what was actually taking place. |
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Post by cato on Sept 1, 2019 21:14:21 GMT
I finally got around to watching a recording of the first episode of the O Connell documentary and was pleasantly suprised. It is a relaxed leisurely look at O Connell the man , the lawyer and the politician. It is beautifully filmed and could have been made by the Kerry tourist board! I certainly intend to visit the stunningly beautiful Kingdom soon.
It should still be available to view on the RTE player. I 'll post more thoughts when I view part two.
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Post by cato on Sept 17, 2019 9:07:42 GMT
Episode two continues the story to include O Connells decline and death in Genoa on the way to Rome. I detected a rather condescending disappointed tone in O Learys treatment that the liberator actually went on a pilgrimage to Rome of all places. There were a few little digs about O Connell wanting a seperation of church and state without exploring this fully. It is highly unlikely this opponent of the French revolution would have embraced the anti catholic secular version of seperation of church and state that seems de rigeur the among Irish anti clericals of 2019.
O Leary was in very good form when she tackled Eoin O Broin, an up and coming Sinn Fein
TD, who claimed O Connell bottled it by cancelling his Clontarf demonstration. Given the British banned it and had field guns and warship guns trained on Clontarf
O Broin's cavalier approach to human life was robustly challenged by O Leary who narrates a story of John Hume who was opposed to any demonstration that put human life in peril. She specifically mentioned Hume had opposed the Bloody Sunday March as it was too dangerous given the tensions of the time. An interesting and all too rare criticism of the modern saintly left wing Sinn Fein narrative.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 17, 2019 9:53:53 GMT
Episode two continues the story to include O Connells decline and death in Genoa on the way to Rome. I detected a rather condescending disappointed tone in O Learys treatment that the liberator actually went on a pilgrimage to Rome of all places. There were a few little digs about O Connell wanting a seperation of church and state without exploring this fully. It is highly unlikely this opponent of the French revolution would have embraced the anti catholic secular version of seperation of church and state that seems de rigeur the among Irish anti clerical of 2019. I was reading a volume of speeches and papers by Archbishop John Healy, who was bishop of Tuam from 1903 to 1918. I was surprised to find a robust defence of religious freedom, which Healy explicitly preferred to the confessional state model. |
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Post by cato on Sept 17, 2019 11:43:30 GMT
Episode two continues the story to include O Connells decline and death in Genoa on the way to Rome. I detected a rather condescending disappointed tone in O Learys treatment that the liberator actually went on a pilgrimage to Rome of all places. There were a few little digs about O Connell wanting a seperation of church and state without exploring this fully. It is highly unlikely this opponent of the French revolution would have embraced the anti catholic secular version of seperation of church and state that seems de rigeur the among Irish anti clerical of 2019. I was reading a volume of speeches and papers by Archbishop John Healy, who was bishop of Tuam from 1903 to 1918. I was surprised to find a robust defence of religious freedom, which Healy explicitly preferred to the confessional state model. I have been dipping into Healy's Centenary history of Maynooth college published in 1897 and he comes across as less than enthusiastically Ultramontane at times. There is a rather stereotypical view of a mindless rigid monochrome form of Catholicism in pre 1960s Catholicism. There is suprisingly little literature on the doctrinal debates and issues within Irish Catholicism. |
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