Tim Pat did not say whether he believes there are similarly sectarian attitudes on the part of nationalists. Little wonder his efforts failed, given his sweepingly dismissive attitude to one of the parties involved. The comment was made in the context of attempts Coogan says he made to bring together northern Protestants and Catholics. Or is Tim Pat saying that the very union itself is intrinsically sectarian? Unfortunately his interviewer did not press him to elaborate. there’s an irreducible minimum quotient in unionism of absolute bigotry and sectarianism’ (HI 12.2, Summer 2004)? Did he mean that individual unionists are all bigots scratch beneath the surface and every single one of them is sectarian? Perhaps he was referring to a particular grouping or strain within unionism, leaving open the possibility that there are some ‘good’ unionists untainted by the minimum quotient. What on earth did Tim Pat Coogan mean by saying ‘. However, for those among us who spurn Whiggish history and seek a more balanced and rational view of Ireland’s past, then Mr Coogan has little to offer except, if I may continue with the culinary metaphor, food poisoning! His avowed disdain of so-called ‘dehydrated, dull’ history allows him to place emotion at the heart of his ‘historical representation’, thus enabling him to obfuscate and relegate as background colour events, themes and trends which are normally more centre-stage in modern historical analysis.įor those people who like their Irish history piping hot, combined with a nauseating self-righteous, Anglophobic moral indignation, overlaid with a layer of very thick green sauce to sweeten their very sensitive Gaedhil nationalist palates, then Mr Coogan is for them. Mr Coogan’s emotive obsession with personality is very revealing of his attitude to historical inquiry. Inside the last twenty years or so, so-called ‘castle historians’, to use but one term of denigration, have succeeded in breaking through the hard-walled core of Irish nationalist historiography to reveal a complex, surprising, and untidy reality that challenges traditional assumptions about Ireland’s past. Mr Coogan’s rant against revisionism was puerile, disingenuous, and akin to skeleton-rattling rather than a genuine critical onslaught. The nationally minded renowned academic Professor Bradshaw afforded the green light to Mr Coogan in every sense of the word, allowing him to propagate, unchallenged, his Gaedhil distorted nationalist image of Irish history. ,-Brendan Bradshaw’s interview technique in relation to Tim Pat Coogan (HI 12.2, Summer 2004) was anodyne in the extreme.
Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Issue 3 (Autumn 2004), Letters, Letters, Volume 12
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