President Michael D Higgins bemoaned the declining status of history to an audience in Dublin Castle this evening, as Ireland’s top academics gathered to launch a new landmark history of Ireland.
The new book, the Cambridge History of Ireland, covers 15 centuries, with Trinity’s Jane Ohlmeyer, the Director of the Long Room Hub and Chair of the Irish Research Council, editing one volume of the book.
In a wide-ranging speech that saw Higgins both praise the power and relevance of chronicling our history, while also taking aim at the rise of “metrics” in academia, which he said helped produce “utilitarian mediocrity”, he ultimately offered a rigorous defence of history as an academic powerhouse.
Through this and previous histories, he said: “We witness a history that is constantly open to change. And we’re all the better for it.”
Higgins also expressed sympathy for the new “precariat” generation of academics on temporary contracts.
“The Cambridge History of Ireland represents this generation’s ‘take’ on the scholarship of the last 40 years. It is an attempt to offer a synthesis of the published and unpublished research done since the 1970s. In short, this is a history for our times; one that will serve as a springboard for further research and reflection in the future”, Ohlmeyer said in a press statement.
Ohlmeyer’s volume looks at Ireland’s tumultuous years between 1550 and 1730, offering new perspectives on the political, military, religious, social and intellectual history of early modern Ireland.
Tonight’s audience, which included Provost Patrick Prendergast and the President of Dublin City University, Brian MacCraith, as well as former Provost John Hegarty, consisted of some of the leading names in arts and social science academia.
The book’s General Editor, Thomas Bartlett, was the Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin and the Professor of Irish History at the University of Aberdeen until his retirement in 2014. Volume three is edited by James Kelly, the Professor of History at Dublin City University and President of the Irish Economic and Social History Society.
Brendan Smith, the editor of volume one, is the Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bristol.
Work began on the book in 2014, with contributions coming from academics in China, the US, Israel and beyond. One third of the contributors work in UK universities, a testament, Ohlmeyer said, to the “close historical and human links of these islands”.
“As Brexit highlights, the Irish question never dies, it just gets reformulated”, she added.
