The Story of Ireland, by A.M. Sullivan

Fóɼam Staiɼe Iaɼṫar Ċoɼcaí

(The West Cork History Forum)

A West Cork History Festival was launched in July 2017. Its patron was Simon Kingston. Its opening address was delivered by Roy Foster, who has been a Professor at a number of Universities in England. The major West Cork historian, Alexander Martin Sullivan, was not mentioned at the Festival.

Members of the Aubane Historical Society took issue, in the discussion period, with a number of gross inaccuracies in Professor Foster’s lecture. The major inaccuracy was the assertion that Charles Haughey was a convicted gun-runner for the IRA. Foster and Kingston did not stand over that assertion when it was pointed out that Haughey was subjected to a criminal trial on the issue and that the jury found him not guilty in the light of the evidence. The factual detail of the Trial has been assembled and published by a member of the Aubane Historical Society, and it is plain for all to see that the State, for some political purpose, brought a criminal charge which it had no evidence to support.

Simon Kingston did not commend the Aubane group for correcting Professor Foster, and preventing his History Festival from launching itself on a groundless fable. What he did after the first session was suggest to the Aubane group that they should leave the Festival as their intervention had not been helpful—it was not the kind of thing the Festival members wanted to hear. He said they wanted to listen to “a real historian”, Professor Foster - who had been demonstrated to be a retailer of fables.

A.M. Sullivan was not unknown to Professor Foster. Foster’s Inaugural Lecture at Oxford,1 Dec. 1994, had been about him. And Foster had written a book about him called the The Irish Story. The Story of Ireland was the title of Sullivan’s main work. Foster asserted that in this work Sullivan had launched a fashion of Irish national history-writing as a telling of fairy-stories, in which facts were made up to fit the story instead of the story being a relation of the sequence of facts.

Foster did not take issue with any of the factual detail of Sullivan’s History. What he did was misquote him as saying that he intended to make up history, leaving the facts aside. So, if Sullivan was a self-confessed falsifier of history, there was no need to argue with him over historical facts.

It is a sign of the times that the Irish Universities did not demolish Foster’s caricature of Sullivan. Since they have not done it, and Kingston’s lavishly funded History Festival is not about history, it falls to some of us who are neither academics nor millionaires to do it. Because history is about the future no less than the past. That is why Fóɼam Staiɼe Iaɼṫar Ċoɼcaí (The West Cork History Forum) has been formed.

Sullivan was part of the influential movement known as the Bantry Band. His brother was the song-writer who wrote God Save Ireland. Another member of the Band was the pioneer of native capitalism, the notorious William Martin Murphy—who was not a Merchant Prince but an entrepreneur who clawed his way up from the bottom. Approve of them or disapprove of them as you will, these are people who should be known about in this era of go-ahead entrepreneurship.

THE PROGRAMME

The Forum will be launched at the West Cork Hotel, Skibbereen, on Friday 9^th August, 2019 at 7.30pm

Cathaoirleach : Donnchadh Ó Séaghdha

Seán Ó Ceilleachair, the Battle of Crossbarry

Con O’Callaghan, the Kilmichael Ambush

Brendan Clifford, launch of a new publication on the West Cork Historian, A.M. Sullivan.

Questions and Answers

EVERYBODY WELCOME

The Story of Ireland, by A.M. Sullivan