Life
Irish historian; senior lecturer, University of Ulster; Professor of Irish
History, QUB, 1997.
Quotations
S. J. Connolly, ‘Cultural Identity and Tradition’, in Brian
Graham, ed., In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography of Ireland (Routledge 1997): […] The place of Jacobitism in all of this
provides a particularly vivid example of the way in which the apparent
continuities of Irish political history can conceal what are in fact striking
changes in content and definition. Loyalty to the exiled House of Stuart,
and the repudiation it necessarily involved of the ruling Hanoverian dynasty
is all too easily assimilated to the image of a long-standing tradition
of Irish (and Catholic) resistance to ‘English’ rule. And indeed
it may well be that Irish Jacobitism, like its Scottish counter-part,
was among other things a vehicle for a strongly felt resentment at political
subordination to those who were perceived as foreigners. But the fact
remains that Jacobitism, concerned to set a Scottish dynasty on the united
thrones of Great Britain and Ireland, was by definition a British political
ideology like the earlier service of Irish Catholics in the armies of
James II, it derived its whole rationale from an assumption that the three
kingdoms of the British Isles would remain under one sovereign. More important
still, Jacobitism was inherently conservative. Its political theory rejected
Whig notions of a contract between rulers and ruled in favour of the claims
of heredity and divine right; in its specifically Irish manifestation,
it looked back to the aristocratic and fiercely anti-egalitarian world
of the pre-plantation Gaelic past. In so far as it contributed to the
sort of disaffection represented by the Defenders, this required a radical
redefinition in which a dynastic and aristocratic ideology rooted in the
Europe of the ancien régime was recast in terms of the egalitarian
republicanism of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions. Resentment
of past wrongs shifted from the overthrow of the Gaelic aristocracy to
an imagined dispossession of the Irish people as a whole; deliverance
came to mean, not the return of a Stuart monarchs but the establishment
of an Irish republic. The reappearance of expectations of French military
assistance masked the transition from the Catholic absolutism of Louis
XIV and his successors to the revolutionary republic. In all these respects,
the tunes being played by late eighteenth-century opponents of the established
order were superficially familiar; but the words being sung to them were
wholly new.’ (p.52.) [See under Library/Criticism/GrahamB1; also
under Thomas Davis, Geoffrey Keating, Charles Stewart Parnell, et al.]
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