Tom Dunne

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Bibliographical details
History and the Public Sphere, ed. by Tom Dunne & Laurence M. Geary (Cork UP 2005), 288pp. CONTENTS: Introduction - Dunne & Geary; Appreciation - J. J. Lee [9]; Message from Conor Cruise O’Brien. [13]; Canon James O. Hannay pays a return visit to the old rectory, Westport, County Mayo, October 8, 2000 - Paul Durcan [15]; John A. Murphy: the singer and the song - Ruth Dudley Edwards Una O’Donoghue [17]; John A. Murphy: scholarly publications, newspaper and periodical contributions, senate speeches and other addresses. [30]; Sect. 2. Essays]; One commonwealth, three nations: the concept of a nation in English Republican thought 1640-80 - Desmond M. Clarke [43]; Personalities and politics: the presidency of Munster and the Lords lieutenant 1660-72 - Liam Irwin [56]; Daniel O’Connell and the debate on anti-slavery, 1820-50 - Maurice J. Bric [69]; beginning of the Irish effort to provide for the Roman Catholic foreign missions before the famine - Emmet Larkin [83]; Nova Scotia, Ireland and the British empire in the writings of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, 1829-46 - Cliona Murphy [100]; Young Ireland in Cork, 1840-49 - Maura Cronin [114]; Anticipating memory: landlordism, agrarianism and deference in late-nineteenth-century Ireland - Laurence M. Geary [127]; Whence Parnell? - Owen Dudley Edwards [140]; Daniel Corkery’s The hidden Ireland and the politics of the Gaelic world - Tom Dunne [161]; To the new world and back with pipes, fiddle and flute: the transmission of Irish traditional music - Tomas Ó Canainn [176]; revival of knock shrine - James S. Donnelly, Jr. [186]; Church or nation: an Irish-American dilemma - Lawrence J. McCaffrey [201]; Unionism and the mass media - Eoghan Harris [213].

[Note: The historical concept of the public sphere was inaugurated by Eric Habermas and is centrally concerned with the uses of memory in the bourgeois world (primarily France, England, and Germany). “History in the Public Sphere” is a course-title in the HIPS MA program launched in conjunction betweeen the Central European University [CEU] and the Graduate School of Global Studies [GSGS] at the Toyko University of Foreign Studies [TUFS] - online; accessed 29.07.2023.]

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Commentary
Brendan Bradshaw, review of Michelle O’Riordain, The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World (Cork UP 1990), in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 1 (Spring 1994), pp.19-22; includes remarks on ‘the anti-nationalist polemic’ of her research supervisor, Dr. Tom Dunne of UCC, ‘The Gaelic Response to Conquestion and Colonisation: The Evidence of the Poetry (Studia Hibernica, 20, 1980, pp.7-30). [See further under Bradshaw.]

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Claire Connolly, ‘Theorising Ireland’, in Irish Studies Review (Dec. 2001), pp.301-16: ‘The sense of moderisation as itself a mythology [...] derived from a powerful sense that something was lost with the leap into the future. This went in parallel with the movement in historical writing about Ireland known as revisionism, essentially the writings of a body of historians concerned to combat narrowly nationalistic (which often meant popular) understandings of Ireland’s past. Revisionism and theory might be expected to be allies, and in some instances were. Among Irish historians, Tom Dunne, for instances, has repeatedly called for a more textually aware historiographical practice, while his own research into Irish-language material continues to pose a challenge to cultural theory.’ (p.306.)

Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839’, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. I [Chap. 10]: ‘Through Owenson [The Wild Irish Girl, 1806], a path can be traced back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bardic verse and the aiding tradition. Another direct source may be found in radical feminist fictions of the 1790s, with their overdetermined politics of plot. More generally, allegory may be seen forming part of what Tom Dunne calls “the colonial character of Irish Romantic literature” (Dunne, p.70): the injunction to speak otherwise ( allos-agoreuein) remained a powerful one throughout the nineteenth century and connects Edgeworth's and other Irish fictions of this period to twentieth-century postcolonial literatures.
 The attachment to allegorical forms within Irish Romanticism marks one of its key differences from mainstream British literary trends in the same period. Critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge contributed to an influential and pervasive devaluation of allegory in contemporary aesthetics; meanwhile, symbol took pride of place as the most sophisticated form of metaphor. Inheritors of this Romantic distruct of the simple and simplifying effects of allegory include the many critics of Irish literature who dismiss national allegories like those of Edgeworth as having an “analgesis” effect.”” (p.414; for full text, go to RICORSO Library, “Irish Critical Classics”, via index or direct..)

[Shirley Kelly,] ‘The Misuses of History’ [interview article], in Books Ireland (March 2004), relates that Dunne is related to Edmund Rice and nearer ancestor his cousin John Rice, who protected women and children from British ire in 1798 and was shot; an uncle Jim played a part in the burning of the Carew house in the War of Independence; Rebellions inspired by ‘gnawing dissatisfaction’ at official 1798 bicentenary commemoration (Comóradh ’98); wrote paper in Journal of Wexford Historical Society; remarks, ‘[...] the official line was to to ignore the hugely important sectarian element of the conflict, as well as agrarian tension, difficult economic circumstances and disputes over recent colonial settlements. Instead the Comóradh committee chose to focus on the idea of a United Irish revolution, bring together “Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter” in the name of progress, as if the ordinary people who fought in ’98 had been transformed into an enlightened bourgeoisie, above and beyond the sectarianism that was in fact endemic in Wexford society at that time. [...] It seemed to me that the hundreds of people who died in ’98 were being recruited to a historical construct that sited the needs of our political leaders at that time.’ Accuses the committee of perpetuating the sectarianism that it refuses to acknowledge in raising a memorial at Scullabogue which defines the massacre as a ‘tragic departure’ fromthe United Irish ideals. (pp.43-44.)

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Quotations
Colonial experience: ‘The experience of colonialism is, above all else perhaps,a psychological one, and is thus particularly manifest in literature. Irish fiction after the Union was intensely and often self-consciously colonial in its ambition to present a more favourable image of Ireland to the imperial political élite, and the extent to which it (like the rhetoric of Irish politicians) was shaped by awareness of this English audience.’ ‘The Insecure Voice: A Catholic Novelist in Support of Emancipation’, in Louis Cullen, Tom Dunne, and L. Bergeron, eds., Culture et Practiques Politiques en France et en Irlande, XVI-XVIIIe Siecle [Actes du Colloque de Marseille 1988 (Paris: Centre de Recherches Historiques [1988]).

Glaring exception: ‘Ireland was the most glaring exception to the social cohesion that marked the United Kingdom as a whole …’ (‘La trahison des clercs: British Intellectuals and the First Home Rule Crisis’, in Irish Historical Studies, xxii, No. 90 (Nov. 1982), pp.134-173[q.p.].)

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