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Editor’s Introduction: The 1798 Rebellion and the Irish Republican Tradition

Last year’s bicentennial commemorations of the 1798 rebellion took many forms, particularly in Ireland. There were television and radio documentaries, museum exhibits, dedications of public plaques and monuments, reenactments of battles, scholarly conferences, newspaper articles, and a small avalanche of books covering almost every aspect of the rising and its aftermath. A theme that recurred frequently throughout the bicentenary year is also the subject of this issue of Éire-Ireland. In the pages that follow, a group of historians and literary scholars explore the meaning of ’98 and the republican legacy that it spawned. They approach the subject from a variety of perspectives. Tom Dunne uses a single event, the Battle of New Ross, to examine what he considers to be “the most important and the most difficult question concerning the rebellion”: the motives and mentalities of ordinary insurgents. He questions what might be called an “official” view of the rising that emerged during the bicentenary. According to this view, French and American revolutionary ideology filtered down to the poor from their more enlightened social superiors and inspired them to rebel. Dunne maintains that this scenario ignores an equally potent, if sometimes brutal and sectarian political culture that thrived among ordinary Irish people. Peter Collins is concerned with the ways that later generations have commemorated ’98. As he shows, various groups over the past two centuries have attached their own meanings to the rebellion. They have, in the process, often sparked some colorful contests between competing interests and ideologies, though Collins finds evidence of a new spirit of understanding and accommodation in the recent bicentenary events. Sean Ryder focuses upon a single group, the Young Irelanders, and shows how they remembered ’98 during the 1840s through their poetry, prose, and visual representations. Their movement displayed a broad range of attitudes toward the rebellion that had the ultimate effect of stripping away its earlier sectarian associations and covering over the republican ideals of the insurgents.