Abstract
Forgetful Remembrance is a remarkable achievement. It offers a case study of communal forgetting and remembering that has applicability well beyond the confines of Irish historical scholarship. By examining how the failed rebellion of 1798 in Ulster was remembered and forgotten, Beiner offers an intricate and thought-provoking analysis; indeed, the author's intellectual curiosity and scholarly range are exceptional. He does so by revisiting ‘the relationship between remembering and forgetting, in terms of social forgetting, and in the study of history, in terms of vernacular historiography’ (p. xviii). Social forgetting contrasts with personal and private commemoration, and to access this, Beiner's source base – vernacular historiography – involves non-standard sources and archives such as the provincial press, oral history, material culture, literature and modern social media. He shows how these can be used to illuminate the social forgetting of a Presbyterian-led rising that preserved sensitive memories outside the public sphere.
The book is divided into eight roughly chronological chapters. It opens with a discussion of pre-memory by which the events preceding the summer of 1798 were often fashioned in order to ensure they were not forgotten, including the fate of the accidental martyr, William Orr. The aftermath of the rebellion was a time of public and official silence, yet private/clandestine commemorations helped the emergence of ‘a tensely ambiguous culture of social forgetting’ (p. 144). This continued into the first half of the nineteenth century when reticence reigned in Presbyterian communities, yet collectors such as R. R. Madden, Samuel McSkimmin and Classon Porter ensured that the recollections of participants were recorded. Their work informed the upsurge of interest after 1850 as nationalists gradually claimed the rebellion, most notably through the efforts of Francis Joseph Bigger. Yet Protestant unionists did not vacate the field, as shown by the important contributions of, amongst others, William McComb, Robert Magill Young and W. T. Latimer. The centenary of the rebellion in 1898 extended the appropriation of 1798 by nationalists, yet the struggle between constitutionalists and republicans after the Parnell split complicated matters and 1898 became an important staging-post for 1916 rising. The efforts of nationalism, broadly conceived, heightened social forgetting amongst many Ulster Protestants and led to acts of de-commemoration, most notably the destruction by Orangemen of the memorial to Betsy Gray near Ballynahinch. After partition, the ‘short twentieth century’ was one of restored forgetting as the atmosphere of the unionist state inhibited social memory, not least because 1798 was appropriated by the IRA and used as a stick with which to beat Protestants for their alleged political apostasy. The bicentenary of the rebellion and the Peace Process meant that 1798 was once more reused by various groups, including governments, local historians and Ulster Scots activists. After such an exhaustive survey, Beiner has demonstrated that it is not possible to talk about forgetting in the accepted sense; social forgetting was not collective amnesia and the relationships between public silence and private remembrance need to be carefully considered in all their variety.
The book is not a study of northern Presbyterians, though they do provide the bulk of the interest. Generally speaking, the analysis is accurate and perceptive, though there are some errors (e.g. the denominational affiliation of the Revd William Bruce), and the spelling of Ulster place names is erratic (e.g. ‘Irvenstown’ (p. 280), Petigo (p. 344)). The work offers a compelling description of memory and forgetting over time, though the reasons why Presbyterian unionists continued to be interested in 1798 could be more discriminating. Beiner is aware of differences within and between loyalist and Presbyterian communities, yet in the nineteenth-century chapters, the distinctiveness of Presbyterian voices is rather downplayed. The impression is created that liberal unionists in Presbyterian-dominated east Ulster who offered sympathetic accounts of their United Irish forbearers were somehow too good to be true. Attention is rightly focused on the Church of Ireland cultural nationalist F. J. Bigger, but the discussion is less developed of Presbyterian antiquarians and historians who were Bigger's associates in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, including W. F. McKinney, W. T. Latimer, W. S. Smith and R. M. Young. As Presbyterian liberal unionists recognised that 1798 happened before the Act of Union, they could reconcile their unionism with an understanding of why many Presbyterians rebelled. In particular, this underlines the point that the intra-Protestant tensions that played a large role in provoking Presbyterian radicalism, namely, social and religious struggles with the Church of Ireland and landlords, continued to inform Presbyterian attitudes to religious ascendency and would be expressed in the Ulster Covenant of 1912. This was itself a reflection of the complexity of the 1790s. The scholarly focus tends to be on the liberal and progressive features of the United Irishmen, less on the popular sectarianism they sometimes deliberately fomented, and it needs to be remembered that the majority of Presbyterians did not rebel. The discussion of the short twentieth century has important things to say about ‘secular’ Protestants such as John Hewitt, Sam Hanna Bell and Stuart Parker, but little about ‘religious’ Protestants. In particular, the failure to even note the name of the Revd J. M. Barkley is a significant omission. Barkley was the foremost Presbyterian historian of the mid-twentieth century and openly identified with the Presbyterian United Irishmen of the 1790s. Although he was condemned by many as an ecumenical sell-out, he was a conservative Presbyterian who became the principal of the denominational training college in Belfast. Barkley's outspokenness contrasts with Hewitt's self-censorship in his unpublished Master’s dissertation on the rhyming weavers that deliberately began in 1800 to avoid 1798 (p. 520). Hewitt's reticence also contrasts with official publications issued by the Northern Ireland government that continued to refer to the events of 1798. Although often muted, the fact the event was noted at all is striking.
This book will be required reading for scholars of collective memory and commemoration for decades to come. It will also be an invaluable resource for historians of Ireland, Ulster and the 1798 rebellion. They will find in the references an abundance of sources that have been utilised by other scholars but which are not widely known. The author weaves a complex and believable tapestry and has an eye for the tellingly odd and, sometimes, absurd. Forgetful Remembrance deserves the accolades and praise that will rightly come its way.