History is necessarily retrospective. Politics is prospective. Good history is concerned with truth. Bad history tries to use a particular version of events for contemporary political purposes.

Of course, history is inevitably written and understood from a contemporary perspective. But good historians know that and attempt to carry out their craft in that awareness.

One of Ireland’s greatest modern historians, the late Ronan Fanning, wrote a magnificent history of Ireland entitled Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. It was published in 2013 and I feel it should almost be compulsory reading for any thinking Irish citizen who wants a clear understanding of the factors at play in the emergence of the Irish State.

Fanning, perhaps more than most historians, aspired to and achieved a sense of clarity and objectivity in his writing. He was at pains to warn his readers that writing and understanding the period from 1910 to 1922 in the aftermath of the 1998 Belfast Agreement might give rise to “a bland, bloodless and bowdlerised hybrid of history, designed to offend no one, in the pious hope that it may command unanimous acquiescence”. This was a phenomenon branded by his fellow historian Bernard Lewis as “history not as it was . . . but as they would prefer it to have been”.

Fourteen cattle........

© The Irish Times