The debate on the nation and its history is new to England; and there is, perhaps, a tendency to assume that what is new in England is new everywhere. In Ireland, the debate has been going on since the 1970s, fuelled by what is called ‘revisionism’; or rather, by a new meaning given to what has always been regarded as the task of the historian: to write new history based on new evidence or the reinterpretation of already existing evidence. Lone scholars, immured in Chancery Lane, the national Library of Ireland, and other repositories, suddenly discovered from the 1970s that they were engaged, whether they liked it or not, in political controversy. They were accused, particularly, of seeking to denigrate Ireland’s national (or nationalist) heroes; of depriving the nation of dignity and its rightful place in history; even of justifying the partition of Ireland in 1921. Their reply – that Unionism too had been revised (as for example in the thoroughly researched and critical books of Patrick Buckland in Liverpool University) seemed not to blunt the criticism; indeed, if anything it sharpened it, for this was dismissed as the token critique offered so that the main project – the demolition of the Irish nationalist tradition – could proceed unchecked...