Patrick O’Farrell and the Irish History Wars, 1971–1993

While Patrick O’Farrell's achievements as an historian of the Irish and of Catholicism in Australia are well recognised, little attention has been paid to his significance as an historian of Ireland. This article takes his two major Irish monographs, published in 1971 and 1975, and considers how they influenced leading Irish political historians of the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the article examines the crisis created for historians by the Northern Ireland Troubles. It demonstrates that the work of O’Farrell, which called into question the primacy of politics and of the nation state, helped open up new avenues for the analysis of Irish culture and identity. Yet, at the same time, such an approach challenged the republican reading of Irish history as a struggle against colonialism, and thus O’Farrell's work attracted severe criticism.     

‘Democracy’ in Northern Ireland: experiments in self–rule from the Protestant Ascendancy to the Good Friday Agreement

Pierre van den Berghe has argued that democracy in divided societies can take five different forms: Herrenvolk democracy, ethnic democracy, liberal democracy, multicultural democracy and consociational democracy. My article argues that each of van den Berghe’s five versions of democracy, or relatives of them, has been experimented with in pre–partition Ireland and Northern Ireland. While all have clear limits, the one that is most suited to Northern Ireland’s conditions is consociational democracy. The article discusses some limits of the consociational approach in Northern Ireland but also defends it against common criticisms.