Living with the pastThe Heritage of Ireland: Natural, Man-Made and Cultural Heritage; Conservation andInterpretation; Business and Administration by Neil Buttimer; Colin Rynne; Helen GuerinReview by: David BrettThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 28, Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities(Winter, 2001), pp. 188-191Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736062 .

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Living with the Past

Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin (eds.), The Heritage of Ireland: Natural, Man-Made and Cultural Heritage; Conservation and Interpretation; Business and Adminis?

tration. Cork: The Collins Press, 2000. ISBN 1-898256-80-2; 1-898256-15-2. IR &

Stg. ?50.00 hbk; IR & Stg. ?25.00 pbk.

This is a big book. Seventy-plus contributors, 700-plus double-column close

printed pages. To do justice to all its themes and pages in the detail it demands

would require polymathic experience and a review of great length. That task I will

happily forego in the service of studying just what sort of a book this is overall and

the claims it makes for itself.The editors' general aims include an intention 'to stress

the analytic and discursive aspect to our title, as opposed to the compila tory charac?

ter of a directory' (p. xii).

The working definition of 'heritage' followed by the book is that of 'anything transmitted by past ages and ancestors' (p. l).This is about as compendious a basket

as can be found; it allows us to deal with very nearly everything that actually exists:

but by putting everything together under the one heading

we are in danger of

making category mistakes of a serious kind.

It is also assumed that the care of this vast realm is s elf-evidently a good thing.

We should remember that this is a not a universal assumption; in the eighteenth

century we might have wished to get rid of anything smacking of Gothic bar?

barism, in the nineteenth huge clear-outs took place in the name of progress and

in the twentieth how many calls were heard to dynamite the museums? We ought

to challenge the assumption, just because it is an assumption now reinforced with

government money and a great deal of social orthodoxy. The real interest lies not

in 'where do you come from?' (how often we hear that question in Ireland!) but in

'where are you going?' But granting this assumption pro tern, how does this book

make out?

The first response is that the details are immensely interesting, and that some of the

papers are telegrams of compressed learning backed up with very useful bib?

liographies; but that the whole is rather less than the sum of the parts. This derives

from the pre-position in the very title - the heritage OF Ireland, not heritage IN

Ireland. But can this be sustained when a great deal of what is under discussion is

not peculiar to this 'Ireland'?

Vernacular architecture is discussed by Fidelma Mullane in a particularly

thoughtful and concentrated essay (the bibliography is a wonder to behold). She

surveys the way in which the field has been defined and redefined by different

scholars and their different mixes of disciplines. She concludes: 'We should be ask?

ing not how we can "save" traditional buildings, rather how we can bear witness to

the departure of this extraordinary architecture and how we can be inspired by it to

build a new and equally enduring rural architecture in the new Ireland' (p. 77). But

there is rather little in this contribution that could not be said of other countries or

188 BRETT, 'Living with the Past', Irish Review 28 (2001)

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parts of the world where the rural fabric has been disrupted by modernity. Nor is

the kind of basic dwelling house most studied peculiar to Ireland - allowing for

changes in materials, it can be found all along the Atlantic coast from Brittany and

even to New England by way of Norway and the Faeroes. In this case, the editorial

strategy (OF Ireland) pushes the contributors toward a parochial interpretation of

their material whether they intend it or not.

This in turn directs our critical attention to a further strategic problem; the

distinction made in the subtitle between 'man-made' and 'cultural' heritage. This is

an obstacle to understanding, and I am at a loss to know how it can be either imag?

ined or sustained. Our most secure knowledge of the past comes from objects and

buildings. There are, for example, a

large number of Romanesque sites in Ireland,

with churches and castles in sufficient state of repair for us to be able to reconstruct

their originals with a decent degree of confidence (either on paper or, less securely,

in stone). This is, in fact, what happened in the later part of the nineteenth century,

when architects such as Godwin and Lynn paraphrased ancient models to good

effect. Such knowledge is scientific in character, in that one can check back from

the reconstituted model to the original and be found wrong. Further, because our

knowledge of the Romanesque in Ireland can be checked and compared with

other cases, we have some real basis for asking in what degree Irish Romanesque is

sufficiently distinct from other variants to be distinctly Irish and what that conclu?

sion might actually mean. How, on the other hand, does one check back to the

history of Gaelic games or 'traditional' music, whose origins and histories are con?

founded in fabulous conjectures? The quality of the knowledges in these cases are

of entirely different kinds, not degrees. So must be their preservation, presentation

and interpretation.

Rachel Moss's contribution on 'Architecture' is a survey of the ways in which

architecture in Ireland has been studied and conserved (or not) and, like several

other essays in this volume, is very useful; the historiography reveals the con?

structed character of most notions of 'Ireland' and 'Irish architecture'. The

confident contribution on 'Gaelic Games' (Tom Humphries) is undefaced by any such scholarship, yet the codification of village sports by the GAA is a locus classicus

of 'nationalisation' and invented tradition, and remains so to this day.

A related problem exists in the field of civil engineering. Fastnet Rock Light? house

? a memorable object if ever there was one -

is certainly in Ireland, but in

what sense is it oflreland when its very existence is predicated on the British Admi?

ralty, Trinity House and other earlier bodies whose main concern was the control

of the North Atlantic for the purposes of British trade and the defence of the realm.

Ron Cox's short paper on this field is concerned mainly with the problems of enu?

meration and the models for assessment that need to be considered; he has no need

to ask the interpretive questions in this place. But to make an object meaningful,

the interpretive and analytic questions must be put, sooner or later. How does the

lighthouse come to be? At that point the Heritage of Ireland gets swallowed up in

geo-politics. There is, almost incidentally, an essay on

shipwrecks but none on ship?

building. It is simply not true ? as it is alleged in some essays

? that Ireland has little

BRETT, 'Living with the Past', Irish Review 28 (2001) 189

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secure industrial history. What do the editors think was going on in nineteenth

and early-twentieth-century Belfast? (A bit of critical company history would not

go amiss here ? not just Harland and Wolff, but Shorts and Sirocco). Where is the

heritage of flax or the craft-based industries of glass and silver?

Overall there is a certain coyness in dealing with The North; the industrial his?

tory and heritage of Belfast does not relate to 'Ireland' half so much as it relates to

its conjoined rivals of Glasgow and Liverpool. This can be noted just as much in the

architecture and the social mix. In this case, the fundamental geographic unit of

study is not 'Ireland' but 'the Irish Sea'. As a general rule, large objects such as build?

ings, ships and bridges are not easily fitted into national concepts of heritage,

because architecture, engineering and the like are pre-eminently transnational

enterprises. I also incline to the view that the separation between 'man-made' and

'cultural' heritage (which I take to be unsupportable nonsense) follows from the

essentialist notion that heritage is (possessively) of a nation or state, rather than

(indicatively) in a geographical or other area. The failure to be clear about this is a

fundamental analytic failure, which weakens the totality of the book and some of

the contributions to it. This has to be said, firmly, because a vagueness about cate?

gories infects the whole realm of 'heritage'.

It is well to point out this strategic weakness because once we get it out of the

way, we can look at the individual contributions for their own sake; and many of

these are excellent. The more strictly academic contributions in particular

seem to

this reader very well worthwhile; J.J. Lee's study of Irish history turns out to be a

study of the discipline of doing history in Ireland, while William Nolan does some?

thing similar with historical and cultural geography. Part social history and part

historiography, both these (and others) actually start by raising the very problem of

the prepositions. I was also struck by Diarmuid O'Gioll?in s essay on folklore and

ethnology. Taken altogether, this group of essays provides an excellent conspectus of

the kinds of study anyone wanting to make a critical approach to heritage in (or of)

Ireland would need to make. This is backed up by learned, approachable pieces on

libraries and archives.

I am less happy about the section 'Heritage and the Arts' because, quite apart

from its separation from 'man-made' and 'cultural' heritage, it deals largely with

contemporary activity. For the life of me I can't see how, for example, the work of

artists like Alice Maher, Brian Maguire and others can be incorporated into 'her?

itage'. They would be staggered at the thought of it. It is, moreover, an intensely

Dublin-centred account that is given by Peter Murray, as if Belfast did not exist or

was not in 'Ireland'. A rather similar difficulty arises concerning 'science'; the his?

tory of scientific activity in Ireland is a very interesting one, but, as Gordon Davies

shows, difficult to present being 'woven into the vast international tapestry which is

modern science' (p. 189). It is, of course, very hard to point to any contemporary

activity which is specific to one country or region, and which is not a kind of fos?

sil. Contemporary culture (in which I include science) has no boundaries.

There is a very substantial section on issues of management and the politics and

economics involved in heritage. Most of this is descriptive. It demonstrates the

190 BRETT, 'Living with the Pasf, Irish Review 28 (2001)

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growth of a bureaucracy in response to an ideological demand. That demand is not

so much 'national' these days as increasingly regional or local; every place must be

different and have its unique and specific character. And where character is missing

it must damn well be invented! The ideological drive of this is quite clear: it is to

construct differences in such a way as they are contained in the sameness of trans?

national economies, giving us the illusion (and it is an illusion) that there are

differently located 'cultures'.The truth is, surely, that we all, without any exceptions,

live in the mesh of many cultural connections, layers and networks, nearly all of

which are held in common across the modern world. The more we are made cor?

porate the more we seek to evade it. Heritage, it becomes clear, is deeply implicated

in the managerial attempt to fit us into a new world.

This idea surfaces here and there amongst the contributions. Donncha Kavanagh,

writing on 'Management's Heritage', gives us a fine short course in the critical his?

tory of management. He links the blurring of the private and the public economic

sectors (typical of recent years) with the way in which managerial methods have col?

onized what was hitherto thought to be unmanageable -

'culture', the arts, history

and the past. We are now afflicted with reality of the 'cultural managers'. What, he

asks, should be the values of this new social formation? They are

evidently responsi?

ble for more than preservation; analysis and interpretation are embedded in the very

principle of management, and it would be well to make this explicit rather than

allow unspoken assumptions and given meanings to percolate through. As Pat Cooke

writes in his piece on 'The Principles of Interpretation','Increasingly, we are

having

to reckon with the fact that in our contemporary world all values are open to con?

testation. The most effective way to deal with these relativities is to change the

emphasis in interpretation from revelation to exploration' (p. 378).

My conclusion has to be that this book in its very diverse contents provides a

comprehensive survey of matters which everyone concerned with our conjoined,

social relation to the past will need to consider, but that taken as a whole it demon?

strates and embodies the problems of categorization and critical method with

which it has failed to deal.

DAVID BRETT

Contested Rights and Relationships Sean Farrell, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. ISBN 0-8131-2171

X. Stg. ?29.50.

Graham Ellison and Jim Smyth, The Crowned Harp: Policing Northern Ireland. Lon?

don: Pluto Press, 2000. ISBN 0-74531393-0. Stg. ?45.00 hbk; Stg. ?14.99 pbk.

Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Hie Politics of Force: Conflict Management and State Violence in

Northern Ireland. Belfast: BlackstafTPress, 2000. ISBN 0-85640-688-6. Stg. ?14.99 pbk.

COCHRANE, 'Contested Rights and Relationships', Irish Review 28 (2001) 191

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