The MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at Maynooth and the MU Sociology cluster “Critical Political Thought, Activism and Alternative Futures” present
Making sense of the Rising: The
role of social science
Public lecture by Donagh Davis
Amid
widespread discussion of Ireland's 'decade of centenaries', one upcoming
anniversary looms particularly large - that of the 1916 Rising. The legacy of
the Rising has been famously controversial - charting a course from lynchpin of
state-sponsored national memorialising up to the 1960s, to subsequently much
more muted official commemoration - and at times bitter contestation - as the legacy
of the Rising came to be seen as tainted by the armed struggle campaign of the
Provisional IRA in the 1970s. With the Provisionals' war coming to an end via
the Northern Peace Process, the coast was clear by the mid-2000s for government
and establishment in the southern state to attempt to reclaim the legacy of
1916. However, it is not just the state that has displayed a newfound interest
in the Rising. Tricolours and explicit references to 1916 are now ubiquitous at
political demonstrations on apparently unrelated topics - such as opposition to
water charges - in ways that would have seemed odd even a few years ago.
References to the 'republic betrayed', and to the broken promises of the 1916
Proclamation, now percolate through anti-austerity discourse. Meanwhile, in
spite of attempts at recuperation of the 1916 legacy by some elements of the
establishment and mainstream political parties, the debate on 1916 within the
intelligentsia has moved on little from the 'revisionism wars' of the 70s, 80s
and 90s - with two sides polarised over the rights and wrongs of the Rising.
While historians have been central to this debate, social scientists have
played little role. Trying to set aside moralising questions of right and
wrong, this talk will ask how social scientists can help make sense of the
events of a hundred years ago. It will suggest that one way to do so is to
strive for a more rigorous causal analysis of why the Rising happened, and
precisely what effect it had on ensuing history. It will also be suggested that
neither partition nor southern secession were inevitable prior to the Rising,
but that the Rising initiated a path-dependent sequence that made these
outcomes extremely difficult to avoid.
Donagh Davis is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology
at Trinity College Dublin, and received his PhD from the European
University Institute in 2015 for the thesis: “Infiltrating History: Structure
and Agency in the Irish Independence Struggle, 1916-21”. His publications
include: "What's so transformative about transformative events? Violence
and temporality in Ireland's 1916 Rising" in Political Violence in
Context: Time, Space and Milieu, edited by L. Bosi, N. Ó Dochartaigh and D.
Pisiou (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2015); and "Revolution" in the Sage
Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought, edited by Gregory Claeys (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013).
Tuesday November 3rd,
6 pm
Maynooth University,
Callan Building, lecture hall CB7 (north campus)
Admission free – all welcome
