ABSTRACT
The beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century is an appropriate time to take stock of Irish nationalism and its place in Irish historical scholarship. This non-national approach to the history of Ireland had profound implications for the history of Irish nationalism, for it challenged the whole basis on which Irish nationalism, as a political idea, was founded – the idea that there was an historic people, a community whose national consciousness could be traced down the ages, and whose struggle to survive is the central theme of Irish history. History is a matter of facing the facts of the Irish past, however painful some of them may be; mythology is a way of refusing to face the historical facts. The connection between politics and history involves the Irish historian in a self-consciousness about his work in a way that English historians find unusual or even exaggerated.
