Thomas Bartlett

Life
b.. Belfast; ed. QUB; Professor of history, UCD; inaug. address entitled “Acts of Union” (2000); works on 18th century revolutionary Dublin in the 18th century; incl. Letters of Francis Higgins (2003); Life of Tone (1998), et al.

See “A History of Ireland 431AD-2010, in 45 Minutes: The Long & the Short of It,” a lecture given by Tom Bartlett at Glucksman House (NY) - podast. (Notice from Anne Solari of Glucksman House, NYU, on Irish Diaspora Studies, 15.08.2012.)

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Works
The Academy of Warre: Military Affairs in Ireland 1600-1800 [O’Donnell Lect., UCD] (NUI 2002), 27pp.; Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, compiled and arranged by William Theobald Tone [his son]; ed. by Thomas Bartlett (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1998), lii, 1,002pp. [Bibl. pp.xlviii-lii]; ed. Revolutionary Dublin: The Letters of Francis Higgins to Dublin Castle, 1795-1801 (Dublin: Four Courts 2003), 480pp.; Ireland: A History (Cambridge UP 2010), 671pp.

See also ‘The Townshend Viceroyalty of 1767-72, in Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690-1800, ed. Bartlett & D. W. Hatton [Ulster Hist. Foundation] (Belfast 1979) [By the end of the Townsend viceroyalty (1767-72), the Protestant oligarchy ‘had been broken’ (p.111; quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody, 1992, p.60).

Review of Michelle O’Riordan, The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World (1992)

Bartlett writes: ‘four historians have entered the fray … ’ BRADSHAW: … In his examination of this [bardic] poetry, or to be more precise, of one segment of it, viz. the poem-book or duanaire of the O’Byrne sept of Wicklow, Brendan Bradshaw has detected unmistakeable signs of ‘a new self-concious nationalism articulated in the poetry’, of the emergence of ‘a national poilitical consciousness’ which was transforming the O’Byrne’s from tribal lords into leaders of a national struggle against the foreigner. TOM DUNN: Not so, arged Tom Dunn in an article evaluating the Gaelic reaction to conquest and colonisation. The Gaelic poetry of the period, he claimed, ‘reveals a much less positive and more complex Gaelic response, one which remained predominantly local rather than national … it was highly pragmatic, deeply fatalistic, increasingly escapist. and essentially apolitical.’ The poets themselves were more concerned with short-term objectives—the need for a patron being high on their list of proprities—while the poetry itself because of the very rigidity of its structure made the articulation of new perspectives extremely difficult. BRENDAN Ó BUACHALLA: a further element was introduced into this controversy by the publication by Brendan Ó Buachalla of his article on the Gaelic poets’ reception of James I. O’Buachalla has no difficulty in showing that the poets were effusive in their welcome for one who would shortly be the author of the plantation of Ulster … [but] he sees as significant the emergence of a strong religious motif within the poetry and prose of the period. For O’Buachalla, his study of the Gaelic potry and prose reveals the close identification of the fate of Ireland with the fate of Catholicism, but his final verdict is that the ultimate response of the Gaelic world to the disaster which befell it was a resigned fatalism. NICHOLAS CANNY: Nicholas Canny has argued that his study of the Gaelic poetry and prose of the period has convinced his that under the impact of conquest and colonisation there was a significant shift in the Gaelic mentalité. Canny argues that while in the 16th c. the Gaelic outlook was very narrow and centred on local affairs, with a corresponding lack of a sense of change or even of historical periodisation, in the 17th c., especially under the impact of the Counter reformation, this all changed. Not only was the irish conflict regarded as a religious one, but the Gaelic outlook became modernised and politically sophisticated. The Gael now recognised that decisions made in London had an impact on their local areas in Irland; that there was a continental aspect ot the struggle in Ireland; and that, essentially, secular affairs were susceptible to human control after all. MICHELLE O’RIORDAN: … Dr O’Riordan argues for a new approach … deliberately eschews the vantage of hindsight … pronounces as misguided the attempt to find a Gaelic ‘response’ to ‘conquest’ … Bardic poetry was not concerned with the here and now, nor with events nor with chronology: the ‘conquest’ made little impact on the Gaelic mentality … Bardic poetry governed by its own laws … its themese not so much time-honoured as timeless; and it did not undergo significant change in 400 years. … Similarly writers who have pointed out the ‘new’ religious [?] or motif in the 17th c. as evidence of a ‘new’ religious or political conscience at work, have missed the point that this theme was a traditional one: that those poets who wrote in praise of the papal nuncio, Rinucinni, in the 1640s merely regarded him as ‘a sept allegiance substitute’ rather than as the spearhead of the counter-reformation. To the end the poets remained heedless of their fate, their poetry reflecting their timeless concerns about the ongoing vicissitudes in the everyday life of Banbha. Bartlett comments: O’Riordan generally ignores the non-poetic literature of the period—the annals, the prose and pious works—bardic poetry is not after all the sum of Gaelic literature. O’Riordan’s dismissal of the religious motifs in 17th c. poetry is more ingenious than convincing. Some of the bardic poets were Catholic priests, trained in the rhetoric of the Counter Reformation. [Gaelic Mind was also reviewed by Art Hughes in Études irelandaises, 18:1 (1993), pp.164-66.]

—in Linen Hall Review (April 1992), pp.18-19.

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