Leon Ó Bróin, The Stopford Connection ( 1985), writes: ‘Robert Dunlop, who reviewed Alice Stopford Green’s The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing in the Quarterly Review, questioned Mrs Green’s adequacy and trustworthiness as a historian. To this hurtful indictment she replied spiritedly in The Nineteenth Century and After, and included the reply subsequently in The Old Irish World. The difference between Mr Dunlop and herself, she said, lay deeper than any question of her merits and demerits. It was the old conflict between tradition and enquiry, and by tradition she meant how writers had hitherto tended to deal with the story of Ireland’s past. Dunlop had dogmatically summed up the [accepted] belief about Ireland in his contribution ot the ODNB, and Cambridge Modern History, and elsewhere ... beginning with his allegation that two-thirds at least of the inhabitants of Ireland had led a wild and half-nomadic existence, that outside the Pale there was nothing worthy to be called a Church, that while it was perhaps going to far to say that the Irish had relapsed into a state of heathenism, the tradition of Christian belief had become a lifeless, useless thing. He asserted that she had no judgement and less candour, and that in the use of documents she had produced a mass of mischievous fiction ...’ (p.23).
[ top ]