Alvin Jackson
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER, School of History, on 9 September 2022 on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa on Alvin Jackson
_____________________________________________________________________
As an undergraduate student of history in UCD in 1990, I was fortunate to attend lectures given by Alvin Jackson for his course on Unionism in Ireland. I can still recall how he distilled the essence of the message he wanted to communicate to us: that historically, Unionism “was an alliance of different forces”. The great skill of Alvin over decades of original, challenging and skillful research and writing, has been to excavate those different forces. In doing so, he has excelled as a historian of unionism and by extension of modern Irish and British history, the range and depth of his knowledge and mastery of the sources allowing him by 1999 to produce his powerful survey of two centuries, Ireland 1798-1998: Politics and War.
A graduate of Corpus Christi College Oxford and Nuffield College Oxford, Alvin came to master the Protestant sense of history in Northern Ireland, bringing the cool, analytical skill of the historian to a unionism that, as he recognizes “does not demand a complex vision of its own past”. But as he has also observed, “this is very far from saying that the Unionist historiographical tradition is as sporadic and monodimensional as the needs and perceptions of its beneficiaries would appear to imply”. He has traced a historiography that had its roots in the origins of Northern Ireland itself, but also moved beyond that tradition to provide us with crucial historical context for more recent and contemporary upheavals, as a historian working during the convulsions and violence of the 1980s and 1990s, the era of the peace process and more recently the age of Brexit.
For students of history, general readers and contemporary commentators, understanding the unionist perspective in relation to these seismic events cannot be achieved without reference to the work of Alvin, beginning with his 1989 book The Ulster Party, Irish Unionists in the House of Commons 1884-1911. This is rightly regarded as a stylish and elegant challenge to the conclusions of earlier accounts and historians, encouraging us to recognize that the party was taken seriously by many conservative politicians, with many of those Ulster Party members well integrated in to British political and social life in the last two decades of the 19th century. The book also underlined the party’s lack of discipline and a quiescence that was apparent only as long as it was listened to in London: “When high political communication was proving ineffective”, he wrote, “Irish Tories looked to exploit their own local political resources”, another enduring theme that resonates over the centuries.
Alvin also became the leading authority on the first leader of organized unionism, Edward James Saunderson. In his 1995 biography, Alvin demonstrates how Saunderson’s life mirrored wider societal changes, and explores his failure to secure a lasting place in the unionist pantheon, while also opening up perspectives on Irish unionist relations with the national Tory leadership and with Empire. Drawing on estate records, high political archives and literary sources, he documents that period before the Belfast bourgeoisie evicted the landed aristocracy from the citadel of leadership, and the increasing “Ulsterization” of unionism after 1905. This was symbolized by the emergence of the Ulster Unionist Council and the requirement to focus not overwhelmingly on parliament, but be “formally responsible to local opinion”, the self-reliance culminating in the great defiance in the 1912-14 period. As he puts it, those crucial few years “served as a creation myth for unionism in the 20th century- as a kind of Orange Genesis, shaped and strengthened by the patriarchs Edward Carson and James Craig”.
Exploring the historical perspectives of modern unionism and the bond between that vision of the past and contemporary unionist action has allowed Alvin to compare popular and official memories with available historical evidence and illustrate “the success with which setbacks and complexities were concealed”.
Alvin has gone further, however, and explored other varieties of unionism. The extent of his increasingly long gaze and reach was reflected in the 2012 book The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the UK 1707-2007, a strikingly original and ambitious comparative study of Scotland’s Union with England in 1707 and the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. His focus is on the longevity of these unions rather than on their torment, as he also underlines the debates and skullduggery surrounding the union measures themselves and how parliamentary union pervaded Scottish and Irish lives, while also while highlighting an England whose “failure to fully buy into the Union” has consistently damaged it. Alvin’s analysis carried an additional charge with the rise of Scottish nationalism, the consolidation of the Good Friday and St Andrews’s agreements and the changing perceptions of the unions of the United Kingdom. The devolutions of 1997 brought to the fore tensions between Westminster, regional assemblies and local power networks; the strength of Jackson is in being able to offer insight and precedent in relation to these themes, but he also warns against crude characterization, while always paying generous tribute to fellow scholars and what he has labelled “the freshness and maturity of the Irish political historiography”, of which he is an exemplar.
Alvin’s landmark book surveying 200 years of Irish history from 1798-1998, originally under the subtitle Politics and War and later updated with the subtitle War, Peace and Beyond, covers a period he regards as representing a “discrete phase within Irish political history”. It was partly influenced by his own academic positions and travel, including posts in Dublin, Belfast and Boston: “If post-modernist writing is a by product of an age of crisis” he wrote in this book, “then we in Ireland, and especially in Northern Ireland, are all post-modernists now…this book was written against a background of political and social fluidity, with the ostensibly marmoreal political attitudes and institutions of Ireland in flux: the book was begun in a post-Unionist Ulster, pursued in a post-Nationalist Ireland and completed in a post-industrial United States”. Pithy, witty, smooth and fluent, Jackson integrates unionism, Belfast and the NI dimension with the Catholic and nationalist experiences and reveals himself as an informed critic of Irish icons, their achievements marked, but their frailties unmasked . That sharp edge is one of the book’s strengths; ultimately the book is about new ways of posing historical questions: addressing “plurality, variousness and ambiguity” and avoiding “imprisoning historical perspectives”.
This approach was also apparent in his 2003 book Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000, documenting the long search for viable home rule schemes and the politicians, civil servants and slow learners who grappled with the weight of history and the challenges of adaptation. Strong in comparing Irish icons, this skill was also on display during the recent commemorations of the revolutionary decade with his Judging Redmond and Carson: Comparative Irish Lives in 2018, while his ability to cajole, marshal and discipline his disparate fellow historians is reflected in the major achievement of editing the Oxford Handbook to Modern Irish History published in 2014.
Having lectured here in UCD from 1988-91, Alvin moved up the ranks at QUB as lecturer, reader and then Professor of Modern Irish History from 1999 to 2004, before he was appointed Sir Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. He headed the School of History, Classics and Archaeology there from 2010-13 while subsequently serving as dean of research. His stature is also reflected in a number of major research awards and honours, including Burns Visiting Professor in Boston College, a British Academy senior research fellowship and a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society as well as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has been a warm friend to UCD through his involvement in quality reviews, and to Irish historical research culture more generally through his work in assessing Irish Research Council applications.
He has engaged in extensive outreach work and is in much demand for the fluency of his insights and overviews for radio, television and podcasts, acting as historical consultant for major broadcasts such as Carson and Wilde for the BBC in 2020 and its Road to Partition in 2021. His keynotes and addresses have traversed not just the critical question of the Union, but Irish and Scottish nationalism, the state of modern Irish historical scholarship, 1916, the historians perspective on Brexit and the topic of his current focus: United Kingdoms: multinational union states in Europe and beyond 1800-1925, a reminder that if we want to understand the present, we will rely heavily on the erudition of Professor Jackson for expert guidance and crucial context as both a historian immersed in the sources and a leading public intellectual.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus utroque Jure, tam Civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.