Irish eyes smiling
Manhattanville professor to launch new book

Friday, February 3, 2006
By Matt Kerner 

Manhattanville College will host a special book reception and reading by Professor Irene Whelan, Associate Professor of History and Director of Irish Studies on Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. 

Whelan, a native of Clifden County Galway in West Ireland, came to America in 1974 and did her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has taught at Manhattanville since 1990. Whelan will read from her newly published book, The Bible War in Ireland, The “Second Reformation” and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-40, at the special reception.

“I always had a great love of history,” said Whelan. “I believe that history does for the collective what psychology does for the individual. History allows us to the look to the past to see what elements guided one direction rather than another. Ireland has such a painful history, and what is recorded is characterized by a battle of who tells the story.”

Whelan’s book is her first, and was published in Ireland in Sept. 2005 by Lilliput Press of
Dublin and was co-published in the U.S. by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of its History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora series in October.

“The reception and reading is designed to honor the faculty for their accomplishments,” said Lynda Hanley, Education and Outreach Librarian at Manhattanville. “It gives the community an opportunity to come in and meet them and learn about the research interests our faculty has. This book brings to light a period in Irish history we don’t hear too much about, a specific period that discusses the intolerance and intensity of the times. It’s just very nice to be able to celebrate a publication of a major work in this manner.”

The book is a study of the growth of the evangelical movement in Ireland and its attempts, in the early nineteenth century, to impose a conservative cultural agenda on the Catholic population through bible distribution and control of the educational curriculum.

This movement provoked a reaction among the Catholic Church and its followers, which resulted in a revolution in political consciousness that led to the winning of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and contributed to the entrenched political and religious polarization that has characterized denominational relations in Ireland ever since.

“Religious division has become practically a characteristic of Ireland,” said Whelan. “I see my work as an attempt toward an understanding of how that division took place, how it became so divided and the growth of the evangelical movement.”

Whelan contends that Ireland has suffered because the majority of people are badly informed of the facts of its history, but the understanding is changing now. There is a new relationship between Irish-America and Ireland, and a new image in the modern world. Students from both Ireland and America are taking part in study abroad programs,
as well as other European countries.

“No country has changed its image as drastically as Ireland has in the last 10 years,” said Whelan. “There is a whole new relationship opening up between the Irish diaspora, there is huge interaction in a way there never was before.”

Whelan’s book attempts to show the history of Ireland through a different scope. “I tried to educate and foster an awareness of the connection between religion and politics and how it contribute to division,” said Whelan.

“In some way, to see Ireland as a kind of model of this process. Ireland is like a laboratory of the study of colonization as a country that was a victim of the division of the larger world, we’ve paid a very heavy price.”