Everybody’s doing it. The Americans, the British and the Australians have gone online. The Spanish are planning a blockbuster; the Dutch would like to begin afresh; and the Germans are developing a European portal through which all of these different national projects – and many more – can be accessed. Meanwhile, the Irish have just published their own, in nine volumes of print as well as online. Why should national biographical dictionaries suddenly be in vogue?

The besetting sin of all historical writing is myopia. Large as well as small nations suffer equally from the disheartening insularity of rarely looking beyond the borders of the nation state as geographical borders mutate into mental, cultural and historiographical ones. Myopia's close relative is the unshakeable doctrine of exceptionalism: the assumption that each nation's history is, by definition, sui generis. National histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered notions of a shared identity and created the sense of an embryonic nation. A critical element in this process was stressing the exceptional characteristics, such as the tradition of liberal governance in Britain, American liberty or the revolutionary origins of the French state. That this history of nations was presented for popular consumption as a story is understandable – story-telling is the most effective method of communicating a narrative to a wide audience.

Nationalism remains arguably the most important framework within which to explore, explain and understand modern Irish history. The object of this article is, first, to reflect on some impressive recent scholarship on the Irish nationalist past and, second, to propose a related set of suggestions intended to deepen and enrich our approach to the subject. It therefore offers both a respectful assessment of how we have thought about history and Irish nationalism, and also an agenda-conscious programme regarding how we should do so in future.