For opponents, Revisionists are regarded as apologists for the British Empire in Ireland, proponents of a form of denialism and even in some cases advocates of neo-unionism, while the Revisionists on the other hand see themselves as positing a progressive cosmopolitan narrative opposed to a "narrowly sectarian" viewpoint.
The revisionist school of Irish history can be said to have originated in the 1930s when it was championed by Robert Dudley Edwards, D. B. Quinn and T. W.
[1] Brendan Bradshaw, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Queens' College, Cambridge, stated that there has been an "iconistic assault" on nationalist martyrs.
The current (2011 - 2025) President of the Republic of Ireland Michael D. Higgins has criticised this calling it "loose revisionism" and "tendentious".
He followed up: “This was of course a somewhat simplistic and ideological assumption, and contemporary historians are more interested in the human rights breaches and the political and social basis of conflict and exclusion as a source of violence in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s.”[2]