Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There is, however, much to learn yet if Paddy Mac is to succeed in the tricky task of acquiring the sort of profile that can help carry him to the Taoiseach’s office. One critical thing our Aspirant Prince must embrace is the role of art in high politics. Before Paddy Machiavelli gets nervous, we are referring to art as in the learning of a profession, rather than writing poetry or painting or suchlike. He can, of course, go a long way in Irish politics without treating it as a form of art. Talent (rarely), hard work (occasionally), or the sort of hard neck more common in a timeshare salesman may bring Paddy Mac as far as the cabinet table. But, unless he brings some form of artistry to his public discourse, when it comes to the great prize, he will be like a pony trying to jump an eight-foot fence and win the Puissance.

Some kind person, I know not who, sent me this just before Christmas, correctly guessing that I would enjoy it a lot. I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t familiar with Drennan as a journalist; he came to prominence only after I had left Irish politics, and he mostly wrote for the Sunday Independent which I rarely read. I think I have been missing out; his witty takedown of the entire Irish political system and its leaders over the years is also passionate and well-observed. It’s easy to be cynical, and to accuse others of being cynical; but I don’t think that is the point of this book, which is holding up a mirror to the Irish political process and describing it in painful detail. Here, for instance, near the end, Drennan reflects on the preference of Irish voters for older leaders in typical style:

…in Irish politics, with rare exceptions, youth will not have its fling. The U.K. and America may have a tradition of youthful leaders, such as Thatcher, Blair, Obama, Clinton and Cameron. We, however, prefer our leaders to resemble the elderly habitues of a bishops conference. That FG soberside, Liam Cosgrave, even when he was young, was not youthful: Garret was a national grand-uncle; Jack Lynch came draped in the sepia of de Valera’s Ireland; whilst Albert, though lively, was a child of the showband era ruling a country nudging the envelope of the Celtic Tiger. Lemass might have been in a hurry, but he was an old man. Haughey too was past his best by the time he secured power, though that might have been a good thing. Mr Bruton, though youngish in years, was a figure who gave the impression of a man who would have been more at home within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bertie Ahern was seen to be a man who belonged to a youthful age, but he too was a creature who resided intellectually in the age of putting posters of de Valera up by gaslight. As for Enda, he is a child of flaming turf sods and Liam Cosgrave.

The book was published in 2014, in the middle of Enda Kenny’s unexpected / long-awaited (delete as applicable) term as Taoiseach, so Drennan failed to take into account the ascension of Leo Varadkar (Taoiseach at 38) or Simon Harris (Taoiseach at 37). But despite that, it’s a good summary of the popular wisdom about each of the leaders of the last fifty years, based on anecdote and experience. I have encountered a small number of the many people who he talks about (only briefly in most cases, though I was friendly with John Bruton), and felt in every case that he is writing about the people who I met.

I fear this is not a book for people who don’t know or care much about Irish politics, and it also won’t satisfy anyone who is hungering for political change; it’s about the internal workings of the old parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent how they manage their coalition partners in office. But personally I tend to feel that a swing back to the default state of dominance by the older parties is more likely than not; so this may turn out to be as useful a guidebook to the future as to the past. You can get it here.

Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley

When I first watched the two-part ending of the second Jodie Whittaker season, I wrote:

I was tremendously excited by one aspect of the first episode – no single minute of TV Doctor Who had ever previously been set in Ireland, as I have previously written. Of course, with the revelation of the second part, it turns out that there is still no moment of Doctor Who set in the “real” Ireland, is the one that exists in the same universe as the Doctor and the Tardis rather than just being in the Doctor’s imagination. Again, as someone who saw The Brain of Morbius first time round, I’m not unhappy with the disruption of what a lot of people thought was established continuity. 

Rewatching it, I felt that there was a bit too much telling and not enough action. If the real point of the story is the true nature of the Doctor, why are we worrying about the Cybermen? (Except that they are obviously a Bad Thing.) But again, I enjoyed the Irish sections in the first episode, and the revelation of the Doctor’s origins in the second.

Ryan Bradley’s Black Archive on the story is longer than usual, but has only three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, so that’s a bit of a variation on the usual format. In the introduction, ‘Everything You Know is About to Change’, he sets out his stall: he believes that Chibnall’s agenda as show-runner always was to have the Doctor experience the ‘ego-death’ of psychedelia, and that the story considered here draws heavily on the story of the (real-life) CIA’sa MK-Ultra brianwashing project. These are strong claims.

But in the first chapter, ‘The Harp That Once’, he diverts from those issues to one that is very close to my own heart: the question of how Doctor Who treats Ireland, and especially how Ireland is treated in this episode. I have written myself (at length here in 2018, abbreviated and updated here in 2019 a few months before Ascension of the Cybermen was broadcast) about Ireland in the show. Before getting into Bradley’s analysis, I’ll recapitulate my own: I believe that TV Who doesn’t go to Ireland for much the same reason as it doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or to other historical atrocities: these are topics too controversial for a family show.

Chibnall did nibble at the edges here, with Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, but I would argue that these are different cases – Rosa Parks’ heroism is not remotely controversial these days, and the worst aspects of the 1947 Partition are somewhat sanitised by telling it as the story of one rural family, rather than the urban massacres. It’s also worth noting that Chibnall never returned to that semi-historical format after his first season: The Haunting of Villa Diodati is not presented as historical fact, let alone Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or War of the Sontarans.

There are more, but still not many, references to Ireland in spinoff novels and comics, and they are generally unsatisfactory – note especially the First Doctor era villain Questor.

Audio is a different matter. There are no less than six Big Finish plays and a BBC Audio Original which are entirely set in Ireland. These go to places where I don’t think TV Who could go – Cromwell’s atrocities; the Famine. Of course, for audio it’s very easy to portray an Irish setting by simply hiring actors with the right accent; TV has to try much harder with the locations (and even here, the relevant bits of Ascension of the Cybermen are filmed in Wales, but indicated as Ireland by diddly-dee music).

Ryan Bradley, like me, is from Northern Ireland, and in this first chapter he explores the conception of Ireland in British culture and in Doctor Who. He points out that Ashad the semi-Cyberman is actually played by a Northern Irish actor, Patrick O’Kane, and draws a parallel between Ashad’s half-transformed nature and Ulster Unionism, or indeed Northern Ireland itself, constructed political concepts which have outlived their original purpose. Ko Sharmus in this story is also played by an Ulsterman, Ian McElhinney.

He goes on to look at some of the previous mentions of Ireland in Old Who, including the Gallifrey joke, and makes the point (which I had missed) that in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Terror of the Autons, Harry Towb’s Northern Irish character McDermott is transformed into a ‘stocky Northcountryman’. He misses a few other examples: Casey in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the less obvious case of Clark in The Sea Devils, and the fairly major characters of McGillop in Day of the Doctor, Morgan Blue in Into the Dalek and Angstrom in The Ghost Monument. (I’ll forgive him Bel in Flux, as it post-dates 2020.)

He looks at the linkage between Frankenstein and Ireland, including Tenniel’s 1882 cartoon depicting Parnell as Frankenstein and the Fenians as the monster. Here he misses an important point – Chapter 21 of Mary Shelley’s novel (plus the end of Chapter 20 and the start of Chapter 22) are actually set in Ireland, as Frankenstein gets shipwrecked on the west coast and imprisoned by the local authorities.

He then looks at law enforcement, especially the dubious aspects of the history of the Garda Síochána in Ireland (more briefly also the RUC), and at Chibnall’s previous depictions of (British) law enforcement in Broadchurch and Born and Bred. To my surprise my great-great-uncle is mentioned – not one of my Irish family connections (and my great-great-grandfather James Stewart actually was an Irish policeman), but the former US Attorney-General, George W. Wickersham, who chaired the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in 1929-31. His report is mainly remembered as giving the Hoover administration a ladder to climb down from Prohibition, but it made many interesting findings on police brutality and corruption as well.

But, perhaps because of his concentration on the Gardaí (and to a much lesser extent the RUC), Bradley misses what is surely the most spectacular portrayal of Irish law enforcement in science fiction and fantasy: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which also features human beings turning into machines. (Well, bicycles anyway.) The Third Policeman himself is clearly in the old RIC rather than a Garda, and the novel is set firmly in the Irish Midlands rather than on the coast, but I’d have thought it worth a mention.

Having said all that, the chapter is very rich in detail and references, and while there are some things that I would have liked to see included, there are others that were new to me, and I found it all very thought-provoking. I don’t think I have ever before written 800 words on a single chapter of a Black Archive (or indeed of any other book).

The second chapter, ‘Any Idiot Can Make Themselves Into a Robot’, starts by looking at Ashad in the context of Bradley’s overall themes of loss of self and hybridization, and briefly notes poor old Lisa in the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman, before moving on to absorption of personalities in Chibnall’s other work, with reference also to Robert Graves and to the First Doctor story The Savages.

The third chapter, ‘Half Sick of Shadows’, looks at what we learn here about the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:

The story has been critiqued for being a ‘scroll through a newly updated Wikipedia page’, but it essentially creates new sections on that page with entirely blank or fragmented entries under them³. Paradoxically, we know more and, perhaps more significantly, less about the Doctor than we previously knew. Their home planet, their species, the number and order of their lives, are all unknown now. Whether audiences should know more or less about the Doctor’s apparent home and past has long been a subject of spirited debate⁴. In one of the most quietly important moments in Ascension of the Cybermen, the Doctor tells Ravio, ‘Don’t need your life story’. While this appears as an oddly self-aware jab at the ill-served side characters of both this story and the Chibnall era as a whole, it anticipates the central issue that the Doctor wrestles with before deciding – both here and at the end of Flux – that she doesn’t need to know everything about her own life story either.
³  Moreland, Alex, ‘Doctor Who Review: The Timeless Children’.
⁴  See Howe, David J, and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, pp313-14.

I’ll be honest, this one lost me a bit in discussion of the Buddhist concept of anattā, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Chibnall’s previous work (again) and She-Ra, among others, but it succeeded in convincing me that the story as a whole is semiotically much thicker than perhaps I first appreciated. (Which maybe makes up for it not being better television.)

A brief conclusion argues that the story is “worth ruminating on”, and I think the book as a whole makes that argument well, though I also think Bradley goes on about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme at unnecessary length. You can get it here.

Next up: The Aztecs, by Doris V Sutherland.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Geraldines: An Experiment in Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald

Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un, again):

The Normans were at this time the foremost race in Christendom. Their courage and ruthlessness had made them conspicuous among the rovers from Scandinavia who ravaged Western Europe. Their sails had been the terror of both coasts of the Channel, long before they conquered and settled in Gaul. But – unlike the previous Scandinavian warriors – the Normans were not content to remain seafarers. They became landsmen. And in land warfare, they cast aside the weapons of their forefathers and learnt to handle the weapons of their newly-won land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. They had archers with bows carrying death at a distance; they had cavalry clad in mail armour, and armed with long lances and glittering kite-shaped shields. In the province of Normandy they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring provinces of Brittany and Maine. And, without laying aside that dauntless valour which terrorized every land from the Elbe to the Pyrences, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. They established internal order. They adopted the French tongue, in which Latin was the main element, and raised it to a dignity and importance which it has never lost. French literature became the glory of the civilized world. They embraced Christianity and adopted the feudal doctrines of France which they worked into some sort of a system. They adopted their own form of architecture, the romanesque. They were chivalrous, these Normans; indeed, with them began the age of chivalry. Unlike other Germanic peoples, they renounced brutish intemperance; their polite luxury presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of their Saxon and Danish neighbours. The Norman baron displayed his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, and wines chosen for their flavour rather than for their intoxicating power. They were dignified in their bearing and well-spoken. They were born orators as well as born lawyers, just as they were born soldiers. For before all else they were soldiers. Their conquests extended to Southern Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and to the British Isles on the other.

I have been trying to find out about the author of this book. Thanks to the genealogy websites, I have determined that his full name was Brian Boteler Fitzgerald, that he lived from 21 January 1908 to 20 July 1977, that he was the son of Lord Henry Gordon FitzGerald (1863–1955) and Inez Charlotte Grace Casberd-Boteler (1871-1967) and the grandson of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and that he married Elizabeth Dorotea Maud Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh (1914-1992) on 28 July 1936 when he was 28 and she 22. I don’t find any record that they had children. In addition to this book, published in 1951, he published four other Irish history books in 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1954, and a few more edited volumes of letters later in the 1950s, all relating to the Fitzgerald family, so a rather concentrated period of writing activity in the middle of his adult life. I have no record of anything else that he did at any other time in his career. He was born, married and died in London, but clearly wore his Irish heritage proudly.

This book is the work of a very enthusiastic and energetic romantic, dedicated to proving the proposition that the Fitzgeralds are the key factor in Irish history for more than four centuries. It’s actually a proposition that most would agree with, but by focussing on one family’s history, you can lose sight of what else is going on. In particular I’d have liked to get an understanding of the relationship between the Fitzgerald lands and the Pale/Butler territory on the one hand, and the more Irish districts on the other.

It’s also misleading to suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ rule of Ireland was the basic pattern of Irish government consistently from 1189 to 1603. It was perhaps the default, but there was no automaticity and the right of English kings to intervene was clearly accepted by all concerned. The peak of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ power comes at the very end of the period, when Henry VII is forced to accept their continued rule in Ireland after Bosworth Field because he has no alternative; but the collapse of that power in the 1530s came very swiftly, which suggests that it did not have such deep foundations after all.

I was surprised to learn that the Fitzgerald family trace their origins to the Gherardini family of Tuscany, based in Florence from 1100, whose most famous member is probably Lisa del Giocondo, to use her married name (though that is not how she is best known). This link seemed really fanciful to me, but the book has documentary evidence from both sides indicating that the Gherardini accepted that the connection was there. To me it’s fairly clear that the mythology of the family begins with Gerald of Wales, who was the son of one of the daughters of Gerald FitzWalter, the best documented originator of the dynasty, and I don’t quite see the timelines adding up.

Still, it’s full of details about the entire period of Irish history from 1170 to 1603, and although it’s partisan, it wears its heart on its jacket and is rather endearing. You can get it here.

This was the very last of the books that I acquired in 2018 which I managed to clear from the unread shelves, ten months after I did the same for the last of my 2017 acquisitions. The full list so far, since I started tallying this way eight years ago, is:

Last book acquired in 2018, read in November 2024 (The Geraldines)
Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

There are 26 books on my unread shelves which I acquired in 2019, and 11 of them are by H.G. Wells, so there’s going to be a fair bit of minor Wellsiana coming up. I’m starting with:

  • The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee (shortest)
  • Lost Objects, by Marian Womack (sf that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
  • What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah (top book on LibraryThing which isn’t by Wells)
  • Marriage, by H. G. Wells (top book on LibraryThing which is by Wells)
  • Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David A. Gerber (non-fiction that has lingered longest unread)
  • Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien (non-genre fiction that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)

Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell

Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):

Inde est utique quod nos ex vestris litteris intelligentes quod per potentiam karissimi in Christo filii nostri H[einrici] illustris Anglorum regis qui divina inspiratione compunctus coadunatis viribus suis gentem illam barbaram, incultam et divine legis ignaram suo dominio subiugavit, ea que in terra vestra tam illicite committuntur, cooperante domino, incipiunt iam desistere gudio gavisi sumus et ei qui iamdicto regi tantam victoriam contulit et triumphum inmensas gratiarum actiones exsolvimus, prece supplici postulantes ut per vigilanciam et sollicitudinem ipsius regis vestro cooperante studio gens illa indisciplinata et indomita cultum divine legis et religionem Chritiane fidei per omnia et in omnibus imitetur et vos ac ceteri ecclesiastici viri honore et tranquillitate debita gaudeatis.Hence it is that – understanding from your letters that our dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England, stirred by divine inspiration and with his united forces, has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law, and that those evils which were unlawfully practised in your land are now, with God’s help, already beginning to diminish – We are overjoyed and have offered our grateful prayers to Him who has granted to the said King so great a victory and triumph, humbly beseeching that by the vigilance and care of the same King that most undisciplined and untamed nation may in and by all things persevere in devotion to the practice of the Christian faith, and that you and your ecclesiastical brethren may rejoice in all due honour and tranquillity.
NB that Curtis and McDowell give only the English translation; I found the Latin original here.

I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)

Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.

Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.

This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.

Yes, Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop

Second paragraph of third chapter:

From 1969 onwards every nuance of every utterance by anybody of note, in all parties in the South, but especially in Fianna Fáil, was analysed for the minutest divergence from stated policy on the North. Any inconsistency led to an avalanche of publicity, followed by another avalanche of restatements of official policy by virtually everybody concerned; there was then relative calm until the next occurrence. Along with the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs had overall responsibility for Northern issues, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, spent much of his time abroad (much to the satisfaction of some of his own cabinet colleagues, according to one of my sources in the Department of the Taoiseach), so Conor Cruise O’Brien was given a free run at Fianna Fáil. He seemed to have Liam Cosgrave’s permission to badger the party about its Northern policy and could not resist stirring the pot from time to time.

A really interesting insider account of Irish politics particularly in the period from 1974 to 1982, when the author started out as press secretary for Fianna Fáil, then in opposition, and was then appointed spokesman of the government when they unexpectedly won a huge majority in 1977; under the Fine Gael / Labour coalition, he was not as central but still had plenty of scope to observe.

I found the first two thirds of the book totally gripping. Dunlop had a front seat as Jack Lynch built Fianna Fáil up from its bitter defeat in 1973, and takes us through the 1977 election campaign and the stunning result. He then sees Lynch slowly losing his grip over the next couple of years, until he is forced to resign in 1979 and replaced by Charles Haughey (“Charlie” to everyone). His description of the Lynch government, having won an unexpectedly huge majority which was in fact built on a very fragile electoral margin, is grimly reminiscent of the problems faced by Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in the UK today.

Dunlop defends Haughey strongly against all allegations of corruption and wrong-doing, and tells stories of his humanity – and also of monstrous behaviour and gross political misjudgements. It’s clear that Haughey was his favourite Taoiseach. Alas, Dunlop’s defence of Haughey’s probity rings a little hollow in the light of his own subsequent criminal conviction for bribing Dublin councillors, not to mention what has since come to light about Haughey. But for me, coming from a perspective where my family were distinctly not Haughey fans, it is healthy to read another view. (Even if it is wrong.)

Dunlop was less close to the centre under Garret Fitzgerald, and spent most of his time in the coalition governments of 1981-2 and 1982-7 assisting the Fine Gael minister John Boland (I must admit I had completely forgotten about him). He then retreated into private sector public affairs and lobbying, though was recruited again by Fianna Fáil for the 1992 election. The book was published in 2004, ten years after the events it describes, and contemporaneous with Dunlop singing like a bird to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is very little about ideology here and a lot about political character, psychology and motivation. In particular there’s very little about Northern Ireland, other than complaining about the difficulties it raised, praising Haughey’s attempts to build a relationship with Thatcher and explaining his own perfunctory contacts with British diplomats, and regretting the (peripheral) impact of the hunger strikes in the first 1982 election. It shows how little the reality on the ground in the North mattered for Dublin (and other southern) politicians.

I am personally sympathetic to the anthropological approach to politics, and I love gossip anyway (who doesn’t?) so I generally enjoyed Dunlop’s account. It is occasionally a little too hand-wavey – he never quite says what he thinks the facts were behind the Arms Trial, except that in his view Lynch was more guilty and Charlie less so than most people think. But some of his observations about the relations between politicians and the media, politicians and the voters, and indeed politicians and reality itself, are spot-on. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that rapidly dwindling pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R.B. McDowell.

Version 1.0.0

Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The loyalists of Ireland were far more exposed to suspicion for resisting the royal claim to supremacy over the Church than were those of England. In England, refusal to submit might be regarded as the outcome of loyalty to the pope rather than of disloyalty to the king. In Ireland, those at first called on to conform were the inhabitants of the Pale, and resistance to the law was exceedingly difficult for people with such a strong tradition of loyalty. Disobedience to the king’s laws was their perpetual complaint against the Anglo-Irish outside the Pale, and they hesitated to act in any way which might result in their being identified with the older colonists. Hence their tacit acceptance of the ecclesiastical changes. There was an equally tacit acceptance by those Irish or Anglo-Irish lords who were coerced or persuaded into submitting to the royal authority during the course of the reign. In the actual operation of the new laws can be traced the real attitude of each class in the country.

I have been wondering where the phrase “Church and State” originates as a book title. Robert Dudley Edwards published this in 1935; my father used a similar title, Church and State in Modern Ireland, for his own book on the more recent period. Looking back, I find an 1886 essay by Tolstoy, a mid-nineteenth century Church and State Gazette in England, and an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson about the need for “a wall of separation between church and state”; but I think the inspiration is more likely to be from other historians: A.L. Smith published Church and State in the Middle Ages in 1913, and probably the original use of the phrase in this context is Robert Keith’s The History of the affairs of Church and State in Scotland from the beginning of the Reformation in the Reign of King James V to the retreat of Queen Mary into England in 1568, published in 1735.

I did not know Robin Dudley Edwards, though I saw him in action, heckling shallow Nationalist interpretations of Irish history at a UCD seminar only a few months before he died in 1988. He published this in 1935 when he was 26; it is the book of his PhD thesis from a couple of years earlier. It’s a remarkable piece of research for the day, looking in detail at the records for the efforts by the governments of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I to impose the Reformation in Ireland (and Mary I’s efforts to reverse it).

He concentrates a bit more on the early part of the period, which I am less interested in, rather than the 1560s and after, but I can understand first of all that any writer have more energy for dealing with the earlier bit of research and second that there was simply more going on in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s in terms of the dynamics of religion and government.

There are two stories here. The first is that the government of Ireland was weak and London was not prepared to put in enough resources to make it effective, so the story of Tudor Ireland is of one chief governor after another failing to make much impact until the very end, in 1603. The second is that the Protestant side was unable to find resources to staff the religious effort; most Irish people spoke Irish, but the state was constrained to operate in English; any sensible rising Protestant evangelist stayed in England where it was safer and the monetary rewards better; and the ability of the state to enforce religious behaviour (let alone belief) even in the most loyal areas was correspondingly weak.

Despite its weight I also found it quite a quick read. I know that much more research has been done on the topic since, but it’s good to go back to basics sometimes. You can get it here (at a price); I was lucky enough to get my father’s copy.

This was the shortest unread book that I added to my shelves in 2018. Next on that pile is New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes.

Imagining Ireland’s Independence: The Debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, by Jason K. Knirck

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There were a number of factors leading each side to consider a truce in the summer of 1921. For the British, the behavior of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans was generating substantial negative publicity, made worse by the government’s apparent sanction of such actions by the end of 1920. In addition, the British had been unwilling to unleash a full-scale war in Ireland and were leery of doing so without exploring alternative solutions. The British had been fighting the Anglo-Irish “war” with police and local security forces rather than with full-strength divisions of the British Army. With difficulties in Egypt and India, among other places, Britain could not afford to station too many regular troops in Ireland. Given that Britain was deeply in debt from the Great War, and Lloyd George’s coalition government was already having difficulty redeeming its promise to build “homes fit for heroes” after the war, Britain also did not have the financial wherewithal to launch a full military campaign in Ireland. The political will was lacking, too. Despite the presence of Tories in the cabinet – Lloyd George was the Liberal prime minister of a largely Tory cabinet, a holdover from the wartime coalition – there was a sense that the British public, as well as the Liberal and Labour parties, would not keep quiet about a full military campaign in Ireland, given that the relatively small-scale hostilities undertaken by the security forces were already causing unease.² In addition, Lloyd George correctly surmised that a settlement could be reached that was closer in practical terms to the offer of Home Rule already on the table than it was to the self-proclaimed Irish Republic.
² Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919-21 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1993), 225.

This is a short and detailed book about the debates in Dáil Eireann in December 1921 and January 1922 about the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and about the political situation which led to it. Having fairly recently read Charles Townshend’s The Republic, which covers much of the same ground, I felt that Knirck’s general political account of the events of the War of Independence, which forms the first third or so of the book, isn’t as good as Townshend’s; but when he gets into the detail, first of the Treaty negotiations and then of the Dáil debates, he is much more solid (Townshend is running out of steam at that point).

On the Treaty, Knirck devotes considerable space to trying to work out what de Valera was actually up to, and comes to the conclusion that he wanted the negotiations in London to fail so that he could leap in with an improved proposal and save the day. Given the relative inexperience and weaker position of the Irish delegation, this would have been such a bold assumption by de Valera that I found it difficult to believe, but Knick marshals his evidence convincingly.

On the Dáil debates, the heart of the book, Knirck goes through the whole thing in fascinated detail, looking at the backgrounds of the members of the Second Dáil (who were all elected unopposed in May 1920), tracking those who moved from hard-liner to pro-Treaty and from dove to anti-Treaty, and tracing the procedural issues and the rhetorical style of the debates, which did become personalised at several points. I found this a much more attractive way of approaching the concept of the Republic than Townshend’s ideological analysis; looking at what people actually did and said is, after all, a fundamentally sound approach.

One important point that he makes is that both wings of the Sinn Fein leadership, and indeed the rank and file, were desperate to maintain a united movement until well past the moment when this was no longer feasible (which was probably when the plenipotentiaries signed in London). This led both sides into tactical and strategic mistakes. For us, looking back on over a century of division along lines established by the Treaty, it can be difficult to appreciate that serious leaders thought they could still avoid it as late as early January 1922. Hindsight gives you 20/20 vision.

Knirck’s most fundamental point is that most of the Irish political leadership in 1921 were politically inexperienced, and the debates reveal a new style of politics coming into being, but not quite there yet. They got outplayed by Lloyd George in London, and then by themselves in Dublin. Having seen other revolutionary situations elsewhere, I must say that it rings true. Whether or not you agree, his analysis of the primary sources – the Treaty debates themselves – is compelling. You can get it here.

Archbishop Treanor’s funeral, and Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait

I attended a big Irish funeral earlier this week. Archbishop Noël Treanor, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the EU, died suddenly on 11 August and was buried in St Peter’s cathedral in Belfast, where he had previously been the bishop for many years, last Tuesday. I happen to be in Norn Iron at present and attended, sitting between a retired South Belfast community worker, and the mum of two of the choristers.

I knew Noël from his current and previous roles in Brussels, and we’d had a really excellent lunch at his residence on 12 July (an auspicious date!), my last working day in the office until September. We discussed many things, including ironically enough the Pope’s health (“I saw him just a few weeks ago; our appointment was at 8.30 am and it was his fourth meeting that morning; his mobility may not be great but he’s as sharp mentally as ever and he’ll stay around at least until the Synod has concluded in October”) and the church blessing of same-sex relationships (Noël surprised me by saying, without any prodding from me, that he agreed with the Pope’s positive approach). I looked forward to continuing the conversation on my return to work next month, but, alas, it is not to be.

The funeral was a massive affair, with a full cathedral including dozens of bishops and well over a hundred priests. (“I’ve never seen so many priests!” gasped the lady beside me. “I didn’t realise there were that many left!” I replied. Noël, who was 73, would have been roughly in the middle of the age range of the clergy attending, and younger than most of the bishops.) It ended with Noël being laid to rest in the chapel where two of his predecessors already lie (Patrick Walsh, his immediate predecessor, died only last December). The current bishop, Alan McGuckian, led the service, apart from the committal at the very end which was led by Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister. The ceremony stuck closely to the liturgy that I know so well, but with a lot more ecclesiastical chanting than I am used to (and that’s a fine thing). It was a respectfully and carefully designed occasion; I left feeling that my friendship with Noël, which was warm but not deep, had been given decent closure, and I am sure that everyone in the congregation who knew him felt the same.

Funerary rituals have been around since the dawn of humanity, but it is surprisingly difficult to track down the historical details of death as a cultural phenomenon. Clodagh Tait has tackled Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650 in this short monograph. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The period of time between a person’s physical demise and the disposal of their corpse is worth close examination, for in the glimpses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people addressing the fact of the corpse in their midst we can also see them dealing with some of those rather more complicated questions raised by that corpse’s presence among them. The rituals and processes involved are difficult to reconstruct. At this stage the corpse usually was in the hands of family and friends, the focus of procedures which, because they were to contemporaries too ordinary to be documented or remarked upon, let alone explained, become all but invisible when the historian attempts to look at them in any depth.

This is a very dense book, looking in depth at what is known about attitudes to death and the dead in Ireland in the early modern period. Tait is frank about the shortcomings of the source material – the surviving written evidence is mainly about the rich rather than the poor, about English speakers rather than Irish speakers, about adults rather than children. But there is enough to pull together a fascinating cultural and ritual landscape, of corpses and graves being relocated for political reasons, of which relatives you are buried with, of how the afterlife is imagined at a time when Protestants and Catholics were being offered very different future fates.

The struggle over the religious jurisdiction of death would in itself have been enough for a whole book, but it would not have been as good; by leading in with the nuts and bolts of the deathbed, the funeral rites and the monuments, Tait establishes a framework of universal human experience, with an Irish historical hue, in which the denominational squabbles then take place. Many of the old cultural practices around death are lost forever, thanks to industrialisation and modernisation, but enough survives to give us a really interesting glimpse of a society both familiar and alien. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett.

Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson / Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman

Second paragraph of third chapter of Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson:

For some time after I came to Dublin, my body was weak, my health very precarious, and my spirits heavily oppressed. Pleasures seemed to have lost their exhilarating effect, and I experienced a kind of lethargy of the mind. In short, I fell into a state, the most destructive to virtue that possibly can be. It is when the heart is replete with sorrow and languor, that is most susceptible of love. In the midst of a round of amusements, each equally engaging, and a train of admirers the giddy female gives neither a preference, and has not leisure to attach herself to either. But when softened, and inactive, the tender passions find easy admission, and the comforter, and consoler soon becomes the favoured lover—such was my case.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore:

While Dardis continued to visit Peg when he could, she was lonely and missed her family. She confessed, ‘I was oppressed with anxiety, and could neither look back with remorse, nor forward without apprehension of what might follow.’ Her biggest concern was what her sisters and father might be making of her disappearance. She had fled he sister’s house telling no one where she was going and had left behind all her clothes. Anxious about the distress she was causing her family, she pleaded with Dardis to try and find out what they knew of her situation.

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book about Peg Plunkett, 18th century Dublin courtesan, off a remainder pile a few years ago, and thought I should prepare myself for it by reading the original memoirs, published in 1795-97 and available for free here, among other places.

Peg’s memoir is a tremendously interesting account of what it was like to make your living from sex in the Dublin of 250 years ago. She pulled herself up from a series of failed relationships and set up a brothel on what is now O’Connell Street with her friend Sally Hayes in about 1775; she would have been in her thirties (if we accept the 1742 birthdate proposed by Peakman) and Hayes a bit younger.

She faced a lot of violence from men who felt they should take it into their own hands to punish sex workers just for being sex workers, but interestingly (by her account at least) she managed to get the forces of law and order on her side, and usually won her day in subsequent court cases. She tells these stories with great humour, but it must have been very traumatic.

She does a lot of name-dropping of names that mean nothing to us now, but clearly she was accepted in the highest social circles. She had affairs with at least two of the English governors of Ireland, Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland, and John Fane, the Earl of Westmorland. She has a hilarious story about being challenged while at the theatre about her affair with the Duke; when hecklers yelled, “Peg, who lay you with last?”,

I with the greatest nonchalance, replied, “MANNERS you black-guards;” this repartee was received with universal plaudits, as the bon mot was astonishingly great, the Duke himself being in the royal box with his divine Duchess, who was observed to laugh immoderately at the whimsical occurrence, for ’tis a known fact, that this most beautiful of woman kind that ever I beheld, never troubled herself about her husband’s intrigues.

Still, it must have been pretty uncomfortable to have her sex life dissected in public like that, and it is impressive that she turns it into a joke. (The unfortunate duke died of alcoholism while still governing Ireland, aged only 33; his ‘divine duchess’ outlived him by more than forty years.)

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book hoping that it would fill in some of the gaps in Peg’s first person account. To what extent can her stories be independently verified by other records? Who is behind the various pseudonyms, such as “Mr. B——r, of Kilkenny [who] shortly after came to be Lord T——s, by his father’s obtaining a very ancient earldom”? How does her narrative fit into the overall analysis public discussions of sexuality and sex work in the English-speaking world in the 18th century?

I’m afraid that I was disappointed. Peakman’s book does resolve some of the pseudonyms, but otherwise doesn’t do much more than reheat and repeat Peg’s narrative for a modern audience; and frankly, Peg’s style is much more entertaining and engaging. I guess that for readers who don’t have access to the original documents, Peakman will do; but as I have found with that other great self-describer of a century later, Fanny Kemble, the original text is far more interesting than any modern re-hashing.

What I’d like to see is an edition of Peg’s memoirs where the blanks are filled in and where we get a decent best-guess timeline and maps showing the geography of the places where she was active. I think that it would sell rather well. Meanwhile you can get Julie Peakman’s book here.

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis.

Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.1
1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3

Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street

He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.

And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)

So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.

Version 1.0.0

Wannabes: a 1990s story, by Dave Rudden

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ the Doctor said acidly, as a pulse round exploded a bloom behind his head, splattering his cheek with thick, sweet-smelling sap. ‘I’ll tell that to our lungs, shall I? I’m sure they’ll understand.’

A story of the Tenth Doctor and Donna, visiting Dublin to witness the first ever gig of (fictional) girl band the Blood Honeys, only to find that the event has been infiltrated by a trio of alien sisters out to exploit the emotional energy generated by the event. The aliens have a number of near relatives in both Doctor Who (the Carrionites) and Irish mythology (many cases of three sisters).

Rudden, who is himself Irish, gets the feeling of Dublin in the early Celtic Tiger days very well (even though he would have been roughly eight years old at the time the story is set), and you can very plausibly see Donna and the Doctor interacting with the changing entertainment scene. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who the five-member girl band making their debut in the mid-1990s are based on, but a pinch of satire can help a story run smoothly.

I am preparing a post grumbling about the failures of Big Finish to get Ireland right in a recent audio play, but I have no such grumbles in this case. I enjoyed this and you can get it here.

Bechdel pass in Chapter Four, where the three alien sisters discuss their plans for Earth.

St Patrick’s Day: celebrating in Leuven

The cult of St Patrick goes back to the fifth century, when he returned to Ireland (having spent time there as a child slave) as a missionary bringing Christianity to the island. The details are very obscure – we have a couple of documents actually written by him which however are frustratingly vague in places. However, his brand proved powerful, and by the seventh century he was accepted as the patron saint of Ireland.

Leaping forward a thousand years, after the disintegration of the old Gaelic political leadership in Ireland – culminating with the voluntary but permanent exile of two crucial noblemen in 1607 – the Irish College in Leuven became one of the centres of Irish culture and external political activity. Indeed, during the whole seventeenth century, the land we now call Belgium was the only country where books were published in the Irish language – it was illegal in Ireland.

From 1612 there are records of the Irish exiles in Leuven celebrating St Patrick’s Day, so the history of March 17 as a diaspora festival really starts here; when you are in the auditorium of the college, formerly the chapel, you really are in the room where it happened. And a couple of days ago (St Patrick’s Day being a Sunday this year), the Celticanto trio of singers performed this electrifying rendition of Danny Boy to a spellbound audience. It was pretty amazing.

As a footnote, Leuven did not in fact witness the first recorded overseas celebration of St Patrick’s Day. St Augustine, in Florida, is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the contiguous USA founded by Europeans, in 1565. It was a Spanish settlement, but in 1600 the parish priest was an Irishman, Richard Arthur, known as Ricardo Artur locally; and he invoked the protection of St Patrick (rather than St Augustine, after whom the town was named) for the settlers. Local historian Michael Francis has found records that Artur organised public celebrations of St Patrick on 17 March 1600 and 1601, including a public procession in 1601. It’s not quite St Patrick’s Day as we know it; there was not much of a diaspora in Florida, and the tradition ended when Artur left the town.

But no need to quibble; today is a day for celebration. Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!

Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Balfour’s Irish experience was rooted in his years as chief secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891 when his repressive policies had earned him the nickname of ‘Bloody Balfour’ among Irish nationalists. His deep-seated Unionism was the rock on which the efforts to establish a bipartisan policy on the Irish problem had foundered in 191o. In 1920 Balfour was the cabinet minister arguing most forcefully for Ulster’s right to remain a fully integrated part of the United Kingdom. In November 1921 he remained so sceptical of negotiating with Irish republicans in the aftermath of the truce that ended the Irish war of independence that Lloyd George sent him to head the British delegation at the Washington Naval Conference lest his presence in London disrupt the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Arthur Balfour was at once the most cultivated, the most cynical and the most cerebral of prime ministers. The trouble with Arthur, a colleague observed, is that he knows there has been one Ice Age and he thinks there’s going to be another. Who better, then, to share Balfour’s enjoyment at Shaw’s lampooning of the conduct of well-meaning English liberals in Ireland than the two Liberal leaders who were to follow him into 10 Downing Street?

I did not know Ronan Fanning well; we met a few times and I certainly admired his work. Although this book came late in his life, published in 2013, four years before he died, big chunks are apparently taken from his PhD thesis of 1968. I guess history doesn’t necessarily change that much.

The subject is Westminster attitudes to Ireland at the time of independence, focussing especially on the two Prime Ministers, Asquith and Lloyd George, and also on the leading Conservative politicians and the other Liberals, Winston Churchill in particular. My own PhD thesis concentrated on almost exactly the same period, and I thought I had done a pretty exhaustive dive into the last two decades of British administration in Ireland. So I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I learned from this book. Fanning concentrates on policy rather than administration, and on the debate in London rather than what was happening on the ground in Ireland – the Easter Rising, for instance, gets barely a page, but the British response gets most of a chapter. This is not a criticism – Fanning was entitled to write the book he wanted to write, and he was entirely correct to see a huge gap in the historiography of the period.

Things that I learned, roughly in order:

The Liberals from 1905 until the House of Lords crisis in 1909-10 were not just apathetic to Irish Home Rule, the leadership were actively hostile to the concept, and would not have ever legislated for it if they had not been backed into a corner by John Redmond and the Irish Nationalists (one of the latter’s few strategic successes).

At the same time, the Liberal government in 1912-14 knew that Home Rule could not be implemented in large parts of Ulster. Lloyd George and Churchill proposed excluding Ulster from home rule as early as February 1912. This was copper-fastened by the disloyal and treacherous actions of senior army officers, in particular Sir Henry Wilson and the brothers Hubert and Johnnie Gough, who undermined the elected government by conspiring with the opposition and with the military garrison in Ireland to provoke the Curragh mutiny in March 1914.

Therefore the counterfactual idea that, if there had been no 1916 Rising or War of Independence, a Home Rule Ireland would have eventually evolved into a Dominion-like status, is wrong. The only decisive factor affecting British policy, apart from the personal prejudices of political leaders, was violence or the threat of violence. The British folded on Ulster in 1914, and on independence for the rest of the island in 1921, purely because of the balance of coercive force. The British government’s own use of coercive force was poorly planned and disastrously implemented.

When it came to the Treaty negotiations on 1921, the British got entirely what they expected (apart from a late concession on tariffs). The Irish delegation were thoroughly unprepared, particularly on the issue of partition. Michael Collins then planned to destabilise and attempt to take control of Northern Ireland, but was distracted by the Civil War, and after that he was dead. London did nothing to protect Catholics in the North in the 1922-25 period (or for that matter Protestants in the South, though they were in less danger). The Boundary Commission, to which Fanning devotes an interesting epilogue, was designed to achieve nothing, and did so.

In general, both Asquith and Lloyd George were motivated (on Ireland at least) not by ideology but by the need to stay in power by satisfying their coalition partners, successively the Irish Nationalists and then the Conservatives. (Also Asquith was fundamentally a procrastinator who did not want to actually do anything.) The Conservatives were more ideologically Unionist than the Liberals; so too was the fledgling Labour party. Andrew Bonar Law, who actually became Prime Minister briefly in 1922-3, was Canadian by birth but an Ulster Presbyterian by background; however, once he came to power his first decision was to get the last stages of the Treaty enacted, just to get it over with.

There’s not a lot about women here, but a key figure is Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary and lover. The smartest officials, notably General Macready who was the person who advised the British in 1921 that the military campaign in Ireland was lost, knew that Lloyd George never read his own paperwork and wrote to Stevenson instead. Not everyone knew this trick. Lloyd George and his key male adviser, Tom Jones, often had crucial conversations in Welsh, which nobody else in Downing Street understood.

The whole thing is eloquently written. It’s not short (361 pages) and it’s not for beginners (knowledge of the broad thrust of events is assumed) but it’s really interesting.

I found the account of the bitterly divided 1912-14 government, publicly committed to a policy goal that had been wished on it from outside, and that few of its leaders really believed in, very reminiscent of the Brexit period. But the wider lesson, that most British prime ministers spend most of their political energy on simple day-to-day survival, has much broader relevance, and not just in the UK.

Anyway, this was a tremendously good read. You can get it here.

An Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards; and in search of W.H. Bromage

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The major engagements of the medieval period are. however, those of defenders against invaders. Most of them were fought in an attempt to prevent further Norman penetration of the country. The fact that the Irish succeeded in preventing the Normans from completely overrunning the country was due not only to their stout resistance, but also to the isolation of the invaders from their homeland and the impossibility of gaining sufficient reinforcements to maintain and consolidate their position. Additionally, the importation by the Irish of Scots mercenary soldiers called gallowglas (from gall óglach – foreign warrior) from the thirteenth century onwards, was to strengthen their resistance considerably. At first confined to Ulster, galloglas later spread throughout Ireland in the service of the great families. These mercenaries prolonged the life of the independent Gaelic kingdoms for more than two centuries after the defeat of Edward Bruce (14). Four centuries after the conquest the O’Neills and O’Donnells were still ruling most of Ulster according to the customs of their ancestors. It was not until their defeat in the Nine Years War (15) in 1603, that all of Gaelic Ireland finally fell to the invaders.

Here are the two maps, by W.H. Bromage, referred to above. I will have a lot more to say about the artist below.

I have known Ruth Dudley Edwards since 1989 or so; she was at school with one of my aunts, as it turns out, and her father was the historian Robin Dudley Edwards. I regret to say that I have stopped following her on social media; she is entitled to express her hardline conservative views, but I do not feel compelled to read them.

This book dates from half a century ago, when the world was a different place and Irish history was a different discipline. It’s a breezy summary of the main points of Irish history to date, concentrating on the medieval and early modern periods, and the maps, even though they would have been a bit old-fashioned even in 1973, illustrate the narrative.

But there are some odd omissions. After independence, Northern Ireland largely disappears from the narrative. (It gets seven pages in the second last chapter, and the Troubles get one line.) From my political perspective, it would have been interesting to see more mapping of election results across the whole period. The chapter on social change completely misses the elephant in the room, the role of the Catholic church in society.

There is a much newer edition, published in 2005 with contributions from Bridget Hourican, where I believe that these issues have all been addressed. I see reviewers complaining, however, that Bromage’s maps were retained despite not really being with the Zeitgeist; as I said, they look old-fashioned for 1973, let alone 2005 (or 2024). But you can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson.

W.H. Bromage, who drew the maps, is credited with the illustrations for a number of similar books of the period, mostly published by Methuen, some by pretty big names: The Archaeology of Crete: an Introduction, by John D. Pendlebury (1939); The War in Burma, by Roy McKelvie (1948); Introducing Spain, by Cedric Salter (1954); In Search of London, by H.V. Morton (1956); An Atlas of World Affairs, by Andrew Boyd (1957); Frontiers and Wars, by Winston S. Churchill (1962); Pan-Africanism, by Colin Legum (1962); Survey of the Moon, by Patrick Moore (1963); The Sword-Bearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, by Corelli Barnett (1963); The American West, by John A. Hawgood (1967); An Atlas of African Affairs, by Andrew Boyd and Patrick van Rensburg (1970); and The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, by George MacDonald Fraser (1971). An Atlas of Irish History (1973) is the last book that I have found which credits him.

Roy McKelvie, writing in 1948, describes him as “Mr W.H. Bromage of the News Chronicle“. I’ve found a number of maps of the changing front lines of WW2 published by the News Chronicle and credited to “William Bromage”…

…and also a rather nice illustrated text of the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, signed by Eisenhower, Montgomery and Churchill and dated 1945.

A William Bromage is also credited with the maps in Small Boat Through France (1964) and Small Boat on the Thames (1966), both by Roger Pilkington. This must be the same person. That’s literally the only other certain information I have about him. Illustrating fourteen books in 34 years would hardly make you a living, so he must have been full-time with the News Chronicle until it was absorbed by the Daily Mail in 1960, and maybe stayed on after that.

Ancestry.com gives me half a dozen people called W.H. Bromage, with the W.H. short for “William Henry” in all cases, born in England in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The surname is concentrated in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. He could, of course, easily have been born somewhere else entirely. I find a Detroit journalist of that name in the 1920s and 1930s, who could conceivably be the same person though it’s a bit of a shift. I also find a San Francisco journalist of the same name in the 1890s, and a reference in 1919 to “the renowned Anglo-Catholic artist, W.H. Bromage”, but neither of these can have been illustrating An Atlas of Irish History in 1973.

It is frustrating that I know almost nothing else about Bromage: he was clearly a man of talent, who captured the market in drawing maps for books about history and current affairs. It could be that this is a problem of Internet research, and that if I had access to a decent reference library in the UK I would find his biographical details really quickly. Or not; you never know what will survive.

The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This ceaseless mixing of the population makes nonsense of all the familiar assumptions of ‘Gaelic origins’ or ‘the Irish race’. The distinctive nature of Irishness arises specifically from the interaction of newcomers with natives (the perennial cliché of Irish historical writing). Strictly speaking, there are no natives; or, to put it the other way round, all the Irish are natives. ‘Irish’, if it means anything, simply means being born in Ireland, even if, like Swift or the Duke of Wellington, you did not want to be. Many of the characteristics which are regarded as ‘typically Irish’, for instance, are demonstrably the legacy of the Old English, or the Anglo-Irish or the Lowland Scots just as much as they are of the Celts, whom we now call the Gaels. Interest in the Gaels, in their language which Irish people still spoke, in their literature and culture generally, revived in the eighteenth century. More specifically, both Protestants and Catholics, though divided from each other politically by the penal laws and structures based on them, tried to establish a connection with the Gaelic Irish culture, which was still extraordinarily healthy. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in decline, and speaking Irish was regarded as a mark of social inferiority, something associated only with backward rural communities. Then, by the end of the century, a revival was under way, and Gaelic culture was being presented to the Irish population as the indigenous culture.

A.T.Q. Stewart was a colleague of my father’s in Belfast, and his sons were friends of ours – indeed I shared a house in Cambridge with one of them for a year. His perspective was a bit different, as one of the few prominent Irish historians of our parents’ generation who came from the Unionist tradition. I found a 1977 review in Fortnight of Stewart’s award-winning The Narrow Ground, written by my father, which began:

This is one of the most depressing books yet published on Ulster.

and concluded:

His book is beautifully written, as readers of Dr Stewart’s previous books will expect. Again and again, one pauses with pleasure at some felicitous phrase. ‘Ireland, like Dracula’s Transylvania, is much troubled by the undead’. (p.15) ‘The factor which. distinguishes the siege of Derry from all other historical sieges in the British Isles is that it is still going on’ (p.53) ‘What the Catholics have been saying for fifty years about the Ulster government springs from a well that was made bitter long before Stormont was built’. (p.179) I wish I could write like that. But I wish also that Dr Stewart had used his literary gifts to write a more constructive work.

My father also criticised Stewart in 1977 for not reading in other scholarly disciplines beyond history, including anthropology in particular. It’s interesting that in the opening chapter of The Shape of Irish History, published in 2001, eleven years after my father died (and nine years before Stewart’s own death) he too appeals to historians to read beyond their own discipline, particularly anthropology (E. Estyn Evans was a key figure in the history of the history of Ireland). There is probably not a direct connection with my father’s review.

The Shape of Irish History is a quirky book, probably written knowing that it would be the author’s last substantial work. I find the basic thesis very attractive: that we should not regard Irish history as a train on a direct journey (“The 10.14 from Clontarf”) with an inevitable destination; if we analyse people and events in the context of their own times, rather than trying to fit them into a story of national destiny, we will learn more. Subsequent chapters look at interesting diversions off the course of the train, especially in the eighteenth century, where I recently read a very interesting microstudy of one particularly vicious cultural practice of the time (duelling). I also learned a lot from the very brief dissection of what actually happened in 1798. There are lots of fun facts here, including the ballooning career of Richard Crosbie.

At the same time, my father’s observation from 1977 about style and tone still stands. It’s beautifully written, but the conclusion is thoroughly depressing:

There is no misunderstanding between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, none whatsoever. Nor do they need to get to know each other better. They know each other only too well, having lived alongside each other for four centuries, part of the same society yet divided by politics and history. This is not just a clash of cultures; it is a culture in itself.

This embrace of the inevitability of perpetual conflict is as unjustifiable as the narrative of the inevitable ‘10.14 from Clontarf’ train to Irish national destiny, which Stewart rightly criticises. There’s very little reference to other countries, and none to other conflicts, beyond the British Isles here. Stewart had clearly integrated the findings of other scholarly disciplines about Ireland into his worldview between 1977 and 2002; it’s a shame that he didn’t also look further afield.

Anyway, it’s not a book for beginners in Irish history, but it will be of interest to anyone who is already familiar with the basics. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2016 still on my shelves. Next on that pile is Comparing Electoral Systems, edited by David Farrell.

A historic maximum: ex-prime ministers and iar-taoisigh

There are more former British prime minsters alive today than at any time since the office was created in 1721.

Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Camero, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major make a total of seven living PMs since Truss’s resignation on 25 October last year. And from the looks of things, that number is likely to increase before it decreases – Rishi Sunak’s government looks to be in worse health than any of his predecessors.

On two previous occasions there have been six living ex-Prime Ministers.

Between the end of Sir Robert Peel’s first term, on 8 April 1835, and the death of Henry Addington on 15 February 1844, there were six living ex-prime ministers: Addington (whose time at the top was decades previously, 1801-1804), Viscount Goderich, the Duke of Wellington, Earl Grey (he of the tea), Lord Melbourne and Robert Peel. Though in fact Melbourne had a second term from 1835 to 1841, and Peel then came back until 1846, so there is an argument that there were only five living men who were former and not current prime minsters for that period.

Similarly, from the end of Ramsay MacDonald’s first term, on 4 November 1924, until the death of H.H. Asquith on 15 February 1928, there were also six living former prime ministers: the rather obscure Lord Rosebery (briefly PM in 1894-95), Arthur Balfour, Asquith, David Lloyd-George, Stanley Baldwin and MacDonald. Again, however, Baldwin was back in for a second term.

The most recent period when there was only one living ex-prime minister was between the death of Baldwin on 14 December 1947 and the end of Attlee’s term on 26 October 1951. The only living ex-PM then was the leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill.

When the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, died on 18 March 1745, there were no living ex-PMs. His successor, the Earl of Wilmington, died in office, as did the next in line, Henry Pelham, and there was no living ex-PM until the end of the first term of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, on 11 November 1756.

The number of ex-Taoisigh (?iar-taoisigh?) is also at an all-time high, at six (Bruton, Ahern, Cowen, Kenny, Varadkar, Martin) though again we have to enter the caveat that Varadkar is currently enjoying his second run.

That level has been hit twice before. Between the end of John Bruton’s term in 1997 and the death of Jack Lynch in 1999, Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey, Garret Fitzgerald, Albert Reynolds and Bruton himself were all living, and as Bruton’s successor Bertie Ahern had not previously been Taoiseach, there are no ifs nor buts.

And more recently, for the two months in 2011 between the end of Brian Cowen’s term and the death of Garret Fitzgerald, the living ex-Taoisigh included also Liam Cosgrave, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern; and again Enda Kenny was a first-time Taoiseach during that period.

There has been no period when there were no living ex-Taoisigh, thanks in part to the longevity of Eamon de Valera. After the death of John A. Costello in 1976, Jack Lynch was the only living ex-Taoiseach until Liam Cosgrave lost the 1977 election (and Lynch came back to power).

The number of living former heads of the devolved administration in Northern Ireland is also current at an all-time high, at five (Mark Durkan, Peter Robinson, Arlene Foster, Paul Givan and Michelle O’Neill – counting First Minister and Deputy First Minister equally, but not counting those who served only in an acting capacity such as Reg Empey and John O’Dowd).

In the olden days there was no living ex-Prime Minster of Northern Ireland until John Miller Andrews was kicked out in 1943, Lord Craigavon having died in office, and then again from Andrews’ death in 1956 until Brookeborough retired in 1963. James Chichester-Clark, briefly PM ion the dying days of Stormont, lived to 2002, by which time devolution had been more or less restored.

Aren’t you glad I worked that out for you?

Enoch Burke, attention-seeker: what the judges said

I don’t know to what extent the tedious case of Enoch Burke has been covered outside Ireland, or Irish circles. He is currently at the centre of a series of court cases surrounding his misconduct as a teacher at a school in central Ireland. Last May a pupil at the school came out as trans and requested the school to use a new name and they/them pronouns. Burke – who did not actually teach any classes including the child in question – wrote to the principal of the school saying that he was not prepared to do so, spoke angrily about the issue at a staff meeting and then disrupted a school religious service by heckling the principal and the local bishop in front of the pupils.

The school suspended him as a teacher and and then fired him, on the grounds of misconduct, but he continued to turn up to the school demanding to be allowed inside to continue teaching. The police and court system got involved; he continued to defy court orders to tell him to stay away from the school and ended up in prison for contempt of court for several weeks before Christmas. After he was formally fired in January, he continued turning up at the school, and was arrested when he went inside. The court has now imposed a fine of €700 per day for each day he turns up at the school premises; he now owes the school over €24,000.

The usual suspects are trying to make a case that this crazy bigot who refuses to give assurances that he will not harass a child who is going through a difficult phase of their life, disrupted a religious service, attempted to intimidate his colleagues and their pupils and has repeatedly defied the law, is in fact a heroic martyr for the cause of free speech and standing up for the principle that biological sex is real. Although it should be noted that Fred Phelps Jr of the Westboro Baptist Church thinks he has ‘gone too far’, which is a line you won’t see often.

I read with interest the rulings of three judges on the Court of Appeal who threw out Burke’s attempt to overturn the previous judgements against him on 7 March. (The Burke family disrupted the Court of Appeal session and had to be removed by police. Since then, Burke lost another case last week.) The three judges take somewhat different routes to arrive at the same conclusion.

The most interesting judgement is from Justice John A. Edwards. You can read it in full here. He goes in some detail into the history of Irish legislation on recognising gender transition, particularly the Foy case, which I wasn’t really aware of. He then looks at cases of people taking controversial stances of conscience, including (rather to my delight) Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire. He makes this important point:

Conscientious objections are to be taken seriously. Beliefs sincerely held are to be respected, whether they be on social or religious or other principled grounds. All the more so, where the beliefs on which the objection is founded, and the right to express them, are supported by personal rights guaranteed to the citizen under the Constitution, and perhaps also under international instruments. However, nobody has a monopoly on rights and rights such as freedom of conscience, the right to free profession and practice of religious belief, and freedom of expression are not wholly unqualified rights. Further, those rights may intersect with the same or other rights, arising under the Constitution or otherwise, of others who do not share their beliefs.

If you are in the mood for it, the two other rulings bear reading too. The President of the Court of Appeal, George Birmingham (who in a previous life was Ireland’s first ever Minister of State for EU Affairs, back in 1986), mainly looks at the legal technicalities (because the Court was looking at alleged failures of procedure, according to the Burkes, in the previous court rulings). You can read his judgement here. But he too makes some very important points of wider application. I was struck by this at the end:

It seems to me that the approach of the school is very much in accordance with wider public policy as articulated in legislation such as the Gender Recognition Act 2015. That Act is not directly applicable in the circumstances of this case, as the pupil involved, being under 18 years of age, has not applied for and is not in a position to apply for a gender recognition certificate. However, it is part of the statute law of the State, and is, to a degree, I believe, declaratory of public policy. The long title of the Act is that it is “An Act to recognise change of gender; to provide for gender recognition certificates; to amend the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, the Civil Registration Act 2004, the Passports Act 2008 and the Adoption Act 2010; and to provide for matters connected therewith.” Against the background of the statute law of the State, it seems clear to me that the decision of the principal and of the school is in no sense an outlier.

Isn’t it interesting that Ireland has come to the stage where recognising transgender people for who they are is seen by a 68-year-old senior judge as the default, and the behaviour of the Burkes is in every sense an outlier?

Finally, Justice Maire Whelan, formerly the second longest-serving attorney-general in the history of the Irish state, whose own appointment to the court in 2017 was somewhat controversial, weighs in on the school’s ethos and duties to its pupils, and Burke’s failure to respect either. One of the points of interest of the case is that the school is actually a Protestant school by background, run by the Church of Ireland. The village where the school is located has a total population of less than 200, and only 2% of the 95,000 population of the whole of County Westmeath identify as Church of Ireland, so it seems likely that the school takes in pupils of other faiths and none. (My research, not Justice Whelan’s.) Justice Whelan looks at the role and responsibilities of the school and of Enoch Burke, and comes down very firmly on the side of the school.

Contrary to Mr. Burke’s contentions the safety, health and welfare of the individual student is of central importance in this case. In was incumbent upon the school to ensure that a parental request that respect be afforded by the school for the diversity arising should be accommodated in accordance with the school’s own Admission Statement and characteristic spirit.  As stated above, both the school and Mr. Burke stood in loco parentis to the student. It was incumbent upon the school to ensure that no conduct, by act or omission, as might cause harm or be potentially discriminatory or that could impact detrimentally upon the student in question or the student body would be engaged in…

Leaving aside all legislation, the school and its Board had continuing and significant common law obligations towards children in respect of which it stood in loco parentis.  Mr. Burke himself had – and continues to have – like obligations at law… 

Further parents and students were entitled to expect that no individual student would be at risk of less favourable treatment than their peers, of being left vulnerable to discrimination, of not being accorded or treated equally with other students in terms of their human dignity by virtue of the potential conduct of a teacher in the school.  The school having adopted its mission statement and statement of ethos as it was required to do by statute was bound by its terms.  Not alone was it not open to the school, by omission, to resile from its obligations but, in my view, it had a positive duty to defend and vindicate the school policy in circumstances where a clear risk had been identified in the conduct of Mr Burke which was capable of visiting discrimination and/or impacting detrimentally on the welfare of the student body in general and the individual student in particular. That was particularly important where the school was one which in the very words of Mr Burke “ all teachers have interaction with all pupils”.

It is powerful stuff. Apparently several St Patrick’s Day parades yesterday featured floats mocking Burke’s removal from the school and the High Court by Gardaí, to cheers from the crowds. Ireland has changed.

(Though I hope that the student is getting the necessary support from their family and community. They did not pick this fight, and just want to live life as their own self.)

Faith in Politics, by John Bruton

Second paragraph of third essay:

As he approached the end of his life, Ian Paisley really wanted to be the man who was seen to have brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

In the last few years I’ve become friendly with John Bruton, former Taoiseach and former EU ambassador to the United States, and he kindly gave me this volume of his collected writings a few years back. Most of the pieces first saw the light of day as blog posts, newspaper articles or lectures, so it is all very digestible. Little will come as any surprise to readers who have followed Bruton’s career; he’s defensive of Ireland’s record as a nation (especially when he was in office, starting in 1973); he’s a convinced European, but troubled at the difficulty of herding cats (he has been at both ends of this dynamic, as a national leader and a senior EU representative); he takes economics seriously but is not obsessed by it.

A couple of points jumped out at me. First, his controversial but well-argued point that if there had been no Easter Rising, by 1930 or so Ireland would probably have ended up in the same place as in our time-line – a Home Rule government would have pushed for full independence and London would have been compelled to concede in the context of Canada, Australia and New Zealand getting similar powers.

I’m not so sure; part of the motivation for 1916 was the Nationalist perception that the UK had consistently failed to keep its promises to Ireland and the known risk that a post-war Conservative and Unionist government might revoke Home Rule before it was implemented, and this perception has some basis in reality. But Bruton makes a fair point that the achievement of Redmond in getting Home Rule onto the statute book in the first place deserves greater recognition.

Secondly, I was struck by the essays in his last section about Christianity and politics. It’s all fairly sensible stuff, arguing the need for an ethical framework to politics and government, and advocating the virtues of a faith background. He does not mention abortion or same-sex marriage. If church leaders were to follow his example and talk more about ethics in the broadest sense, they would have more credibility.

You can get it here. This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry, John!) Next on that list is The Ahtisaari Legacy, edited by Nina Suomalainen.

My grandfather and Irish decimalisation

Three men, Ken Whitaker, Sean Murray and George Colley, pose with the new Irish decimal currency in February 1971

It’s a photograph that I have long been familiar with; legendary Irish economist and public servant T.K. Whitaker on the left, Minister for Finance George Colley on the right, and in the middle my grandfather, Sean F. Murray, previously Whitaker’s deputy at the Department of Finance, inspecting the new decimal Irish currency, switching from the old system of 20 shillings and 240 pennies to the pound, to the new 100 pence which endured until the arrival of the euro. My grandfather chaired the internal government committee that brought in the new system.

The new Irish decimal coins exactly matched the British, as the old coins had done since they were introduced in 1928; there was later some divergence, as the Irish 50p coin did not downsize when the British did, and the Irish 20p coin was larger and rounder than the British one, but for most of the period from 1971 to 2002, most British and Irish coins were physically interchangeable, and certainly in Northern Ireland you would normally find some Irish coinage mixed in with your sterling change. This could occasionally lead to problems after the Irish pound aligned with the European Monetary System in 1979; I remember well Black Wednesday in 1992, when the exchange rate shifted from £1.05 Irish to £1 sterling, to vice versa in the course of a few days.

In hindsight, the decision to continue the alignment of the Irish and British currencies after decimalisation in 1971 looks like a no-brainer, and I must say I had vaguely wondered what my grandfather’s committee actually did other than accept the inevitable. I was completely wrong. A 2020 Ph D thesis by Andrew John Cook at the University of Huddersfield looks in depth at the decimalisation process, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the Commonwealth (much of which had inherited the pounds, shillings and pence of the colonisers) and Ireland. The story is much more complicated than I had realised, and in fact all three of the men in the photograph – Whitaker, Murray and Colley – had initially opposed the decision that they ended up implementing.

From the early days of independence, occasional voices had floated ideas that Ireland should decimalise its currency – but by adopting the ten-shilling unit and shillings as the core of the new system, abolishing the pound and changing from 12 pennies to 10 cents in each shilling. This was not a fringe idea. The first such proposal was from T.A. Smiddy, Michael Collins’ economic advisor and later the Irish Free State’s first ambassador (to the United States). The surviving memo from him to Collins is dated April 1923 in the archives – which must be incorrect, because Smiddy was already in Washington by then and Collins had been dead for eight months. If he received it during his lifetime, Collins would have had other things on his mind anyway.

A cabinet committee in 1959, and another in 1965, endorsed the ten-shilling scheme, though a sizeable minority in both cases preferred to move in tandem with the UK. Another proposal floated at the time was to move to florins, worth two old shillings, as the base unit; each florin would have 100 cents (so 10 florins and 1000 cents to the old pound). The argument was that for a country much poorer than the UK, the fundamental unit need not be as valuable as the British pound.

But with the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement in 1965, and the 1966 British announcement that they would move to a pound with 100 pence in 1971, the situation became urgent. Cook quotes from several government memos written by my grandfather, from which it becomes clear that he ended up as the key mover, along with Finance Minister and then Taoiseach Jack Lynch and also Charles Haughey, Lynch’s successor in Finance, to ensure that Irish decimalisation would match the British process.

My grandfather was in charge from an early stage. In January 1967, three months before I was born, he wrote a memo to the Cabinet on behalf of the Department of Finance recommending the florin-cent system. This was also supported by his boss, T.K. Whitaker, and by the Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Frank Aiken, and for Industry and Commerce, George Colley. However, the 85-year-old President De Valera supported the ten-shilling scheme (advocated 45 years earlier by Smiddy) in an October 1967 letter to the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, in which he also foresaw the ultimate role of a single European currency:

I would adopt half the pound sterling, that is the ten-shilling note as the Irish fundamental note. It would have to be given a name. For want of a better one I use Réalt here. One tenth of a Réalt would be a scilling and one tenth of a scilling a pingin.

If I were asked, why not keep exactly to the British unit, I would say that the ten shilling one is a better one on its merits. Moreover, it is desirable that Dublin is not considered a mere suburb of London, or Ireland as a piece of West Britain. There are, possibly, amongst us some who desire this but we should not aid them. There is no better way of making visitors feel they have come to a different nation than by having a different currency …

We will never get a chance like this again for a quiet assertion of our nationality. The decision to be made here is, in my opinion not a mere economic one. It is, also, a national one, and were the decision to be mine I would not hesitate a moment. The British might, sometime in the future change the basis again, we would surely look ridiculous if we were always accommodating ourselves to them. The position would be different of course if the nations of Europe were all to go over to a common unit and Britain were to join them. We could then, without any loss of dignity, accept the common unit.

But the Minister of Finance, Jack Lynch, had been in favour of simply following the British lead since at least 1966, and when he became Taoiseach in October of that year, the new Minister of Finance, Charles Haughey, ruthlessly implemented Lynch’s policy. (Which is rather ironic, given later events.) Haughey commissioned a public consultation, and put my grandfather in charge of managing it and ensuring that it came up with the right answer (thus neutralising one of the internal voices in favour of the florin system).

The banks were particularly strong supporters of the Haughey/Lynch plan, and that carried a lot of weight. On 23 April 1968, Haughey, backed by his deputy, Jim Gibbons, and by Lynch as Taoiseach, announced the shift to pounds and new pence with the same value as sterling, to take place on 15 February 1971, the same day as the UK, based on the results of the public consultation and the conclusions of the committee that my grandfather had been running.

By February 1971, Haughey had been dramatically fired by Lynch, and tried and acquitted of shipping arms to the IRA, with Gibbons (who had meanwhile become Minister of Defence) the chief witness against him. His replacement as Minister of Finance was George Colley, meaning that he and my grandfather, who had both been early supporters of the florin scheme, were now in charge of implementing a completely different proposal.

The RTÉ coverage of Decimalisation Day starts with Colley in a Dublin bank, my grandfather beside him looking at the camera to see if it is rolling, and ends with my grandfather in a brief interview saying that it all seems to have gone well. (And it had.) It must have been one of the biggest days of his career, and one can sense his glee. (I wasn’t able to embed the video directly, so this is it captured via my iPad; there are some silent parts, including at the beginning.)

Today is in fact the 113rd anniversary of my grandfather’s birth, on 16 October 1909. (His sister-in-law, now aged 106, is still with us.) He died in 1976 when I was nine, and the last thing I remember talking to him about was Gulliver’s Travels. I am the oldest of his 22 grandchildren; here I am with the first of his great-great-grandchildren, my half-first-cousin-twice-removed, born last year.

Meanwhile Andrew Cook’s thesis looks like a rollicking good read of what might at first sound like a very dry corner of administrative history, and for the time being at least, you can get it here.

That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly

Second paragraph of third chapter, with table:

Many factors contributed to the growth in enthusiasm for duelling in Ireland in the late 1760s and 1770s. The social and attitudinal effects of economic prosperity, already referred to,’ were at work a fortiori by the end of the 1760s; while the disinclination of the authorities to use the law to confine the enthusiasm for duelling meant that there was little by way of legal obstacles in their path. Table 2.6, which summarises the response of the law to the recorded duelling incidents that constitute our sample for the years 1716-70, indicates that there was an identifiable decline in the proportion of duellists taken to court in the mid-eighteenth century. By the 1760s the authorities no longer prosecuted duellists as a matter of course, even in cases in which there were fatalities, if the duel was deemed to have been conducted within the code of honour, because judges and juries routinely returned verdicts of manslaughter in self-defence which ensured the defendant’s prompt release.

I got this because I remain very intrigued by the reported incident of about 1723 when one of my 5x great-grandfathers, John Ryan Glas of Inch, Co Tipperary, was killed in a duel in Dublin by another of my 5x great-grandfathers, John White of Leixlip, Co Kildare, in a property dispute that escalated. Kelly doesn’t refer to that in his book, but it’s still a very interesting analysis of socially sanctioned extrajudicial violence in a society which was going through many transitions.

Although the dates given are 1570 to 1860, most of the recorded duels are from the eighteenth century. I do have a family connection with one of the earliest of them, however, the 1583 trial by combat between two of the O’Conors of Uí Failge (Offaly, as we now call it), held in the yard of Dublin castle at the command of my ancestor Sir Nicholas White, Master of the Rolls.

But basically the formal duel came into its own in the aftermath of the Williamite settlement, when the rule of law was weak but the concept of honour remained strong, and intensified in the later part of the century as political change began to build. Indeed it’s striking just how many of the leading politicians of the day were involved with duelling, right up to Grattan and Flood, and the young Daniel O’Connell.

I also realised that I had forgotten whatever I once knew about the complexity of eighteenth-century Irish politics, with the corrupt but stable “undertaker” system during the mid-century upset by the Castle v Patriot dynamic towards the end, which led to autonomy from 1782, failed rebellion in 1798 and Union in 1801. These political struggles were not only carried out verbally. But at the same time, quite a lot of duels were resolved without either combatant being killed, and no major figure lost his life in that way (unlike Alexander Hamilton).

So, plenty to chew on. You can get it here.

The Limbless Landlord, by Brian Igoe

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thence they had a long (over 200 miles) journey by road to Chalon-sur-Saône, whence they took a steamer down the River Rhone to Avignon, which should have been much more comfortable. The swift flowing Rhone can be quite exciting to sail down, and this trip reportedly took thirteen hours. That would be an average of 16.8 knots!

Way way back in 2008, I read and reviewed four biographies of the fascinating Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, an important Irish political figure of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, who notably was born with only stumps at his shoulders and hips instead of arms and legs. A bit more recently in 2012 I wrote a shorter piece about him for the BBC. I’ve also written up the one book that he wrote, and a novel based on his life. Brian Igoe sent me his own biography of Kavanagh to look at back in 2015, and I’m sorry to say that it took me until now to actually read it.

Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh

I complained of the four previous biographies that 1) none of them is particularly good, 2) none of them looked at Kavanagh’s political career in much detail (he ended up leader of the Irish Unionist MPs in the House of Commons) and 3) none of them looked at his religious beliefs. Igoe’s biography is certainly better than the other four, and looks at Kavanagh’s politics in detail, and at least gives more than passing notice to his religious practice, so I think I’d recommend it as a starting point to anyone wanting to explore Kavanagh’s life.

I felt that Igoe is particularly good also at looking at Kavanagh’s family circumstances, a younger son of a landlord family, a class that was already dying out, doing his best to stand up for his ideal of an old-fashioned, conservative Ireland in changing times. And to be honest, Ireland was a pretty conservative country until quite recently; had he lived to see Irish independence (he would have been 91 in 1922) he would probably have accommodated himself to it as he accommodated himself to other inconveniences in his life.

Igoe’s style is a bit breathless, and there are one or two moments where I winced at a truncation of the historical record. But he sticks close to the historical facts, as far as they can be determined from the record, where other recent biographers have taken the truncated figure of Kavanagh as a canvas to project their own fantasies onto. Really, the truth is extraordinary enough. You can get it here.