How can Ireland survive the seismic changes of the past three decades?

Historians in Ireland occupy a public role – unlike in Britain, where those with an inclination towards the commentariat usually migrate to America. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where public intellectuals are exemplified by Stephen Fry and philosophers by Alain de Botton. Ireland presents a more demanding prospect, where, ever since the days of Conor Cruise O’Brien, historians have colonised the public sphere with influential newspaper columns and regular debates on television. Indeed, when the national TV station began broadcasting in the early 1960s, it featured a discussion programme called The Professors, all of them historians (and one or two usually a bit the worse for wear).

Diarmaid Ferriter currently carries the flag for the historian-as-commentator, and does it with considerable élan. He is also far too hardworking to abuse the hospitality room. His punchy columns in the Irish Times are required reading on the issues of the day, and a stream of substantial books have dug deep into the modern Irish experience, covering revolution, civil war, social change, sexual behaviour and most recently the Irish border. His magisterial study of the 20th century was called The Transformation of Ireland – a title also applicable to his latest volume, where the word ‘revelation’ seems rather odd in the context.

Or maybe not if it means, rather than a stunning coup de foudre, the unveiling of something that was there all the time. Ferriter tells us that his earlier use of ‘transformation’ now seems provisional, and the new book, beginning in 1995, ambitiously charts the upheavals of economic boom and bust, the coming of uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, the crumbling of the social and political power of the Catholic Church, and above all the diversification of a society transformed by immigration: Gort, County Galway, where Yeats spent his summers, is now largely inhabited by a lively Brazilian community attracted by the local meat-packing industry.