Those fearless men, but few

While reading this book in a London café, I was politely buttonholed by an Irishman: ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw what you were reading and wondered how far back it went.’ I answered that, as it was a group biography of the men who led the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, it began with the eldest of them, Tom Clarke, in the mid-19th century. ‘But,’ I added, ‘it goes back further, to Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone — even Cromwell is mentioned.’ ‘Sure the feud’s much older than that,’ was the gleeful reply.

If Ruth Dudley Edwards had been at the table, I imagine she would have said that that was part of the problem — the romantic, rebel, republican view of Irish history as an unbroken tradition of justified resistance. It is a view that she has spent a 40-year career trying to redress. ‘Ireland has a surfeit of idealists who in their desire to make things better made everything much, much worse.’ The Seven who signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in Dublin on 24 April 1916 were no exception. In their quest to free Ireland from a foreign yoke, they made no allowances for the fact that the Irish Nationalists, holding the balance of power at Westminster, had already secured Home Rule, even if it was delayed for the duration of the Great War.

Home Rule represented that despised thing, compromise, and in any case Clarke, Patrick Pearse, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett had no time for notions of democratic representation. Their authority came, in the words of the Proclamation, from ‘the name of God and the dead generations from which Ireland receives her old tradition of nationhood’: in other words, the old feud.