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.’