When Irish nationalism meant sexual adventure

One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past, only more so. It’s a natural human tendency to project the outcome of events backwards, ignoring the fact that the arc of history really doesn’t work like that.

In the case of Ireland that tendency to see the past in terms of outcomes is particularly misleading. The state that came about less than a century ago as a result of the Easter Rising, the war of independence and partition was socially conservative and strongly Catholic. Roy Foster’s achievement is to show that this need not have been so. This book — the title is from W.B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ — takes a close look at the generation of nationalists that came to political maturity between 1890 and 1916, and reveals a rich and assorted cast of characters with a diversity of views and preoccupations — feminism, socialism, religious diversity, sexual liberalism, the works.