Wild, wild times

There are, I believe, only two jokes in Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest voluminous tome: one, citing Liam Cosgrave, sometime Taoiseach, considered a rather dull character, who apparently said that ‘the Jews and the Muslims should settle their differences in a Christian manner’ (which is almost as insightful as the Tyrone newspaper which once carried the headline: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite against ecumenism’). The second is a quotation from a woman in Sandy Row, in deeply Loyalist Belfast, expressing her distaste for a United Ireland with the words ‘Dublin would have us practising celibacy on the streets’.

There is no reason for a historian to entertain humorously, and Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin, is a serious person, as the Irish ruling caste tend to be nowadays: Irish public intellectuals, television inquisitors and political figures have succeeded to the position previously held by strait-laced bishops, moralising priests and commanding reverend mothers. And Professor Ferriter has currently much authority in Dublin, where he is called upon regularly to discourse publicly on matters of history, culture and progressive ideas.

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Matthew Lynn

Nationalising British Steel won’t fix a thing

He is an outstandingly diligent researcher: he has the ability (and the industry) to amass a great number of facts and archive material and organise it all into a coherent narrative; in this case, pertaining to the Irish Republic during the troubled 1970s, when the optimistic changes of the 1960s were overtaken by murderous scenes in Northern Ireland (about which the Republic was ambiguous indeed — the Irish Tourist Board was very keen to distance itself from any united Ireland which included the North), and economic development faltered. There were also significant social changes, from the challenges to the 1935 law banning birth control, to the emergence of Co.