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Title: Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland by Conor Cruise O'Brien ISBN: 0-226-61652-5 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Sane Explanation of a Sad Situation
Comment: Conor Cruise O'Brien has spent many years combating the mystical nationalism that insists on a unified Roman Catholic Ireland. The citizens of the Republic and the Catholics of Ulster (not to speak of the Irish-Americans!) may not consciously condone the IRA and its methods, but their tacit approval (and sometimes more) of the aims of this terrorist organization is what keeps it going. By foregrounding this issue, O'Brien is doing that which is unpopular North and South, but needs to be done. My hat is off to him.
This is a personal account of the "troubles" that the Irish have inflicted on each other (with some help from the English) from Wolfe Tone (1798) on. The author spends the last third of the book discussing the current mess in Ulster - current, that is, as of 1995. CC O'Brien has been involved in various of the governments of the Republic of Ireland over the years, as well as working in the UN and being an intellectual-at-large in this country and elsewhere. He is a lapsed Catholic whose aunt Hanna was a well-known Irish Republican activist after the Easter Rising of 1916. It is his thesis that virtually everything in Irish politics that came after 1916 can be explained by reference to the sacral character of the deaths of Connolly, MacBride and others, but particularly of Patrick Pearse, who foretold his death on that occasion in prophetic and religious language that cast himself in the part of the Savior who would be a sacrifice for his country's freedom. These deaths haunt the Irish Catholics still, and those that hear most clearly the "ancestral voices" and their calls for blood in service of the nation are deferred to by those more moderate, for whom the voices are dim.
Actually, I picked up this book to better understand some references in James Joyce. I was not disappointed. Much of the family conversation in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" becomes more clear: the time of the novel was just about the turn of the century, not long after the fall of Parnell (almost wrote "the Fall"), when battle lines were being drawn between Catholics and Protestants, and Catholics and Catholics. As a bonus O'Brien talks about WB Yeats and Maud Gonne and their roles in the events of the early part of the century, particularly Yeats's play "Cathleen ni Houlihan", which became a touchstone of Republican patriotism thereafter. Although Yeats got out of that mystical form of country-worship, and was repudiated by the Catholic sectarians who wanted an Irish AND Catholic nation, his play was retained as an evocative piece of propaganda.
This book is charming and personal, mixing family memoir with formal history. O'Brien has written other things on this painful subject of the intersection of religion and politics (I enjoyed "The Siege" when I read it a dozen years ago), but this is closer to home for him, and I found the metaphor of the "ancestral voices" to be telling: it explains a lot. (In particular, I now have a hope of understanding the movie "Michael Collins", which deals with the tangled politics of the Irish civil war of the early 1920's.) Still, though, I may get the book he and his wife wrote on the history of Ireland for a wider view of events. This book traces an important thread of that history, but must, because of its focus, leave much out. Still, as an explanation of that intractable situation in Ulster I don't think it can be bettered.
Rating: 5
Summary: The sanest man in Ireland ?
Comment: I lived in Ireland for over twenty years, starting from just before the time of the 'Troubles'. In all that time, and since, it is my sincere opinion that no-one has talked as much sense about Ireland as Conor Cruise O'Brien. Sadly, he's been much reviled for it. Happily, he's never let that stop him.
Dr O'Brien recently published his autobiography, 'Memoir', which hints gently at an awareness of his own mortality (he's 82 this year). I guess that after he's gone then many folks will realise what they had in the 'Cruiser'. Don't wait on this event, dear reader ! (And anyway, it might not be for a long while yet, the Guinness is VERY good in Dublin, you know!)
To cut a long bit of blarney short - read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A measured and humane historical meditation.
Comment: O'Brien's courage, scholarship and independence of mind are fully in evidence in this series of reflections on the links between religious and nationalist mythology in his native Ireland. No Irish politician or commentator in the past generation has equalled O'Brien's historical knowledge and insight, and it is this historical sense - coupled with a passionate and reasoned aversion to the ideology and acts of terrorism - that makes his writings unique and vital. For his pains, the apologists for terror frequently engage in emotive and semi-literate diatribes against him; that, coming from them, is a compliment to him.
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Title: The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849 by Cecil Blanche Fitz Gerald Woodham Smith, Cecil Woodham-Smith ISBN: 014014515X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell ISBN: 0156767503 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1973 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield ISBN: 0804729301 Publisher: Stanford University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (OPUS S.) by T. S. Ashton, Thomas S. Ashton, T.S. Ashton ISBN: 0192892894 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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