The Green Ribbon Books

The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism

Robert Kee
Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972
Penguin 2000

A widely read history of Irish nationalism, that has been published both as an omnibus, and as three separate volumes: The Most Distressful Country, the Bold Fenian Men and Ourselves Alone.

In the opening chapters, Kee surveys the Medieval and early modern background to Irish history. The bulk of the book, however, consists of a sustained narrative of the years from the rise of the United Irishmen in the late Eighteenth Century to the Civil War of 1922-23, an eventful period which included the Act of Union, the struggle first for Catholic emancipation, and then for Home Rule, the Great Famine and the Land War, the emergence of the Fenians, the War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty that created the modern Irish state.

Kee concludes with an epilogue which considers events up to the time of writing, during the earliest and most intense years of the Northern Troubles. It's clear thoughout that his sympathy is with constitutional nationalism and the Home Rule movement, rather than with the republican tradition. Nevertheless, The Green Flag is an obvious choice for anyone looking for a well-written narrative history of the period.

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The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein

Owen McGee
Four Courts Press
2005

A comprehensive study of the history of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from its roots in the European revolutionary tradition of the 1840s, to the emergence of Sinn Fein in the early 20th Century.

Reconstructing the history of a secret society is necessarily a difficult task, but McGee's account is compelling.

He shifts the emphasis away from the insurrectionary attempts of the 1860s, which were partly shaped by pressure from the movement's Irish-American supporters.

Instead he focuses on the 1880s, the IRB's role in the Land League and as a competitor to the Irish Party during the home rule debates. He sees the IRB primarily as a political movement for democracy in an age when democracy was still a revolutionary idea.

If McGee sees the IRB as key to Ireland's break with Britain's elitist constitutional tradition, he nevertheless sees its republicanism as distinct from the more Catholic-influenced Irish-Ireland ideas of the War of Independence generation, and of the legitimism of the post-Civil War IRA.

This book will be of profound interest to any serious student of modern Irish nationalism.

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