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.

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918-1973

Enda Staunton
The Columba Press
2001

A huge number of books have been written about the Northern Ireland troubles. There are far fewer covering the first half century of the northern state's existence.

Of those few, Enda Staunton's study of the political history of northern nationalists is among the most important.

Staunton begins with the 1918 election in which Sinn Fein swept the board throughout Ireland including much of the North. In the Belfast constituency of the Falls, however, Eamonn De Valera was to be defeated by Home Ruler Joe Devlin.

This event underlined the internal differences within nationalism, both between North and South, and within the North Itself.

Devlin would later describe the creation of a separate northern Parliament as 'the greatest and last of all calamities.'

Hell or Connaught: The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660

Peter Berresford Ellis
Hamish Hamilton 1975
Blackstaff Press 1988

 

The Cromwellian plantation of Ireland is an event that still resonates to this day, and in Beresford Ellis it has a worthy chronicler. His highly readable account of the period shows a mastery of original sources, both native and settler.

Beresford Ellis draws on English political pamphlets of the 1640s to argue that the Levellers opposed the invasion. Yet it was in many cases the most radical parliamentarians who ended up in Ireland, perhaps as part of a deliberate policy to keep them from making trouble in England. Some such as Edmund Ludlow, would themselves become exiles following the restoration of Charles II.

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion

Charles Townshend
Penguin
2006

Charles Townshend’s Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion traces the events of 1916 from their roots in the home rule crisis before the First World War, to their aftermath in the War of Independence.

There is a careful examination of the confused days leading up to the rebellion, when Eoin MacNeill, chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers, countermanded the order for mobilization on Easter Sunday. The Rising nevertheless went ahead a day later. MacNeill’s authority was over-ridden by Pearse, Connolly and the other members of the military committee of the IRB, the secret revolutionary organisation which had been the hidden hand behind the creation of the volunteers in the first place.

Townshend argues that the secretiveness of the IRB was one reason why for the relative failure of the rising in rural Ireland, which he deals with in a single chapter.

The core of the book is a blow by blow account of the fighting in Dublin. Townshend details the positions occupied by each of the volunteer detachments in what was essentially a defensive stance, and relates the progress of the British counter-attack.

Paine: Political Writings

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Thomas Paine, edited by Bruce Kuklick
Cambridge University Press
1989, 2Rev Ed 2000

Tom Paine was arguably the most important thinker in the English radical tradition and a significant figure in both the French and American revolutions. He transformed the art of political writing with a lucid plain style designed to appeal to the common people rather than the classically educated elite.

This useful anthology includes a number of his most important writings:

Common Sense (1776) - tract containing the first open call for the Thirteen Colonies of America to throw off their allegiance to Britain. At one time there was one copy in circulation for every five people on America.

The Crisis Number I (1776) - Famous pamphlet written while Paine accompanied George Washington's army in its retreat across New Jersey. Washington had it read to his men before crossing the Delaware. Its power is exemplified by the famous opening lines:

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.

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen

A.T.Q. Stewart
Faber & Faber
1993

This book traces the influence of English and Scottish radicalism on the United Irishmen.

Stewart describes two important parallel developments in Eighteenth Century Ireland which ultimately came together in the United Irish movement.

The first was the emergence of an Irish national consciousness amongst Protestants who had formed the political class ever since the Williamite settlement of the late Seventeenth Century. Imbued with the Whig principles of the English revolutions of the 1640s and 1680s, they increasingly chafed at the Irish Parliament's subordination to England.

The second was the gradual re-emergence of a Catholic middle class able to challenge the penal laws.

These twin developments are clearly summarised in chapter three, The Story of the Injured Lady.

Choosing the Green? Second Generation Irish and the Cause of Ireland

Brian Dooley
Beyond the Pale
2004

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

As recently as the 1970s, it was argued that the Irish in Britain were unique, because of the fact that their children assimilated totally into the British population within a generation. If nothing else this book is a spectacular refutation of that assumption.

Choosing the Green looks at the second generation Irish (mainly in Britain but also elsewhere), through their relationship to the Republican tradition.

Author Brian Dooley acknowledges there are other ways of looking at those of Irish descent. He says of writers such as Pete McCarthy “What is remarkable… …is how little impact the Troubles in Northern Ireland appear to have had on their definitions of Irishness.”

Dooley also examines others for whom attitudes to the conflict were decisive. Arguably, this range of opinion is not that that different from the spectrum among the Irish-born. Nevertheless, Dooley is right to apply a political perspective.

The second generation dilemma, how far to identify with Ireland, and how far with Britain, surely derives much of its urgency from the political relationship between the two countries.

The Enchanted Glass: Britain And Its Monarchy

Tom Nairn
Radius, 1988

An incisive critique of the Monarchy and its role in sustaining the British establishment. Nairn sees the monarchy as the lynchpin of an oligarchy in which Westminster, Whitehall and the City of London all seek to contain popular democratic/nationalist demands in order to maintain a residual sense of global greatness.

Some of Nairn's targets; Trident - 'the Royal bomb', the 'pseudo-feudal socialism' of much of the Labour Party, appear even more well taken twenty years on.

Indeed, it has become ever more apparent that New Labour's early constitutional reforms were ultimately an attempt to shore up the system Nairn describes rather than challenge it. This book is arguably even more timely now than when it was written.

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

The Tyrannicide Brief

The Story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold
Geoffrey Robertson
Chatto & Windus
2005

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

The Tryannicide Brief explores the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, and the life-story of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted the King and paid for it a decade later with his own life.

The death of Charles I has often been seen as nothing more than a settling of scores at the end of the English Civil War. Robertson argues that it was in fact a blow for human rights, establishing the principle that the head of state is not above the law.