I know that I’m really not very good at reading non-fiction, but GoodReads tells me I started this book in May 2023, so it’s taken me ten months to finish it! As often happens with non-fiction, I’ll read a little bit and then put it down for months at a time before resuming it and wondering why I’ve got no idea what’s going on. I’m guilty of doing that here, but then I made a concerted effort from the start of 2024 to finish it, as a result of which it only took another two and a bit months to finish.
I don’t know much about Irish history. Being schooled in Northern Ireland, we got English kings and queens, but nothing at all about Ireland. I’ve tried to rectify that a bit through my own reading and listening, and this was part of that self-education. But maybe it was the wrong place to start trying to learn about the Irish independence movement. I know so little about this period in history that a detailed account, running at times almost day by day was not a good idea, since I didn’t really have any knowledge of the overall shape of events.
Also, I think I learn history best though narrative events. Stories of people and how they were involved with historical events. The names and dates style of history leaves me entirely cold, and that’s what this book was. A big list of names (both people and places) and dates. It talked a lot about what the people did (and when) but without really any explanation of why. Some delving into their interior lives might have made a difference.
The book definitely did help cover fill in some of my blank knowledge, however. From the creation of the first Dáil in 1919, to the guerrilla war with Britain to the amazingly quick descent into civil war following the Truce and little glimpses of where things could have gone differently.
For a book called The Republic I was slightly surprised that it didn’t actually cover the final transition from Dominion status to full republic. The book really only covered the wars from 1919 – 1923, ending with the end of the civil war. I had to turn to Wikipedia to discover that there was a further constitution in 1937 that created the position of president and abolished the post of Governor-General, and not until 1948 did it declare itself a republic.
I can see that this would be a valuable book for someone already versed in the outlines of the war of independence and who wanted details. But both due to my lack of that knowledge, and the way I prefer to learn about history, it wasn’t as useful for me as I’d hoped.