This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to October 2007. During the grand redesign of 2008 I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from June 2003 and lives here forevermore.

A History of Ireland

When I was at secondary school if one of our teachers was ill we’d have a free class which involved going to a large hall, rather grandly called “the Study”. In reality it was just a room consisting of rows of tables, of the kind you’d expect to see in old films about public school, the kind that are 6 feet long, without any form of padding and obviously designed without any thought to comfort. In my final couple of years these were replaced with individual desks with plastic chairs, hardly the height of luxury but a vast improvement in comparison.

I grew very used to that room in my final year, where I spent over half of my time, due to the organisation of my timetable. I used it effectively, revising various things and writing notes on a whole host of subjects. There were however a good number of times when I really couldn’t be bothered to study so I resorted to my fall back plan. That consisted of reading my history textbooks, which, while technically revising, was really just interesting.

I happily bought various books covering European history and read them with enthusiasm along with the standard text. My Irish history textbooks, covering 1870 to 1970, were read less frequently. This was not because it was any less interesting, it was because I found the style of writing, and much of the slant of opinion, off putting. Much of the slant of the books was on the heroic struggle for freedom against the oppressive British, without any further analysis of the real situation. The tensions between the various different groups were barely mentioned until the Civil War “suddenly” starts. The feelings of the groups who didn’t want to break from Britain were ignored. The different socialist groups received little mention and the differing long-term aims of all of the groups were pretty much ignored. Everything came down to a black and white struggle between the “good” rebels and the “bad” British. The only thing that maintained my interest in the Irish part of the my history course was my teacher who would leave the textbook for long periods while he explained the importance and motivations of different events as well as how different groups were effected.

Nowadays I read more history books that any other kind. All of it is non-Irish history. The books I have which I haven’t read yet contain no Irish history, and I have none in my collection. This isn’t for a lack of desire to read a good, balanced book on the subject. It’s because I haven’t found a book that I want to read. Every so often I wander into the Irish section in a book shop and have a flick through some books. None of them manage to grab me. Too many of them obviously have an agenda. Those that I’ve found that don’t, seem to lack any sort of ability to engage a reader, their styles are dry and they’re too “academic”, trying to impress other writers rather than explaining the situation. So I’m still on the lookout for a book on Irish History covering the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Does anyone have any ideas? Relevant comments welcome.