The Story of Ireland (2011) By Neil Hegarty; and The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History (1997) Edited by Sean Duffy

I did not pick up The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People by Neil Hegarty as a pleasure read, I found it to use as a stepping stone to a larger project, but it is a pleasurable read.

I’ve blogged before about my goal of conquering James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that I’ve started, and abandoned, several times.  I find myself ill equipped to tackle it.  A few months ago I began taking the incremental approach to it by reading and reviewing Joyce’s early book of short stories Dubliners.  Satisfied, I then took the next step, attempting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; but, by the end of the first chapter realized I needed a primer on the history of Ireland before I could quite grasp the elusive asides in A Portrait.  Hence, my latest reads.

In searching for a book on Irish history, the selection process alone was time-consuming. It seems everyone, and their brother/sister, has written a book on Irish history.  Inevitably, these books are in reality about their family history, interesting, but not what I was looking for.  What I wanted was a readable history of the island, except not a thesis.  I found 80% of that with Hegarty’s book, which is almost entirely text.  I found the other 20% with a phenomenal little book titled The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History edited by Sean Duffy and consisting primarily of maps.  These two books weren’t written together, but they complement each other perfectly.

The histories do an admirable job of outlining the complexities of a people born of the influence of endless invasions from the outside world, yet also often insulated from it. One witnesses Celtic and Viking interactions (most of the cities on the coast that we know of today, including Dublin, are renamed Viking settlements) and, one also witnesses the countless back and forth migrations across the Irish Sea that resulted from subsequent invasions of England, by the Romans, the Normans, and the needs of British imperial expansion.

(And, as if talking politics is not dangerous enough, let me delve into religion…)

Then there is Ireland's religious history, which started not in the pews, but in the bedrooms of England – politics, disguised as theology.  It was played out in colonial economics then; and it lingers forever more, while continuing to be sold to the outside world as religious differences, an aspect, not a cause.

For purposes of reading Joyce, this religious history is what I was looking for -- not the Catholic/Protestant divide of the north, but the internal Catholic division.  What I did not understand when beginning A Portrait was the many references to internal squabbles about “The” Church.  Ireland has a deeply Catholic people with an innate independence born of a monastic tradition.  Yet, it saw that monastic tradition stamped out by a politically corrupted Vatican-imposed diocesan structure that was more often than not in bed with the imperial overlords – an administrative structure accepted by some, but never to be trusted by all. This helps explain a great deal about the legendary skepticism found in many Irish Catholics worldwide vis-à-vis the Vatican. 

Recommendation:  I don’t know that I’ve ever spent as much time searching for the correct book on a subject. The time was well spent, The Story of Ireland by Neil Hegarty, coupled with The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History, is precisely what I was looking for, detailed, not dense.