One of the joyful results of writing any book on Irish history is that it puts one in touch with a cross-section of the learned and the loony, the bitter and the blissful. This came home to me initially when I wrote Partners in Revolution (1982) on the United Irishmen and again in 1990, just after my Wolfe Tone biography appeared. A year on from the publication of Catholics of Ulster I particularly treasure the letter enclosing one of the reviews. This appeared in the London-based Irish Democrat of the Connolly Association, and the writer, claiming as his address 10 Downing Street, wanted to draw it to my attention.
"I am sure that you would be very interested in the article on the back page, we would like to know how much they pay you for writting this false rubbish. You need to go back to College, or whatever institute you attended and re do your Irish history papers, God help us. We have a proverb in Irish that geos Nil sic aon mhaith a bheith aineolach muna dteasbaineann tu e , and the translation goes - Its no use being ignorand if one doesint show it, that applies to you. Mise le meas Empire appeaser. I get rich by putting my own race down."
The Irish Democrat's review was not flattering and was one of four hostile reviews which stand out from a large body of otherwise favourable ones. All four were in the same vein as my hate-filled correspondent (if such is the term) who sent the Irish Democrat piece. Most referred to points made in the others, though vying with each other in discovering new ways of calling me a "Castle Catholic". Thus I was "the Loyal Taig" in Books Ireland, the "Castle liberal" in the Sunday Business Post, a "revisionist" "imperial apologist" in the two English periodicals (the Irish Post and Irish Democrat), one who dared to call the IRA "callous" (Books Ireland), the award of an OBE for a lifetime promoting Irish Studies in Britain confirming my guilt for the Irish Democrat reviewer. He also damns by implication the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, which I head - its establishment having been one of the main outcomes of the work for which I was awarded the OBE - even though I have made it available for Connolly Association meetings and will continue to do so as part of the institute's engagement with the local community.
These reviews reminded me of Brian Moore's character in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, who "read the newspaper the Irish News as other men play cards, shuffling through a page of stories until he found one which would confirm him in his prejudice".
In contrast, the book touched a chord with a significant number of Irish people, and some English people of Irish ancestry, who wrote to me. Prompted by my discussion of such topics, they told me of family traditions about Protestants holding land in trust under the penal laws (some returning it, some not), of their experiences at hiring fairs as late as the 1940s, of cross-community activities in the 1950s, of memories of Catholic schooling and church activities. Northern Catholics singled out aspects of my book devoted to relations between the communities, those from other parts of Ireland were more interested in dispossession and the penal laws. I am involved in correspondence with a well-informed man from Co Dublin who has found evidence of priests being arrested under the penal laws and queries my discussion of the mythology which has developed around the emotive image of the priest being arrested at the Mass Rock. Priests were indeed arrested then as today, but usually for reasons other than Catholic religious practice, which was not outlawed - the infamy of the "priest-catcher" notwithstanding. Moreover, such concentration on the priest and the Mass Rock has deflected attention from the very real penalisation of Catholics in the areas of social status and civic and political rights.
Indeed it was in Ulster that the kind of petty persecutions which were such a feature of life under the penal laws would have been most common. Even so, the culture of grievance and resentment produced by such brooding on past wrongs has blighted the Catholic community and made it all too easy for those trying to move beyond such resentment to be accused of "selling out". Yet many have shown that it is possible to do so without in any way becoming less Catholic, less nationalist or less Irish, and the book was welcomed by those who have done just that, people like Maurice Hayes, Denis Bradley and Patricia and Conn McCluskey. A number of unionist-minded people - particularly members of the clergy who are working to combat sectarianism within their own community - also wrote of how much they had learnt from the book and adding their own stories.
The Catholics of Ulster is not a book about high politics or the Catholic Church, although both are discussed as part of the general context. It is rather about the people who have called themselves Catholics, about their culture and identity and their relationship with their Protestant neighbours. Three readers' letters stand out in particular, all from Catholics who now live in England.
One was from a south Co Down man, who was critical of Catholic religious and cultural life in the 1930s and 1940s, but who nevertheless has remained a practising Catholic - and if any reader recognises who I am talking about, would they ask him to contact me again? For his alone of the letters has remained unanswered, since it has been misplaced and I have no address to which to respond.
Another was from a woman who had settled in the north-west of England from south Armagh and told of how, in the 1940s, "Catholic and Protestant were obliged to pull together, as neither were particularly prosperous". And, lastly, there was the woman who had grown up in west Belfast in the 1930s and worked in Ballymena during the war. In a moving and lyrical five-page letter, she spoke of hearing frequent talk of "planters" without knowing anything about them, of childhood picnics on the mountains overlooking Belfast, of "the great day out for poor children" with Joe Devlin's free excursions, of routing through Belfast's communal interfaces to reach her Catholic school, of being taunted passing the Protestant school with "insults about the Blessed Virgin. After all, we had the true faith, we would be rewarded in the presence of the Almighty. Where the Prods would end up didn't bear mention."
On the 12th of July, she would watch the Orange Lodges gathering in New Barnsley. "Then the drums would start up and they would set off in full regalia down the Springfield. It seems amazing that still goes on."
She told of the beauty of the countryside as she cycled all over the North and the impact of the American soldiers introducing "a jolly carefree" atmosphere to wartime Ulster. On moving to England she was warned by her father not to marry a Protestant. She reminisced fondly on how she failed him and how she has been married to just such a Protestant for 50 years. But at first her instincts made her uncomfortable with her in-laws' tradition of adding the names of each new generation of children to the old family bible, "such a 'Protestant' book".
It was the kind of memoir that I had trawled the various folklore collections for and I longed for more as she apologised unnecessarily for "rambling on". "I had intended just writing a word of appreciation and thanks for your splendid book, but now in my 80s memory overwhelms me. The Catholics of Ulster . . . is, to coin a phrase, a book whose time has come".
That letter was more reward than any number of favourable reviews, for it was the story of people just like herself that I had set out to write.
The Catholics of Ulster: A History, by Marianne Elliott is published in paperback by Penguin, £9.99 in UK