PARNELL’S DISLIKE of funerals and his English accent posed a “major barrier” to his Irish political success and made him an unlikely leader, a new book covering some 1,500 years of Irish history has said.
Ireland: A History by Prof Tom Bartlett was published yesterday by Cambridge University Press.
Few major historical figures escape criticism in the book which details Irish history from what Prof Bartlett described as “St Patrick to St Paisley”. St Patrick’s “superhero” status created by early Irish hagiographers is placed under question because the saint’s writings revealed a “modest, all too human (though still quite remarkable) individual”.
The lack of detailed information in St Patrick’s writings were “infuriatingly vague” and began the “Irish tradition of whatever-you-say-say-nothing”.
Irish folklore stories of Catholic emancipation leader Daniel OConnell cast him as “Gaelic Messiah”, Prof Bartlett said. Among the traits given to him was “boundless sexual energy” with “none other than Queen Victoria reportedly succumbing to his charms”.
Former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party David Trimble is described as possessing “a capacity for rudeness that left opponents furious and onlookers gasping in disbelief”, the book notes.
The departure of taoiseach Jack Lynch in 1979 opened the way for Charles Haughey and “a 30-year period of thuggery, skulduggery and sleaze was begun in Irish political life”.
The Irish language skills of former taoiseach WT Cosgrave are chastised because he needed “phonetic flashcards when saying a few words in Irish in public”.
His successor Éamon de Valera’s condolences to the Germans on the death of Adolf Hitler was the final expression of a “wilful blindness”.
