The inside-cover blurb for this book is not an encouraging start: "In 1916, Eamon de Valera arrived on the Irish scene and as a result, or so we are told, the fairies left." Whoever, in a respected publishing house, was responsible for such whimsical twaddle? However, the book itself is more serious and more rewarding than that, though in a discursive, eddying, sometimes highly subjective way. Peter Somerville-Large makes it plain from the start that his background, education and outlook are those of the kind of traditional Irish Protestant who is becoming rather an endangered species, and this defines both the strength of his book and its limitations.
Until a few decades ago, the War of Independence and its pendant, the Civil War, were largely hedged about with national myth or simple ignorance, since a great many of the survivors understandably preferred to remain silent and even dourly Revisionist historians often found it hard to get at the basic facts. There were certainly heroism and self-sacrifice involved, but also clouds of rhetoric which veiled the fact that what had taken place was to a large extent a social and agrarian revolution, with all that usually entails both good and bad.
It was a time of unrest and revolution in Europe as a whole - in Germany, Poland, Finland, Central and Eastern Europe generally, Italy, to mention only obvious cases. The solvent appears to have been the first World War, which overthrew or shook the old social orders and by its sustained, indiscriminate mass slaughter brought in an epoch of violence. The old certainties had gone, and many societies groped about wildly in the dark.
The 1916 Rising was the beginning of such a phase in this country, and Mr Somerville-Large begins his narrative (insofar as there is one) with this obvious watershed. He progresses to the War of Independence, without sparing atrocity stories of which there is a wide choice on both sides - the terror unleashed against the RIC, the burning of fine old houses, the killings carried out on the orders of Collins and others, and their counter-terror.
He is particularly vocal about happenings in Cork, not forgetting the elderly Protestant lady, Mrs Lindsay, who was first kidnapped as a hostage and later shot when the military refused to reprieve five young republican men who had been sentenced to death. For the start of the Civil War - really the final chapter of the immediately preceding one - he lays heavy blame on de Valera, who in general fares badly in this book. This verdict seems unbalanced; almost certainly Dev, though his attitude to the Treaty negotiations and to Collins was certainly ambivalent, could not have reined in his republican wild men or the hotheads of the left. They were, mostly, young men with more idealism than judgment, but the result was more civil devastation, an endemic bitterness which lasted for nearly two generations, and a bill of £50 million in damage - a huge sum for the time. Like the Weimar Republic, the newborn Irish State had started out with massive economic and ideological weights tied to both feet. That it survived is probably due as much to emotional exhaustion as to any new access of energy, but survive it did, against the odds. Mr Somerville-Large, however, appears to share the topical obsession with political violence, a phenomenon which appears to be endemic in the 20th century. Yet Ireland can no more be singled out for this than can Spain, where the Civil War also had deep social and ideological roots and was also far more destructive.
No doubt his own class and ancestors suffered badly under the social revolution, but many or most of them ultimately came to terms with the new order, and in any case the Anglo-Irish land-owning caste was probably doomed historically. (In England, it decayed steadily, though the National Trust has given the Stately Homes a kind of ghostly second life). There was endemic land hunger to satisfy, old social and economic grudges which ached, vicious class differences, yawning religious divides, the challenge of new, nativist class structures and social forces emerging; and the constitutional means were simply not there to cope with this.
His account of the second World War and Irish neutrality is biased and unsatisfactory, and he plays up the degree of pro-German sentiment here to an almost ludicrous degree. (Incidentally the name of David Gray, the much-detested American Ambassador to Dublin, is spelt "Grey" throughout). The plain fact is, Dev had little choice but to be neutral, since the real and unavoidable alternative was English garrisons in the country - which would almost certainly have put us back to the days of the Black-and-Tans.
Thousands of Irishmen fought in the British armed forces, thousands more worked in war-time British industries, and our so-called neutrality was in fact distinctly weighted in favour of the Allies. This much is history, and is now generally admitted. In comparison, how many fought or worked for Germany or Italy? The importance of the Irish ports has, in itself, probably been much exaggerated, since by 1942 the American High Command reckoned that they were of little strategic value in the Battle of the Atlantic, which was mostly fought two thousand miles from the Irish coast.
Mr Somerville-Large, rather predictably, cannot resist the opportunity to bring up de Valera's 1937 Constitution and the "special position" clause about the Catholic Church. He makes the point that Dev consulted Archbishop McQuaid about it, which he did, but he consulted many others about it too, including the Church of Ireland Primate, Dr Gregg. (In fact, Gregg may even have suggested the wording of the relevant clause.) It was not a concession to clericalism, since the Catholic Right disliked it and Dr Alfred O'Rahilly, its leading intellectual spokesman, attacked in a pamphlet entitled "Thoughts on the Constitution". Dev, whatever his faults and blind spots, was not a religious bigot, and it was largely thanks to him that in the postwar years Trinity College, Dublin received the financial help which enabled it to survive a difficult time in its history.
As political history, in fact, the book is rather lightweight; its strength is chiefly as social history, even though there is overmuch fashionable harping on the milieu of the Big House, which recently has become a kind of national nostalgia cult. The treatment of art and literature, too, is rather stereotyped, with the usual emphasis on literary censorship - a commonplace at the time; after all, it was Britain and America which banned Joyce, not his home country. And in spite of the censors, Irish writing flourished - it was, indeed, very much a literary era and culture, as Ireland is not today.
The trouble is, Mr Somerville-Large has a certain inbuilt myopia and usually sees the trees rather than the wood - let alone the forest - and the trees are often those of the Anglo-Irish big estates. Nevertheless, he has ranged widely and has got much disparate material and many lively quotations together, even if his method is impressionistic rather than structured. On that level, at least, his book is an entertaining read, in spite of its occasional intellectual thin-ness and moments of socio-political naivete. Apart from the contemporary colour photographs of Mark Fiennes, the many period illustrations give good backing to the text.
Brian Fallon's most recent book is The Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960