Irish History: Historians will be ploughing through the files of the Irish Bureau of Military History (BMH) for many years to come, writes Diarmaid Ferriter
The bureau's collection includes almost 1,800 statements taken in the 1940s and 1950s from people involved in the events of 1913-21, and were released to researchers in March 2003. The publishers of this new history of the 1916 Rising maintain it is the first account of this event to make full use of the statements, which is not strictly true - they were central to Annie Ryan's book Witnesses: Inside the Easter Rising, published earlier this year.
While Ryan's lively book provided a memorable portrait of the events of Easter week, Townshend has succeeded in presenting a much broader and more textured analysis of the Rising, including the view from the British side. He is well equipped to do so, having previously published books on the British campaign in Ireland during the War of Independence, and the connection between Irish politics and violence.
He writes with great clarity, and has mined a formidable array of primary source material, particularly important in a book that deals with an event characterised by utter confusion. But the other claim his publisher makes - that his book "scrapes away layer upon layer of myth" associated with the Rising - is somewhat exaggerated.
Part of the difficulty lies with the lack of sources, particularly when dealing with the activities of a secret military committee within the IRB that left no account of its proceedings behind. This is one of the reasons the author draws heavily on the work of a previous generation of historians, such as FX Martin, Florence O'Donoghue and Desmond Ryan, whose initial assessments are usually found to have been sound.
Townshend traces the growing militancy of a minority in Ireland - north and south - in the years before the Rising with great fluency, and gives due credit to Bulmer Hobson, the IRB's leading strategic thinker in the pre-Rising period and subsequently written out of history because of his opposition to the Rising.
Trying to establish exactly what was going on inside the IRB is still difficult, and Townshend is often speculative and not quite confident in his answers to key questions, such as how the IRB viewed Pearse. While the BMH statements can be used to fill in some of the gaps, the narrative is still peppered with doubt - "we have only a hazy idea of how frequently it met"; "we have no idea of why Plunkett's ideas were so readily accepted"; "we have no idea what appeal the GPO possessed"; "as with everything else, we can only guess".
He is also tentative about the social structure of the Irish Volunteer movement ("Professionals were probably under-represented in Dublin"), and does not appear to have used the witness statements of the BMH in order to look in depth at the Irish Citizen's Army.
Despite this, this book has great strengths - it gives an incisive overview of the behind-the-scenes indecision of a British administration that was being "bombarded with warnings about the approaching rebellion". He writes convincingly on the growing ineptitude of British rule in Ireland, "the deep ambivalence about the balance between suppression and provocation" demonstrated by Nathan, the under-secretary for Ireland and Birrell, the chief secretary.
His forensic dissection of the activities of the various battalions in Dublin during Easter week is authoritative and compelling, and he effectively charts the indecisiveness and inexperience of all the senior volunteer commanders. He gives credence to the criticisms of de Valera's battalion in Boland's Mill, including the observation of a contemporary that "there wasn't much of a fight, but it wasn't the fault of the men. They weren't put into the position to fight".
The BMH statements are particularly helpful in tracing the failure of Munster to rise and the effects of Mac Neill's countermanding order - he makes the point that despite the confusion, the efforts of "bands of rebels" outside Dublin should not be dismissed, as they were enough to justify martial law being extended across the country. The BMH statements also reveal some of the immediate reactions to the surrender, such as the recollection that Major John MacBride told the Jacob's Factory battalion that "if it ever happens again, take my advice and don't get inside four walls".
This touches on just one of the military failures of the Rising. Undoubtedly, the rebels could have made things more difficult for the British army if they had not centralised their forces, but they also failed to seal Dublin off from outside communication, and to seize Dublin Castle.
In looking at the reaction to the Rising, it is regrettable that Townshend cannot demonstrate whether it transformed Irish public opinion from hostility to sympathy or solidified a latent sympathy - another example of an answer to some of the bigger questions being thwarted by evidence that is fragmentary and subjective.
The book contains an excellent overview of the British government's public and private response, which was deficient in the extreme, exemplified by the arrest of so many who had nothing to do with the Rising - a clear indictment of the police intelligence services. General Maxwell, who oversaw the military suppression of the Rising, was for three months the effective ruler in Ireland. The desperate and failed attempts by Lord Wimborne, the viceroy, to prevent more executions, "pointed up just how completely the civil government in Ireland had been superseded by the military".
The book concludes with an objective and succinct assessment of the legacy of the Rising. The rebels were, he acknowledges, ready to act without majority support; in this "they were hardly different from any revolutionary insurrectionist of the nineteenth or twentieth century". He labels them rebels "because it carries a charge of romantic glamour which was wholly appropriate to their minds". That is why this is a significant book - it may not succeed in scraping away all the myths, but it does not attempt to read history backwards.
Diarmaid Ferriter lectures in Irish history at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University. His book The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 has just been published in paperback by Profile Books
Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion By Charles Townshend Penguin/Allen Lane, 444pp. £18.99