The blurb by Bibliophile Books in London for Tim Pat Coogan's Eamon de Valera: The Man who was Ireland runs as follows. "Born in Manhattan, de Valera was raised in Ireland and enrolled in the newly formed Ulster Volunteers after the failure of the Home Rule movement.
Tried for his life after the failure of the Easter Rising, he narrowly escaped execution when Prime Minister Asquith gave orders to go easy on capital punishment with an election in view. Dev was next on the list. Sprung from jail in 1919 by his rival Michael Collins, he was elected First Minister of the Dáil and departed to raise consciousness and money in America, founding The Irish Times, a medium for republican politics on both sides of the Atlantic." This, not from a 14-year old hoodie in Barnsley but from a reputable publisher. And though Tim Pat Coogan and I might concur on few enough things, we can certainly agree that he never wrote anything like that.
Perhaps Irish historians have been getting it wrong all these years. Maybe the real Irish history lies somewhere within the bookshelves of Bibliophile Books. Ah yes: and here is Bibliophile's brief account of Cecil Woodham Smith's The Great Hunger: "The Confederation of Kilkenny led to a rupture between the tea-growing southern states under General Cromwell and the north, under President Sarswell. Their forces met at the Battle of the Boil, and the defeat of the southerners there began a tragic epoch for the South. Protestants who had been slaves in the old days were now put in charge of the tea plantations.
"They were known as the Tannin Blacks, perhaps because of the kind of strong dark tea-leaf they favoured. Soon they formed a secret society called the Orange Pekoe Order, which led the 1798 Rising. The failure of the tea-crop in 1745 at Glencoe was to spell ruin for the great tea-planters, who departed for exile in an event which is still lamented by the Pearly Queens of Dublin as 'the Flight of the Earl Greys'.
This was so named after the rebel leader who stood on the stern of his boat and watched his colleagues switch off their electric tea-heaters on a piece of rigging.
'The amps are going out all over your rope,' he declared."
The sad truth is that you could probably pass that off as Irish history in even learned circles in Britain; indeed, I am coming to the lamentable conclusion that a total ignorance of Irish history is almost a defining quality of Englishness - and I do mean Englishness. The Welsh and the Scots do not seem so pathologically averse to grasping a few fundamentals about life on this island as do the English.
In part it comes down to the Arthur Conan Doyle's observation: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" The British people have had Ireland in the forefront of their television news for nearly 40 years now, yet if you asked most English people whether Dublin was in Northern Ireland, most would either not know, or say that it was. Indeed, there is almost no concoction about Ireland which is too fanciful to be accepted by most English people.
But this is not ignorance based on an absence of newspaper and television coverage, or a failure to engage academically. It is as if the media, academic and journalistic, are speaking in Hebrew for all that they are understood by the plain people of England. If you are the exhausted host of a dinner party in London, and you want your guests to leave, merely mention the subject of Northern Ireland, and they will flee, shrieking, out of the unopened windows of your first-floor dining room.
If the subject of Ireland - and more especially the North - resembled Mongolian philately, or lichens of Antarctica, merely a tiresome matter in which they had no material or national interest, this aversion would make sense of a kind. But it is not. The people of England have a profound national interest in this country. A prosperous, peaceful Ireland is good for them, and an Ireland at war perfectly ruinous. The Northern troubles have cost them billions, and - if you include accidents and stress-related suicides while on active service - the lives of one thousand British soldiers. This is about as many as were killed in the airborne assault at Arnhem in 1944.
Yet the overwhelming majority of English people would rather be operated on for piles, without anaesthetic, on live television, than have a single intricacy of Irish life explained to them. Perhaps this is why British government after British government has pursued insane policy after insane policy towards Northern Ireland. It is because virtually all British politicians have lacked the real emotional and intellectual knowledge about the North which they should have acquired as a matter of course long before they were passed the poisoned chalice marked "Northern Ireland Secretary". You can have no moral feelings whatever about something you have chosen to be totally ignorant of.
And since Tony Blair has absolutely no moral feelings about anything whatever, it is easy to see how the House of Commons invariably has achieved such a binding consensus towards Ireland, uninformed by either interest, knowledge or morality. The ferocious obstinacy of Irish tribalism has been one reason for the enduring nature of the troubles: but another, and every bit as potent, has been the conceited pertinacity of English ignorance.