I knew Brendan Bradshaw, genial and intellectual priest and historian, while I was a student at Cambridge - indeed, I asked him to marry me, but unfortunately he wasn't available on the day. (I will wait while you unscramble that sentence.)

I hadn't realised how big a contribution this book had been to Irish historical studies. It is a micro-study of one policy area concentrated on a period of a few years and geographically restricted mainly to the core areas of English rule in Ireland. But he puts forward, entirely convincingly, the evidence that the suppression of the Irish monasteries was driven at least as much by local circumstances and leaders as by the demands of Henry VIII, and that in fact it was no big deal - the monasteries had long since lost their way as centres of spiritual leadership, or even providers of public welfare, and had become blocks on economic and political development. The monks were in general easily bought off, and the only demonstration of popular protest against their dissolution was the successful mobilisation of public opinion in Dublin to save Christ Church Cathedral. The policy enabled Henry VIII to pull the Gaelic lords (and the Earl of Desmond) more tightly into his project of transforming Ireland from a Lordship to a Kingdom, with considerable success.

Of course, I'm reading this as background for my own Tudor Ireland project. One James White, the recorder of Waterford, is recorded as having visited Cork in the spring of 1541 in order to help survey and dissolve the monasteries in both city and county. It's not an uncommon name, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the same James White who was my direct ancestor and died of poisoning while visiting London five years later.

Enda Kenny, the leader of the opposition in Ireland, has been getting headlines for his pledge yesterday to abolish the upper house of the Irish parliament if he wins the next election (as seems increasingly inevitable).

He is right. Before I explain why, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to look at the other two parliamentary upper houses which have been inflicted on the twenty-six counties which now constitute the Republic of Ireland, and also at the reasons why they too were abolished.

( The Senate of Southern Ireland, 1921 )

( The Senate of the Irish Free State (1922-1936) )

( Seanad Éireann (1938-??) )

( Why Enda Kenny is right )

looks like a swing of 15-25% from No to Yes in the Irish referendum, on a slightly higher turnout, according to RTÉ.

I came across a really stupid article about the European Defence Agency, by Vincent Browne who should know better. The best analysis of it and where it fits into overall EU plans is by its former Chief Executive, here. I would like to summarise it but don't have time.

Meanwhile this is a brilliant parody of the "No" posters:

I am cranking up my reading on sixteenth-century Ireland, and decided to go back to basics. This is essentially a narrative survey, based on exhaustive sampling of the surviving primary sources, of what happened politically in Ireland from the death of the seventh Earl of Kildare in 1513 to the Flight of the Earls in 1607. I am still getting my head around the various shifts in religious policy, particularly during the reign of Elizabeth I, but this gives a good skeleton on which to hang the meat of any future work I do.

I was less convinced by Dudley Edwards' subtitle, "The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilisation". It is beyond dispute that in so far as there was such a thing, this period saw its destruction, but he doesn't really illustrate why or what Hiberno-Norman civilisation actually was. It would be more accurate to describe the book as tracking the growth of colonialism as the active British policy in Ireland, which it does very well.

On my first working day in Bosnia in January 1997, orienting myself in the National Democratic Institute's office in Tuzla, I noticed that there is an area of that city called "Irac" - "Irishman". I never found out why, and I am still wondering.

Revealed here.

It's an interesting time for us fans of the Single Transferable Vote. (In case you don't know, STV is a voting system where the voter ranks the candidates in order of preference, used in places such as Malta, Tasmania, elections for the Australian Senate, local council elections in Scotland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, all elections in the Irish Republic and all elections apart from Westminster elections in Northern Ireland.)

( British Columbia )

( Ireland: Stephen Collins on single-party rule )

( Ireland: Gemma Hussey on clientelism )

( My answer to Hussey's problem )

( Why I am grateful to Gemma Hussey )

(Hat-tip for the two IT articles to Brian Walker on Slugger O'Toole, who agrees with me that they are asking the wrong questions.)

In honour of the national festival, I've produced this list of books about Ireland which I have reviewed on-line. This is not a reading list for Irish studies - I ran through most of that when working on my PhD. But I hope some of you will find some points of interest here.

( Books )

It's been brewing for a while, but it now looks like Fianna Fáil are going to join the European Liberals. ( But is this a Good Thing? )

An interesting question raised in my mind by Morgan Llewellyn's Red Branch: what is the origin of the name Ulster?

She has a throwaway reference to the Ulaid being named for the wool they produced - this would link the word to modern Irish olann, which is a cousin of Welsh gwlan and goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European *wlna and thus English woollen, and (dropping the initial w) Latin lana and French laine.

But not everyone believes this; the shift from the initial o of olann to u of Ulaid seems unpopular among linguists. Instead the received wisdom, including that of the great Pokorny, is that the ul of Ulaid is from Irish ulcha meaning "beard". This root supposedly comes from Proto-Indo-European *pul- which otherwise has only an obscure Greek cognate transcribed as pylinx and meaning hair on the posterior, and an Old Indian root pula meaning when your hairs standing on end.

Ptolemy calls the people of the northern part of Ireland the "Uoluntii", which doesn't help as it is evidence in both directions.

I was a bit dubious about the idea that Celtic words drop an original Indo-European “p”, but this turns out to be reasonably well attested – the root *palam turns into Latin palma and thus English “palm”, but Irish lamh; likewise father/pater/athair and first/primus/roimh. So I am convinced by that bit.

But for some reason I prefer the idea that the Ulaid were so-called because they were wool producers rather than because they had beards (which would I suppose make them equivalent to the Lombards). It seems more convincing to derive the toponym from economic activity than shaving fashions. (However, if there is no other case of an initial o shifting to u in Irish names, I shall have to concede to the beard theory.)

A fairly hefty (550 pages) reworking of the Cuchulain legends I think I still like papersky's The Prize in the Game more, but this is a decently told tale, with due respect given to the facts of geography and the findings of archæology.

There have been a number of interesting posts floating around lately about Irishness, and I hope this will be another one of them. Chasing quite a different track of research, inspired by wyvernfriend, I discovered the likely origin of the famous quotation inaccurately attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that "just because one was born in a stable doesn't make one a horse". ( more )

The trains are haywire again this evening; I waited for my connection in sub-zero temperatures for an hour and a half in the Brussels North station before I finally escaped. But I used my chilly wait profitably. Jeff Dudgeon has, once again, done me the favour of drawing my attention to the Dublin Review of Books, and I've been reading several of the essays in the latest issue.

My eye was immediately drawn to Martin McGarry's piece on the future of Belgium, written before last month's crisis which brought down Yves Leterme's government, but very insightful as to how we got to where we are - in particular, he describes the infamous BHV problem perfectly adequately in a single sentence, and he enlightened me as to the peculiar dynamic between the N-VA and the CD&V. (A lot of Belgian politics revolves around acronyms.) McGarry is much more readable than Witte, Craeybeckx and Meynen, the authors of the only one of the books he is ostensibly reviewing which I have myself attempted. He's pessimistic about the long term future of Belgium, but doesn't quite explain why.

A little-remembered historical linkage between Belgium and Ireland is that Daniel O'Connell was given a vote in the choice of the first King of the Belgians (who, if his first wife had lived, would have been Prince Consort of the UK instead). Paul Bew and Patrick Maume review Patrick Geoghegan's new biography of O'Connell, and achieve the task of both disagreeing with it and making you want to read it (though I may wait until the second volume comes out - the first takes us only to 1829). I had in fact read MacDonagh's biography when it came out almost 20 years ago; it sounds like Geoghegan has found more humanity than sainthood in the man, with a more realistic assessment of his religious beliefs, his sex life, and his tendency to go over the top in his oratory. Bew and Maume ask, but don't answer, the question of whether Parnell or O'Connell was the more significant figure. There's no doubt in my own mind that it was O'Connell, and frankly I find his large-hearted liberal nationalism much more attractive than Parnell's somewhat neurotic and narrow ideology.

Leaping forward a hundred years or so, the essay that is closest to my own work and experience is Eunan O'Halpin's review of Paul McMahon's book on British espionage in Ireland between 1916 and 1945. From the narrow Irish perspective, this books sounds like a useful corrective (and even in part an explanation) for the Sinn Féin obsession with "securocrats". But it is also a good set of case studies of how intelligence services operate successfully (eg the collaboration between the RUC and the Garda Síochána on keeping a lid on Republican dissidents in the late 1930s and early 1940s, despite the fact that their respective governments were not on speaking terms) and unsuccessfully (the "German Plot" allegations of 1917-18, uncritically accepted by key British ministers despite the lack of actual evidence).

There's a wider lesson as well: if, as a government, you keep open the official channels of communication with your neighbours and potential rivals, you are less dependent on the particular idiosyncracies of a small number of intelligence agents, at least when it comes to dealing with actual governments. It is rather extraordinary that there was no British diplomatic presence in Dublin until 1939! And I can think of a good dozen contemporary examples of this sort of short-sightedness. I will stop here.

1) The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin

On 20 June 1631, pirates from Algiers descended on Baltimore in County Cork and kidnapped over a hundred of its inhabitants, most of the population, bringing them back to Africa and selling them into slavery. Ekin describes this as "the most devastating invasion ever carried out by the forces of the Islamist jihad on Britain or Ireland", and while I regret that he asserts the jihadism of the pirates, who were clearly less interested in religion than, say, Sir Francis Drake or Oliver Cromwell, you can see what he means.

Yet in fact very little of this is quite as it seems. The leader of the pirates was a Dutch renegade whose sons settled in New Amsterdam (or as we now call it, New York), and whose descendants include, for instance, Caroline Kennedy. The kidnapped villagers were a small Calvinist colony in a hostile territory; Ekin makes a good case against a local Irish Catholic dignitary for having organised the pirates' raid in the first place, and makes it quite comprehensible that when the opportunity of ransom came aroud fifteen years later, only two of the hundred-plus former villagers of Baltimore chose to go home. Algiers had a decent health service, running water in the houses and a decent climate; Baltimore is still lacking in some of these respects and certainly lacked all of them in the seventeenth century. (I was there when I was nine, but did not check the water or the health service; the weather, however, was poor.)

Ekin is a journalist rather than a historian, and (as tamaranth points out) has got perhaps a bit carried away by his research into what life was like for the slaves of Algiers, his description of which occupies most of the book. (Having said that, his attitude is properly sceptical and his documentation scrupulous; my criticism is of his structure, not his methods.) He also doesn't appear to have visited Algiers personally, which is not a criticism, it's just a shame that he doesn't give us the benefit of today's perspective.

Even so, the story is a fascinating insight into the world of seventeenth-century maritime commerce linked by the Atlantic Ocean: New Amsterdam at one end, Don Quixote and Zoraida at the other. The fact that Algiers and New Amsterdam were such cosmopolitan places, with people moving pretty freely between them and Western Europe, makes it rather difficult to justify describing one city as "Islamic" or indeed the other as "Christian". (And makes his choice of words to describe the raid even more regrettable.)

Anyway, fascinating stuff, which has got my 2009 reading off to a good start.

I have four Big Finish audios to write up, but three of them are pretty unremarkable and can wait until a later post.

The Settling, by Simon Guerrier, takes the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex to Drogheda and then to Wexford in 1649, where, inevitably, they get mixed up in Cromwell's invasion of Ireland - Hex ends up as a confidant of Cromwell's, while the Doctor and Ace get involved with the civilian victims of the unfolding tragedy.

Doctor Who has, in general, almost no relationship with Ireland. The Irish characters in the entire TV canon can be counted on the fingers of one hand (Sean in The Underwater Menace, Flannigan in The Wheel in Space, McDermott in Terror of the Autons and Casey in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, with a generous half a finger for each of Chip in New Earth and Brannigan in Gridlock, neither of whom as characters can ever have been near Ireland). Irish people are less visible than black people in Who of any era; meanwhile entire stories are set (if not necessarily filmed) in Scotland and Wales.

It's not too difficult to understand this reticence, at least from the Old Who perspective. Doctor Who is, after all, an entertainment show, and for most of its run it was rather tricky to engage with Irish issues both tastefully and entertainingly. (Supporting evidence: So You Think You've Got Troubles, the unsuccessful sitcom starring Warren Mitchell as a Jewish businessman sent to Belfast.) A couple of the Pertwee novelisations mention the Northern Ireland troubles in the background; if any of the spinoff novels go there, I have not yet encountered them. Turning the focus around, Daragh Carville's magnificent play Regenerations (download link here) takes Sophie Aldred and Tom Baker to Belfast to bring peace both to the local Doctor Who fans and to the city more widely.

Guerrier's choice of setting for The Settling, therefore, is pretty brave. Making the story a pure historical tale is also pretty challenging - you can just play it for laughs (which can be done successfully - The Romans, The Crusaders, The Kingmaker and stretching a point The Unicorn and the Wasp) or, as Guerrier has done, go for the more risky didactic approach, more demanding of both cast and audience. This can fail miserably (eg The Marian Conspiracy), but it can work well - witness the early Hartnells, The Witch Hunters or The Council of Nicæa. It works here (though the inclusion of the bloke who is going off to found the Royal Society is a bit gratuitous).

Cromwell is one of the dividing points between me and many of my fellow leftie liberal friends from the neighbouring island. In England in particular, he is a liberal hero, having abolished the Divine Right of Kings and ensured the supremacy of Parliament. But for me it's impossible to separate that from his direct personal responsibility for the slaughter in Ireland. Guerrier makes a decent effort at reconciling the two sides of Cromwell in The Settling, and the play is carried by Clive Mantle as the man himself and Philip Olivier as the Doctor's Scouse companion Hex, discovering first that there is a human being behind his Irish grandmother's stories of terror and then that the stories of terror were true after all. Indeed, it's Olivier's best outing yet as Hex, with a framing narrative of him and Ace safely back in the Tardis, trying to talk through the trauma. It's a shame that, in sequence, it's rather overshadowed by The Kingmaker which was released immediately before - it's a lot better than the immediately following stories, with a bleak atmosphere of grief and savagery.

The history, of course, isn't perfect. Guerrier presents Drogheda and Wexford as the last Irish bastions of loyalty to the recently executed Charles I, which Cromwell therefore wishes to suppress, and while that's basically true, it's quite far from being the whole truth; both local and European politics, and in particular the religious/sectarian elements of the conflict, are rather underplayed. But one cannot expect too much detailed attention to the canvas of the seventeenth century in 100 minutes of the adventures of a roving timelord. The Settling is well worth a listen.

In a week full of exciting electoral news from the USA, Scotland, the Maldives and New Zealand, you could be forgiven for missing the fact that one of the parties in the current Irish government coalition has formally disbanded itself.

The Progressive Democrats were founded in 1985 by dissidents from Ireland's main political party, Fianna Fáil; however, they spent almost two thirds of their existence in coalition with the party from which they had originally split (1989-92, 1997-now). The PDs ostensibly endorsed liberal social values (where their clothes have been stolen by FF, and indeed everyone else) and opposed corruption (where they appear to have achieved nothing at all in their years of coalition with FF). The death knell was sounded in last year's election, when they won only two seats in the Dáil compared with 14 at their height in 1987. But really the writing had been on the wall ever since 1992, when the party's founder, Des O'Malley, botched the handover of the party leadership to his designated successor, Mary Harney, and alienated Pat Cox, one of the party's better media performers, to the point that he left the party and ran as an independent in the European Parliament elections of 1994. (I admit that I know and like Cox a lot better than any of the other ex-PDs; there may have been other factors of which I am unaware, but for a small party to discard a figure of his ability was rather wasteful.) Really today's news is about five years too late in coming, one of many things in Irish politics that were distorted by the appalling performance of Fine Gael in 2002, where the PDs were among the numerous unexpected beneficiaries.

So the PDs disappear; their voters will now drift to FG who apparently are enjoying their highest ever poll ratings, seven points clear of Fianna Fáil, for the first time since the 1920s. The one thing they did do was to demonstrate that the sterile structures of Irish politics could be shaken up, and create the basis for other changes to take place (most notably the election of Mary Robinson as President in 1990). But I must say that if I was a member I would be wondering today if it had all been worthwhile.

19) Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470-1603, by Steven G Ellis

Perhaps it is just because I am getting used to the subject, but I found this book much more lucid and informative than either of the other two I have read on the sixteenth century in Ireland. In particular, I feel I have finally sorted out the geography in my own mind: most of the island divided up among Irish-speaking chieftains, and the English-speaking areas concentrated in two large chunks - the Pale and the Kildare / Fitzgerald lands near Dublin, and the Ormond / Butler and Desmond / Fitzgerald regions farther south, the former centred around Waterford, the latter sprawling erratically from Cork to Limerick to Dingle.

Ellis deliberately rejects any inevitability about the forging of Irish nationhood in the heat of English oppression. Instead, he argues that if the Henry VIII / Anthony St Leger policy of "surrender and regrant" had been consistently applied, Ireland could have been integrated into the Tudor realms without much more difficulty than Wales or the far north of England, with the Gaelic chieftains converted to loyal-ish subjects rather than fractious objects of military adventure. (The idea was that they would surrender their ancient claims to their land to the King, and he would then regrant them their territory and give them peerages; there were also usually provisions about adopting English dress and customs.)

This didn't happen, of course. Partly, Henry VIII had doubts about the policy, and died almost as soon as he had got over them; but mainly, a succession of English governors got sucked into expensive military adventures which then developed their own logic. At times, the accounts of London and Dublin trying to identify which former enemy faction could be this year's ally are uncomfortably reminiscent of the travails of the US in Iraq. The result of the military approach was that the potential loyalty of the Gaelic chieftains, and indeed the previous loyalty of the "Old English" magnates, was lost; and the island itself politically and economically devastated by the Nine Years War at the end of the Tudor period. (My one complaint about Ellis is that he rather runs out of steam in the 1590s.)

There were two further exacerbating factors. One was that the military policy created a new political dynamic - the "New English", those who had come to Ireland and made good on grants of confiscated land and offices of state, had a vested interest in conflict rather than conciliation. They weren't all that numerous, but had a critical mass in the machinery of government and the courts. Their policies were not always adopted; the Old English magnates still retained influence in London, especially when one of their number briefly married Henry VIII and more substantially when her daughter became Elizabeth I. But they were a new element in the Irish political equation which the rest of the island didn't quite know how to adapt to.

The second exacerbating factor was the Reformation. Ellis confesses himself rather baffled as to why it did not work in Ireland. The dissolution of the monasteries was far from unpopular. Henry's breach with Rome had little practical effect on the ground. There was no Irish equivalent of the Pilgrimage of Grace. In the end his conclusion seems to be that the Protestant leadership in England simply did not try hard enough to impose religious change on the neighbouring island; confusing instructions, failure to counter the Vatican's fairly desultory defensive response, and a lack of suitably qualified staff - Trinity College was not founded until 1592, and by then it was too late; language was also an issue here. By the end of the century, the New English were by and large Protestants, and the Old English and their former Gaelic enemies by and large Catholics; but there was no inevitability about this.

Ellis mentions, and I'll pursue it a bit further here, the other contemporary European country where the Reformation did not have the result desired by its rulers: the northern Netherlands, where Philip II actually lost sovereignty of a large chunk of territory. The Spanish supply lines to Brussels were of course much more difficult to maintain than the British lines to Dublin; also, in all fairness, the Spanish behaviour in the Netherlands was far more extreme than that of the British in Ireland; also it has to be admitted that Hugh O'Neill was not as gifted a statesman as William the Silent.

My reason for interest in this period is my ancestor and namesake, Sir Nicholas White, who I'm glad to say comes out of his three mentions in Ellis' book rather well, as a consistent opponent of the military line and supporter of conciliation. He complains to the Queen about one of the more aggressive governors and helps get him sacked; he helps institute a revised version of "surrender and regrant" in Connacht in 1585; and he warns London against too much innovation in policy. Unfortunately the point where he fell from grace and died in the Tower of London is precisely the point (1592) where Ellis seems to lose interest in the narrative and there is no reference to this particular crisis. Despite this shocking omission, I very much recommend this book.

Before 1689, only three kings of England had set foot in Ireland during their reign. Can you name then?

Answer: As worked out by parrot_knight and drplokta, the answer is ( Read more... )

31) 1690: Battle of the Boyne, by Pádraig Lenihan

Another in the Tempus series of monographs (like Maria Kelly's Black Death) on Irish history. Lenihan takes the 1 July battle and examines it in depth from military, political and above all psychological perspectives. His unpacking of what James II, William III and Louis XIV were really up to is most enlightening - he doesn't believe James had aimed at much more than the restoration of Catholic rights before 1688, which chimes with my instinct, but then goes on to say that in 1690 William's hold on Britain was still far from complete, and the Irish campaign was necessary as much as anything to satisfy the Westminster Parliament.

Lenihan's analysis of the military styles of the kings on each side of the Boyne and their commanders is even more impressive: William and Schomberg were second-rate (and he gives examples from William's other battles to support this), but James and Lauzun were third-rate - the best evidence of this being that the battle took place at the Boyne at all, rather than the much more strategic Moyry Pass, abandoned by the Jacobites without a fight.

The description of the Boyne battle itself is a forensic dissection, with Lenihan slightly (and unnecessarily) apologetic for the amount of detail, honest about the gaps and inconsistencies in his sources, and also honest about the fact that the most decisive moment in the battle was something which didn't happen on the previous evening, when William was grazed on the shoulder by a cannon-ball; had he been killed at that stage, his forces would probably still have won the battle (if it went ahead) but certainly lost the war, or at least concluded it on much less favourable terms. But the fact that William, though wounded, carried the field, while James fled despite a surprisingly low number of casualties, was enough to set the mythology of the battle and the reputation of both men.

Having said up front that I really enjoyed the text, I am sorry to say that there are several aspects of its presentation which fall below the standards I would expect from a responsible publisher. The maps are too few, and are confusingly placed and labelled, which is something you really don't want in a book on military history. As with Kelly's book on the Black Death, the index has serious deficiencies. And James II's own memoirs - a key source!! - are confusingly cited; it is implied that they are reproduced in Clarke's 1816 biography, but it would have been nice to be clear. Despite all this I'd recommend the book unreservedly to anyone who already has a decent idea of the historical and geographical terrain.

16) A History of the Black Death in Ireland, by Maria Kelly

Prompted by young F's fascination with the subject, I bought this from the remainder pile in the University Bookshop in Belfast the other day. Given the extreme paucity of sources, Kelly has done a very good job - she makes the most of what few records there are, signals clearly where there is disagreement in the secondary literature, and is honest about the extent to which she is arguing evidence of absence from absence of evidence. It builds up into a convincing story: the 1348-50 outbreak of plague was devastating to Leinster and Munster, and much less so to Ulster and Connacht; and in particular it was devastating to the towns and communities of Anglo-Irish settlement, some of which never recovered - she estimates the pre-plague population of New Ross, Co Kilkenny Wexford, at over 12,000; today it is less than 8,000!

The result of this was a depopulated and reduced area of English control in Ireland, retreating into the Pale, and an effective decentralisation of power to the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish chieftains and intensification of warfare between them, all in the context of a devastated economy - merchants and sailors were especially badly hit, so trade effectively vanished, and meanwhile the price of labour soared, and the plague had literally killed off any chance of importing workers from England. The Irish population may not have returned to pre-plague levels until the 18th century. If anything Kelly slightly undersells the huge impact of the plague on Ireland, given the evidence she presents.

Kelly mainly draws on administrative and archaeological evidence, but there are a couple of personalities who stand out. One is Richard FitzRalph, the Archbishop of Armagh, who preached fiery sermons while worrying about church administration (especially staffing levels, for obvious reasons). The other is Friar John Clyn of Kilkenny, who chronicled the advance (and symptoms) of the plague from the Dublin ports across Leinster, seeing it as the end of civilisation and the first step of the apocalypse, before himself falling victim to it; the closing words of his chronicle, written perhaps when he already knew he was ill, are poignant.

Anyway, a good book, though I have a serious complaint about the index which has completely inaccurate page numbers.

5) The Right Honorable Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh: A Biography, by Sarah L. Steele
6) The Incredible Mr Kavanagh: A Triumph of the Human Spirit, by Donald McCormick
7) Born without Limbs: A biography of achievement, by Kenneth Kavanagh
8) Kavanagh MP: An Inspirational Story, by David Cohen

The story of Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh is a fascinating one. Born with only stumps for arms and legs, he travelled much of the world and served for fourteen years as a Member of Parliament, one of the leading Irish Unionist MPs. His rather extraordinary physical exploits included shooting lots of wild animals and cutting down trees with an axe, as if he was taking it out on the animal and vegetable world. He ended up on the wrong side of Irish and British history, though, and is remembered really as a curiosity of local history in County Carlow more than anything else, and as the basis behind the equally unjustly forgotten Richard Calmady.

I am fascinated, but also feel a certain amount of ambivalence towards him. True, he triumphed over physical disability; but this was possible because of his vast inherited wealth. He used his position in parliament not to improve the fortunes of people with similar disabilities to his own, but to resist the erosion of the privileges of the Irish landlords. His travels do not seem to have much broadened his mind; he presents his journeys more as tests of his own manliness than as encounters with the Other, and the eventual failure of his political career has everything to do with his inability to be like the people of County Carlow.

These four biographies ( differ )

( trouble-maker? )

( Malichus Mirza, aka Malek Qasim Mirza )

( Conolly's prayer-book )

( politics )

( religion )

It may not have been apparent to President Sarkozy just how ill-advised his recent remarks on the Lisbon Treaty were. In Brussels circles, the official orthodoxy remains that the treaty should be ratified by all member states before the end of the year, and that the process in Ireland is not finished. In real life, of course, the process in Ireland is finished; there will be no second referendum, even though this is the preferred option of 26 other governments.

Context and nuance are everything of course, and we don't know if President Sarkozy was simply making the normative statement that for the Lisbon Treaty to survive, it is necessary to have another Irish referendum, or that the Irish must (with all the undertones of compulsion) vote again; both would roughly be covered by "Il faut". I'm open-minded, though also aware that the latter is entirely possible.

(Also subject to interpretation are his remarks last week about the tradeoff between further enlargement and Lisbon. When he said that the Treaty issue must be "settled" before any more countries can join the EU, did he deliberately not stipulate that it should be approved?)

The wider problem is that many inside the Brussels beltway just don't get how serious the problem is. Someone terribly well-meaning invited me to join a Facebook group the other day whose description began: "EU should not be a hostage of 1 milion Irish who voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty." Well, too bad; it is - and had there been similar votes in other countries, I can easily think of half a dozen which would have produced a similar result. As I've said before, I rather feel that the drafters of the grand design have been asking the wrong questions.

15) The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva, by Arthur Kavanagh

My latest little project is to read up on the fascinating Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, whose life story combines my interests in Irish history and disability. I have ordered all three available biographies second hand, but was delighted to discover that the one book which he himself actually wrote is available in its entirety, complete with colour prints based on photographs which he took, online via Google Books.

The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva is a travelogue of a shooting cruise which lasted just under six months, from October 1862 to April 1863, taking Kavanagh and his wife and friends to Corfu and the surrounding coastline. (No mention is made of Kavanagh's children, though we know from other sources that at least two and probably four had been born since his marriage in 1855. Presumably they were left behind in Ireland.) It was an interesting time to visit politically; King Otho of Greece had just been overthrown, and the British government had promised to hand over Corfu (and the other Ionian Islands, under British rule since 1815) to the new Greek king, George of Denmark. Kavanagh was there in the last few months of the British presence, and makes it clear that he deeply regrets the decision:

( patronising colonialism )

One senses that he may have had some other, larger British-ruled island in mind apart from Corfu.

But excursions into politics are rare (having said which, Kavanagh got elected MP for Wexford only a couple of years later). Mostly the book is about the technicalities of crewing a yacht from Ireland to Albania, and then shooting lots and lots of animals when they got there. (The final death toll, proudly printed on the last page, is "Pigs 10; Snipe 45; Deer 6; Plover 6; Jackalls [sic] 6; Pigeons 24; Hares 4; Swan 1; Geese 13; Bittern 1; Duck 54; Sea Pheasant 7;  Widgeon 152; Bargander [?] 3; Teal 102; Grebe Duck 4; Woodcock 203.") Lots of discussion of the locals and their quaint habits, and of the ecology of the shoreline. They ranged quite a long way both north and south, but Corfu was their base.

Kavanagh was only in his early 30s at this point, but had already had an adventurous life, which he occasionally reminisces about. I found this passage about his famous trip of ten years previously particularly interesting for its ( echoes of Hopkirk's The Great Game )

The striking thing about the whole book is that Kavanagh was sufficiently confident in his personal security to go wandering around the frontier between a fading Ottoman empire, an evacuating British protectorate, and a Greek kingdom recovering from revolution, with his wife and various retainers. The worst hassle he reports experiencing is when he is taking photographs of the local women, and has to get their husbands to stop them raiding his darkroom materials. Perhaps there are bits of the story he didn't tell. (He himself starts and finishes with the yacht; his wife and the other women come to the Mediterranean by train and commercial steamer.)

And there is no mention at any point of his disabilities. (The closest we get, perhaps, is in the incident of the women and the photographic stuff, where it is clear that he is unable himself to take physical measures to stop them.) As a narrative on its own merits, The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva is not especially remarkable; but in context it is extraordinary.

45) Masters of the Fist, by Edward P Hughes

A rather dismal Baen collection of short stories about a village in post-Holocaust Ireland where the head honcho is the only fertile man left in the world, and has to grapple with the awful responsibilities of impregnating the local women. Oirish and sexist clichés abound. Amusingly, the head honcho's unofficial partner's name is Celia Larkin (and these stories were written in the 1980s, so I suppose it is coincidence).