Irish born and at large in the wider world

This I suspect is the sort of book that many families have been looking for, a compact, highly readable and adroitly written narrative of the Irish aboard.

Author Bunbury makes vivid use of all the human parts of a 2,000-year-old history that academic historians resolutely leave out in favour of a more austere impersonal narrative.

It is altogether a great read and will answer many questions. However, I have a little difficulty not so much with what he puts in, as with what he chooses to leave out.

Audience

He has in mind two audiences (or perhaps his publishers have) British and North American readers. So there is a concentration on North America and the spread of the British Empire, as in India.

But running my eye down the list of names I exclaimed “What, no Ned Kelly!” No indeed: that premature Australian republican patriot is absent, as are people from Australia and New Zealand.

In part this is made up for by an excellent chapter on inventor Louis Brennan, nicknamed ‘the Wizard of Oz’, though his inventions a wire-controlled torpedo and a monorail were great accomplishments made back home in Europe.

Another blank is Latin America. ‘Chile’s Irish Patriot’s’ are discussed, but not the far more important Irish settlement in Argentina, where from the 1880s on many middle-class Irish were involved, not so much in farming, as in the development of railways and urban trams, or in editing newspapers. (I speak about members of my own family).

It is worth emphasising that the Irish were not always victims”

Also his brief presentations of complex historical facts at times go astray. He seems to suggest that Ireland was a source of slaves for Europe, when it was the other way around, Europe was a source of slaves for Ireland.

The wealth of ancient Ireland was not based on slavery, however popular that theme may be today, but on its connection since early prehistory with the Atlantic coast-wise trade.

Ireland had copper from Kerry and gold from Wicklow, and exported these; the copper, together with tin from Celtic Cornwall, being essential for making bronze in the Bronze Age.

The real wealth of Early Christian Ireland is evidenced in the superb metal work of the Derrynaflan hoard. So it is worth emphasising that the Irish were not always victims, were not always a poor downtrodden race.

Notable

But these comments are not to deny the great value of this book for its intended audiences, and to suggest that for a great many readers in Ireland these 42 chapters, ranging from St Columbanus to Vietnam hero Patrick ‘Bob’ Gallagher (a decorated hero, he was killed in March 1967) will be most informative.

Also, in this important election year in the USA a section is devoted to Ireland in the White House, including the Presbyterian patriots that founded the state to Al Smith, the Kennedy brothers, and Joe Biden.

So here are many notable Irish from the past, the sort of people so often excluded from general histories. Turtle Bunbury shows them in all their teeming, energetic vitality in a fascinating range of roles.

In the past many of the Irish-born put their great talents to work for other nations. Now they can at last stay at home and build the sort of nation their ancestors could not even have conceived of. This is a book which will be warmly welcomed.