Towards the turn of the revolutionary tide

An Illustrated History of the Irish Revolution 1916-1923

by Michael B. Barry (Andalus Press, €24.95)

This is another illustrated history from the pen and press of Michael B. Barry. He has chosen in this one to colourise the images of the past. This is a process which most historians are sceptical about. As I have said before in these pages, it is a form of forgery, a manipulation of historical documents.

The past – which is still of some importance to many people – is made to look like a television documentary, sometimes even a ‘docudrama’, like The Crown. However Michael Barry with a sharp eye has selected from a wide variety of newly available sources images which will be fresh to many readers; the supposed ‘colour of real life’ imposed on them can always be subtracted, leaving the true image.

Anniversary

But we are approaching the anniversary of the truce, followed by the treaty, and then the civil war; to inexcusable events for which we will no longer be able to blame the British, but will have to account to ourselves and to history for what Irish people did to Irish people. For the ‘War of Independence’ was at its heart not a war with Britain, but between at least seven different groups from left to right for power on the island – or part of the island. The civil war truly began in 1912. We have to come to terms with this, and to let it become history rather than a source of present-day politics; perhaps even to face the fact that the revolution was not so revolutionary.

This book ends in 1923. In 1924 when the emigration office for the United States opened again there were queues around the block for travel permits, and the ships were crowded with those who lived through the years we are commemorating, but did not want to live in the ‘new Ireland’. The main gift of freedom was, down to the 1960s, the freedom to leave the country in huge, nation-weakening numbers, that too needs to be commemorated.