An Interpretation of Ireland

Extract

‘The Irish Tangle for English Readers’ (Macdonald; 10s. 6d.) is a mainly political history of Ireland. The historian, Sir Shane Leslie, sees himself under the sod—‘turf’ would have hotter associations in Ireland—and free to speak his detached mind without fear or favour. One cannot imagine a better place for this feat than a country house on the Ulster border guarded by Yankee sentries; with an occasional coffin of butter, followed by pious mourners, proceeding north, and a few gewgaws from Belfast infiltrating in the other direction. Here the book was conceived. It was finished in a military building in London as ‘impartial reading for Englishmen who are weary of Ireland and the Irish’. It is very good reading for anyone.

The book sets out to tell what Irish and English between them have made of Ireland. It does not saddle the living with the follies, vices and misdemeanours of the dead. Nevertheless, history and the climate have made the country what it is, and neither is particularly helpful. The author insists that Nordic interbreeding has been propitious, and that the climate can always be counted upon to turn immigrants into Irishmen. ‘The only pure blood in Ireland is . . . in the racing-stables.’ There is a climate, too, one notes, of the soul. Cromwell has to expel Spenser’s grandson for becoming a Papist. Nearly all the great Irish leaders have been of mixed stock. The supreme chance for an independent Ireland, without Partition, was lost, the historian insists, with Parnell. Any new opportunity, he says, will be hard and slow to come by; though it is quite possible now that Conservative Ulster may throw in its lot with the farmers of the South, rather than risk entanglement with English Reds.