A History of Northern Ireland by Thomas Hennessy Gill & Macmillan 347pp, £40/ £12.99
The 18th-century aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg coined a word in 1789 which usefully defines the situation of the North of Ireland today. "If a war has lasted twenty years," he wrote, "It can well go on to last a hundred. For war has now become a status. Polemocraty. People who have enjoyed peace die out."
"Polemocracy" (as we might spell it) definitely rules. No one knows where government resides. The prisons have become parliaments. Democracy, justice and law enforcement have retreated into the pages of Alice in Wonder- land. A miasma of fear hangs over the populace. The chapter headings of Dr Hennessey's book mark out the steps which have brought us to the brink of sectarian civil war: "The Birth of Northern Ireland", "Cold War, Civil Rights and Civil Strife", "The Collapse of the 1920 Settlement", "The Long War".
So inured to this status have we become that an academic culture has grown up which no longer distinguishes between history and the history of polemics. But there is always more to history than polemics; it is Carlyle who reminds us that the evening sun of July 14th 1789 fell slant on reapers in peaceful fields, old women spinning in cottages and ships far out on the main. Potential readers should be aware that this book, whatever it is, is not A History of Northern Ireland, and even less is it, as the jacket claims, "the first comprehensive history of Northern Ireland for fifteen years". The reader who seeks that must turn to Jonathan Bardon's magisterial History of Ulster published in 1992.
Instead, Hennessey has given us an excellent account of the polemocracy, the latest in a line of such studies. It itemises seventy years of name-calling, unsullied by much evidence of statecraft. To experts it will be of considerable use, but a Northerner reading it feels a little like the hero of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, trapped by a mad recluse and compelled to read aloud, not in this case the novels of Charles Dickens, but every political manifesto issued in the North.
As a Fellow in Politics at Queen's, Belfast, and a former research officer in the Centre for Conflict Study at Coleraine, Dr Hennessey is completely at home in his subject. His writing is concise, lucid and mercifully free from the kind of jargon which often envelops conflict study. It is studiously neutral, and as free of value judgments as any academic work could aspire to be. The problem is that to achieve this, the author has had to drain his material of everything which could have given it the slightest human interest.
The book invites comparison with Sabine Wichert's Northern Ireland Since 1945 which appeared in 1991. Though equally impartial, Wichert presents a more sophisticated political and historical analysis and skilfully argues (in a language which is not her native language) that the North's political problems arise from the failure of society there to "modernise". I have reservations about this thesis, but I find it challenging in a way which Hennessey's even-paced recital is not. It has its strengths, but is a little short on explanation. He plunges into the birth of Northern Ireland in medias res, dismissing the "older and deeper roots" of the problem in one paragraph (something to do with plantations) and ends abruptly with Canary Wharf, almost as if the "polemocracy" can be cut into convenient lengths according to customers' requirements.
Let no one assume, however, that it is less useful as a contribution to the subject. Such works come into their own at three o'clock in the morning, when a deadline beckons, and you need to know "what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women", or, to be more prosaic, precise facts and figures for the key events.
As an act of simple compassion, I recommend this book for the shelves of every politician, author, journalist and broadcaster. To quote just one example of Dr Hennessey's enviable gift of concision, here is all you need to know about Sir James Craig, in one sentence: "A Presbyterian, Craig had pursued a career in stockbroking, in the British army, serving as a captain in the Boer War, and finally as an MP, first entering Parliament for East Down in 1906, and ultimately becoming the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1921, which he remained until his death in 1940."
A.T.Q. Stewart was formerly Reader in Irish History in the Queen's University, Belfast