Servants to the Public: A History of the Local Government Public Services Union 1901-1990, by Martin Maguire, IPA, 326pp, £15

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Never judge a book by its title. Usually it promises far more than any author could possibly hope to deliver. This is one of the rare occasions when the title is disarmingly modest, not to mention off-putting. Those who refuse to be put off will be well rewarded.

Martin Maguire's history of the LGPSU may not be for the casual reader, but it deserves a far wider audience than the thin crop that the labour history market usually yields. In fact, anyone interested in our recent past and how we, in the Republic, came to live in the sort of society we do, would learn far more from this book than the many pretentiously titled works pushed at us by a ferociously market driven business.

The role of the humble local government official in creating this State and its evolution was far greater than that of any individual politician or the plethora of gunmen who subsequently claimed the credit - of course, a lot of the latter were politicians, too. Not that 1916 and all that don't feature in this book.

Take Harry Nicholls, for example. He was out in 1916. Unable to locate his own unit of the Irish Volunteers, he climbed over the railings in St Stephen's Green to join the Irish Citizen Army garrison. Whom, you may ask, was Harry Nicholls? He was an engineer in Dublin Corporation and, it almost goes without saying, a member of the Church of Ireland, for he lived in an era when the higher professions in the capital were still dominated by a religious caste system.

He was radicalised by the Gaelic revival, the frustrating experience of trying to do his job properly under an increasingly rickety British administration, anger at the corruption and niggardliness of Dublin city councillors who regarded middle-class ratepayers as a deity, and last, but not least, several taps on the head with a DMP baton during the 1913 lock-out.

In short, Harry Nicholls was one of the key figures in the foundation and growth of this state, not to mention the LGPSU. Among his lesser sins was a speech to trade union activists in the local authorities in November 1920. He told them that their guiding principle in such troubled times should be to become "Servants of the people". Hence the unfortunate title of this book.

Martin Maguire's history sets the War of Independence in a new and thoroughly researched context. As he says himself: "If guns were decisive in the struggle for national independence then the gap between the military resources of the Irish Republic and the achievement of forcing the British authorities into . . . negotiations. . . can only be explained in mythic terms." That is precisely how they were, nowhere more mythically (in the best sense) than in Neil Jordan's film, Michael Collins.

The film perpetuates the other myth of de Valera the military bungler. The most often cited example of Dev's incompetence in the military sphere is his insistence on the Custom House attack of May 1921. This supposedly empty symbolic gesture, opposed by Collins, led to heavy IRA casualties and the capture of over a hundred members of the Dublin brigade.

Yet Maguire points out that the destruction of local government board records kept in the building probably struck a more decisive blow against the British administrative machine than every IRA ambush of the previous two-and-a-half years. In those days the local authorities were the main arm of British administration. At one stroke all the information - and with it control - of the system passed from the British to hundreds of officials in town and county halls across the country.

Such a development would have meant little on its own, if figures like Nicholls had not been subverting the system for years. Their task was made easier by a growing nationalist sentiment within the local authorities - whose staff, incidentally, welcomed the election of new Sinn Fein councillors to replace the sometimes corrupt and frequently burnt-out relics of the United Irish League.

Maguire's accounts of how equal pay arrived on the wider trade union agenda in the early 1960s and how the Programme for National Recovery was put in place are two more of the gems that sparkle in this book. His recounting of the birth of the PBR may well become the starting point for the historical rehabilitation of Charles J. Haughey, admittedly a distant prospect at the present time.

If you want real history, as opposed to that marketed through interpretative centres, glossy commemorations of 1798 and film link-ins, try Martin Maguire's book. Like Tom Girvan's 1922, it gives a new and long needed perspective on our past.