HISTORY: We Declare: Landmark Documents in Ireland's Historyby Richard Aldous and Niamh Puirséil, Quercus, 216pp. £20 THIS BOOK WILL be popular for two main reasons. First, its fascinating collection of documents from Ireland's past will intrigue that wide audience still keen to devour the country's history.
Second, the editors - Dublin-based historians Richard Aldous and Niamh Puirséil - have opted for a light touch in their brief prefaces to each of the documents. As a result, an omnivorous public will digest the book with great and easy pleasure.
The idea behind the volume is a simple one: gather together a selection of passages from important Irish historical documents, and then insert short editorial comments into the chronology.
So the book contains an episodic journey through the Irish centuries, from St Patrick's Confessio to the 1541 declaration of Henry VIII as the king of Ireland; from Oliver Cromwell's report to parliament after the atrocity of Drogheda, to the aims and organisation of the United Irishmen; from the Act of Union to the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty which partly dissolved it; and from the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant of 1912 to the far more ambiguous 1998 Belfast Agreement.
In his thoughtful foreword to the book, Fintan O'Toole rightly observes that it represents "the paper trail left by a continual tussle for authority. The Ireland it refers to is always a contested space, always up for grabs". He also shrewdly alludes to "the complex functioning of public documents in Irish history".
This is all true. But it is also true, and important to remember, that much the same could be said of the equally unique experience of so many other nations.
Aldous and Puirséil themselves note that many of the documents in their book "helped to influence national identities and nation building on the island".
And in other nations too, the fluidity and precariousness of power relations would be evident from key historical documents, whether in Russia, Germany, Italy, Israel, Iraq, or even peaceful old England.
For the politics of nationalism - a story of community, struggle and power - is very often a tale of sharp rivalries, uncertain victories and failed attempts to secure the future. That tale is certainly clear again and again in this impressive volume.
The United Irishmen - arguably Ireland's first real nationalists - resonantly declared in 1797 that, "We have no national government, we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another country".
The society pursued "a community of rights, and a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion".
Such powerful claims and ambitions have understandably endured in nationalist Irish memory, and in the United Irishmen we see a self-consciously national community engaged in an organised struggle for power. But the future failed to take the shape so sincerely sought by Tone and his colleagues. As Aldous and Puirséil note, the 1798 rebellion "succeeded only in killing thousands, inflaming sectarian hatred and convincing English politicians of the need to keep Ireland on a tight rein".
The later rebels of 1916 are also powerfully represented here, in the form of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. This too embodies themes at the very heart of Irish nationalism, not least its ultimate emphasis on freedom. But much of what Pearse and Connolly themselves anticipated, and bravely gave their lives to achieve, has of course not come to pass in the modern Ireland whose streets and stations carry their name.
For one thing, the rebel leaders' assumption that a politically united Ireland should emerge, faced a huge obstacle in the north-east of the island. And, as with the dashing of James Connolly's Marxist hopes, economic realities here played their role.
In introducing the 1912 Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, Aldous and Puirséil rightly point out that contemporary unionists in Ulster had an economic weight behind their opposition to Home Rule: "in terms of its economy, the union seemed to be paying off in the north, where the linen and shipbuilding industries prospered throughout the nineteenth century".
Economic dynamics were important too in producing the ambiguous deals of 1921 and 1998 (the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Good Friday Agreement), but it is political promises and arrangements which take centre stage in the documents themselves. Famously, each of these epochal compromises was sold to rival sides in starkly different terms. And, tellingly, neither involved any actor in the preceding conflicts winning quite what they had been fighting for.
ONE OF THE VALUABLE features of high-quality popular-historical books such as this is that they inevitably prompt healthy disagreement. Should the volume not have included something by Daniel O'Connell or Edmund Burke, respectively Irish nationalism's greatest leader and Ireland's most significant political thinker? Is the Widgery Report on Bloody Sunday (which is included) really more important than the Sunningdale Agreement (which is not)?
And does the structure, with very short introductions, always allow for sufficient explanation of context? The editors do not have space, for example, to explain the importance to late-18th-century Irish Protestant reformers of the perceived weakening of the power of the Catholic Church. Without this, however, the United Irishmen are inexplicable. But the prompting of such points of debate is one of the strengths of a book such as this.
The book is an utterly readable and fascinating journey through Ireland's complex history, guided by two very talented historians.
Richard English is the author of Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland. His book The Terrorist Problem: How to Respond, will be published next year by Oxford University Press