William Magan has taken a chance with history and written this fascinating book. Conceived as a private work for the author's family, he dispenses with scholarly trappings and charts the Magans' stormy relationship with history from their O'Conor royal ancestors to the twilight of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.
His adroit family kept a foot in both camps during the Jacobite war, thus ensuring survival. At the height of their fortunes, they held 20,000-30,000 acres of the best grazing land in Westmeath and five other counties. The author served the British raj in far-flung corners of the empire. His distaste for Irish revolution is understandable, given the savagery inflicted on a beloved aunt by three gunmen in 1924.
One detects a whiff of amnesia in Magan's treatment of the Famine. Having acknowledged that Ireland was effectively a colony, ruled since the Act of Union from Whitehall, he fails to see that the Anglo-Irish axis reached its tragic climax during that "great calamity".
He asserts that Irish landowners - including his kinsman, Maj Denis Mahon of Strokestown - did their best, that catastrophe was inevitable, particularly after Young Ireland rebels forfeited the sympathy of "mainland Britain". "Famine fatigue" had already set in, however, as evidenced by the failure of Queen Victoria's second Irish appeal in October 1847. Moreover, the Poor Law Amendment Act of that year precipitated an era of brutal social engineering, as Irish landlords cleared their estates of the "swarming" destitute.
The rebel leader, William Smith O'Brien - descended from the ancient Thomond line - believed that a self-governing Ireland would have prevented a natural disaster - the repeated failure of the potato crop - from becoming the greatest social cataclysm in Irish history.
But this book, an updated version of a more modestly titled work published in 1983, is a monumental achievement for its author, now aged 92. Splendidly illustrated, it is panoramic in scope, nostalgically written, and peppered with idiosyncrasies.
Magan reminds one of an ancestor not featured in his story, Charles O'Conor of Belanagare. His Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland, published in 1753, attracted the attention of Samuel Johnson, who urged him to continue his researches. More than 20 years later, Dr Johnson wrote again and encouraged him to undertake a history of Ireland "from its conversion to Christianity to the invasion from England . . . when Ireland was the school of the West".
Brendan O Cathaoir is a historian and Irish Times journalist