It may not quite be a case of "all you thought you knew about 1798 but don't," but it has elements of that. It is the Summer issue of History Ireland. There is a fascinating interview with Marianne Elliott, whose biography of Tone came out nearly a decade ago; a typically sparky, challenging article from A.T.Q. Stewart on 1798 in the North (with a worthy map in colour for those whose geographical knowledge of that region is less than sure); Thomas Bartlett deals with Informers, Informants and Information; The Secret History of 1798, including such figures as The Sham Squire and Newell of Belfast who, face blackened went around the city pointing out to a guard of soldiers this and that individual. Ruan O'Donnell writes on Keeping up the Flame-General, Joseph Holt. There are other names, well known to you.
One of the most absorbing items, to many, will be an interview with Marianne Elliott by Tommy Graham, co-editor of the journal. She tells of growing up in the shadow of Mc Art's Fort, Belfast, her family working-class Catholics, the father being involved with a theatre group which staged plays by, among others, Thomas Carnduff, the dramatist from the shipyards, who wrote plays about McCracken, Emmet, Lord Castlereagh and so on. Her father, though a Nationalist was "fiercely proud of Belfast". (As many Catholics were and are.)
On that note: she has a book coming out on the history of the Catholics of Ulster. Asked why on that subject, she replies that long before partition there was a very different provincial identity in Ulster, that was shaping a slightly different religious identity even before the Reformation. She says she was always conscious how different "we" (the Ulster Catholics) are from their co-religionists elsewhere. "I used to think that this stemmed from the Ulster Plantation onwards, but it was there before then." She says that the 1790s were difficult to write about, for the United men travelled so far and wide. "For my books, I've had to work in five countries." And she says we still don't know what happened on the ground in 1798 outside the main events of the east of the country.
A new question for some scholar. The figure of dead, in 1798, she thinks, to be higher than the estimated thirty thousand. So much in sixty-odd pages. A publication of lasting value. £3.95. More another day.