Sometimes insults are delivered in such exaggerated form as to make one want to ignore them; indeed maybe they are thought to arise from a perverted form of humour. But a book by C. H. Bretherton of the Morning Post of London published in 1925, takes the biscuit. He had had experience of this country during the War of Independence and Civil War. The Morning Post died in the late 1930s, someone said from an excess of its own bile. Francis Williams, a journalist of repute, was not so severe. He felt its demise was due to "its fine literary quality and highly idiosyncratic approach to affairs". Highly idiosyncratic is perhaps a term that the generous would apply to The Real Ireland. The very generous-minded. One chapter begins: "Before the war (1914-18) a large number of Sassenachs were wont to visit Ireland, chiefly on pleasure bent. They went to hunt and fish and see the Dublin Horse Show and the Lakes of Killarney. There was good golf to be played, scenery sufficiently wild to impress, zoological novelties like Kerry Spotted Slugs and Connemara Heath. Arbutus unedo and Pinguicula Lusitanica pranking the bogs. Capricornus McGillicuddiensis browsed on the heights, and when unobserved on the tyres of the Saxon's motor car. "Hotels were primitive, but not devoid of a certain rude comfort. One extended an appreciative nose to the peat fire, and refrained from looking under the bed. The natives melted unostentatiously into the landscape or emerged politely, though seldom punctually, to perform their allotted roles in the moving pageant. Suppressing their natural instinct to cut his throat, they "blarney'd" the delighted stranger according to plan, and left it to his honour when the question of payment arose. If his honour offered them less than double the proper fare, they reverted to the formula on page 6 of "How to Harpoon the Saxon" and his honour hurriedly paid up. Comforting himself with the reflection that if a London taxi-driver or a Swiss head-waiter would have been content with less, this was Ireland and the poor devils needed all they could get. That was strictly true. Ireland, even before the war, was a land in which everybody had to profiteer grossly to make a bare livelihood."
And this is one of the milder examinations of the Irish mind and demeanour. "God help him" is perhaps the best reaction. How many English readers took the book seriously?