The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (59 page)

Charles Stewart Parnell was the enigmatic, authoritarian and charismatic Protestant leader of the Irish Home Rule movement. Following his citation in a divorce case, the Catholic Church publicly condemned him, and his support ebbed away.

Scots-born James Connolly became a leading proponent of Irish socialism. He sustained a leg injury in the course of the Easter Rising so he had to sit rather than stand for his subsequent execution.

Women were present in virtually all theatres of the Easter Rising. Elizabeth O’Farrell accompanied Patrick Pearse in his formal surrender to British officials; in this photograph she is imperfectly edited out, with her disembodied feet still visible behind Pearse.

In the course of a long career, Arthur Griffith was by turns a journalist, political theorist, founder of Sinn Féin, treaty negotiator – and ultimately president of Dáil Éireann.

Maud Gonne is remembered for her passionate involvement – as actress, journalist and political agitator – in the cause of Irish nationalism.

Sir John Lavery’s portraits of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera capture the differing destinies of the two men. Collins took the reins of power in the newly independent Irish Free State, but was killed months later at the age of thirty-one; de Valera lived for a further fifty-three years, in the process holding the offices of both taoiseach and president of Ireland.

Scenes from the Irish Troubles: a mural of a civil rights march at Derry; Bobby Sands was the first man to die in the hunger strikes of 1981; the iconography of the Orange ‘marching season’ recalls scenes from Ulster’s tempestuous history.

Ireland in the aftermath of the Troubles: Ian Paisley, now first minister of Northern Ireland, shakes hands with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Dublin (April 2007); Sinn Féin leaders welcome the Good Friday Agreement (April 1998).

John Kelly, whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday, welcomes the findings of the Saville Inquiry at the Guildhall, Derry; the backdrop image is of a second victim, James McKinney (June 2010).

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE STORY OF IRELAND
.
Copyright © 2011 by Neil Hegarty.
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Fergal Keane.
Maps © 2011 by Encompass Graphics.
Afterword copyright © 2012 by Neil Hegarty.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

This book is published to accompany the television series entitled
Story of Ireland,
first broadcast on BBCNI and RTE in 2011.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com

ISBN: 978-1-4299-4129-7

First published in Great Britain by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, a Random House Group Company

^*
The Pelagian model posited that humankind was born without original sin, and was therefore capable of attaining grace without the need of Divine intervention.

^*
In addition to his other activities, Colum Cille is also credited with the sighting (and banishment) of the Loch Ness Monster.

^*
A confederation of Pictish tribes had inhabited parts of what is now Scotland since before the Roman conquest.

^**
Colum Cille was not the first missionary to Scotland. St Ninian, about whom little is known, was evangelizing there at the end of the fourth century. His Casa Candida in Galloway was the country’s first Christian chapel, and his shrine at Whithorn attracted pilgrims from Ireland itself until the Reformation.

^*
Henry had married the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152; she had brought to the marriage additional vast French territories as her dowry.

^*
There are several later copies of the bull, including a fourteenth-century document now preserved in the UK National Archives.

^*
Poynings was in fact the second-in-command to the official Lord Deputy of Ireland, Henry, Duke of York – who at the time was four years of age.

^*
Simnel was pardoned by Henry VII, who recognized that the pretender had been a pawn in the hands of others: and rather than hand Simnel over to the executioners, the king gave him a job in the royal kitchens.

^*
In sixteenth-century England the average male height was 1.7 metres (5 feet 6 inches).

^*
Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, was the uncle of two of Henry VIII’s wives: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; ironically, in the aftermath of the Reformation, the Howards would remain one of England’s most visible Catholic families.

^*
Chichester remains best known for setting in motion the expansion of Belfast from an insignificant settlement at the mouth of the river Lagan into, eventually, the largest city and industrial powerhouse of Ulster.