Author turns to new and often-overlooked source material for a fresh examination of the nation before independence
In February 1844, not long before The Famine, British Tory MP Benjamin Disraeli offered this brief overview of Ireland: “A dense population, in extreme distress, inhabit an island where there is an Established Church, which is not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in foreign capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy and an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish question.
Novelist Emma Healey: ‘There’s an idea that painting all the roofs in the world white would reduce the global temperature’ There is also a focus on securing the state – the harbours, barracks, Insurrection Acts and the web of military outposts – with fascinating detail on Martello towers, each of which cost about £175,000 to build; the 26 of them, a consequence of the Napoleonic wars, were “never tested and were obsolete within the decade”.
Ireland’s leading penologist Walter Crofton and the mid-century prison chaplain Charles Gibson were preoccupied with “the habits of industry”. The absentee landlords are also followed, including to their European spa resorts, as O’Neill makes much of the “transnational circulation of the Irish elite”.
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