“It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.” So ruminates John Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat.
Not so for Paddy McEvoy, a morning writer who explodes the first daily shells of his unrelenting literary assault on his eternal foes soon after rising. The stereotypical targets from his earlier jousts (A Disobedient History of Ireland, Books 1-3) including the Catholic Church, the Irish nationalist political parties, and the 'armed struggle' brigades, what he would no doubt call ”leftie-triggered historical appraisals, are still in line for serial bombardment. In this book, however, our author increasingly employs a scattergun approach to Irish history and frequently explodes mines under the green fields of modern Irish morality. Among the questions asked here are: “Is assisted miscarriage akin to assisted suicide?” “What is the Catholic Church really saying about abortion?” “What does it take to make someone an atheist?” Much of this most recent volume of his Irish Quartet is about identifying the forces which have impacted in a negative way on the national psyche.
Looked at through another lens, Ireland appears as one of the most fortunate countries on the planet, over the last hundred years at any rate. One of the most welcoming places in the world to foreigners (World Economic Forum report, 2013), it is the world’s best country for business (Forbes list, 2013). It would probably be high on most neutrals’ preference to win any sporting event. Paddy McEvoy, having grown up in 1950s Ireland sees things in less flattering terms. His Ireland is one which has been curtailed in its development by “blood- and dogma-steeped orthodoxies”; one upon which “Pearse and Connolly unleashed a flood of blood” in a Rising that was “a curtain-raiser to a bloody calamity”. He speaks of a “venom which was to find its way into the political bloodstream”. The characteristically Old Testament imagery he employs when writing that “the poisoned tree we have chosen to feast on in this stricken island, is the Tree Of Blood”, brings to mind a nation more cursed than blessed. This vision of a “most distressful country” permits our author to lay a claim to being today’s equivalent of Napper Tandy - on a really bad day.
Paddy McEvoy would never claim to be classed as objective or wish to be seen as 'academic'. This work is one man’s personal conclusions, and in Book 4, as in the rest of the series, the reader is invited to disagree and cross-check the 'facts' from other works. This book comes with the usual health warning, cautioning the reader not to rely on anything that purports to be a 'given', without checking it out for her/himself, against the backdrop of a century of nationalist and church sermon propaganda. To say that these writings are 'revisionist' is to miss the point.
At the heel of the hunt, though, amidst the eroding “language of sacrifice, of blood, of sin” we glimpse the glitter and sparkle of Paddy McEvoy’s prose. His words do not lie idle on the page; they stretch out to pull the reader into the narrative. And when he reaches the limits of verbal orthodoxy, he resolves the dilemma in a most entertaining way by constructing words not yet in the dictionary. His passion is clear for all to read. And there is nobody else like him out there.
If you are Irish by birthright or by inclination, the Disobedient Histories are a “must read”.
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