Neil Hegarty is no stranger to being presented with expansive writing tasks. Before writing Story of Ireland, he was commissioned to write a history of Dublin. With both projects, his responsibility was to research every minute detail of what has made Dublin and Ireland what they are today and write lively and informative histories. No better man for the job.
I ask Hegarty how the idea for writing this book came about. “I was commissioned to do it by BBC Books. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Dublin, A View from the Ground, which is a history of Dublin over a thousand years. This was interesting for me as I’ve lived there for so long and I thought surely there’s nothing left to be told, but there was so much there so I kind of wrote that from the point of view of a flâneur, you know somebody who walks around. It meant I was juxtaposing the present and the past and it worked nicely. I worked with the same editor there as I did on Story of Ireland. He knew my work and came along and asked me would I like to do this project about two years ago.”
Since the idea for the television series, presented by Fergal Keane, was developed before Hegarty was given the commission for the book, I ask did he find the fact that there was a complimentary documentary already in the works useful to him when he was writing the book. “I was lucky in a sense that there was the connection with the TV series. It helped in that I had a certain structure. Then, after that, it was up to me to fill the rest in. In terms of the general structure, the TV series and the book have the five same episodes but after that it was more or less up to me because TV produces some things really well and can capture the whole sweeping drama of it but with the book you can stop and think; so I think perhaps if you watch the series and read the book you can get the whole picture.
Being faced with the enormous task of covering a nation’s entire history in 336 pages was no mean feat but Hegarty found that having a structure was a useful guide; however a lot had to be filled in between. “I spent a lot of time in the library in Trinity and then just slowly spent my time filling in everything in between. You get the framework set up and you also concentrate on what you didn’t know too much about to begin with. It’s not a book where I found out everything; I did use a lot of really good stuff that’s come out from universities in the last thirty years and then I tried to collate that as best I could. It’s aimed at everybody. It’s not an academic book, it’s not a specialist book at all, it’s a book that kind of says that imbedded in our history are some of the greatest stories ever told, and here are some of them. It’s supposed to be a book that anyone can read all the way through.”
One of the main purposes of this book and the documentary was to tell the story of Ireland and place the history of the country in a broader context, paralleling important events in Ireland’s past with turning points in world history. A major example of that was that the French Revolution and American War of Independence put fire in the bellies of Irish Revolutionaries and the 1798 rebellion followed closely in Ireland.
Since the last major book and documentary series telling the history of Ireland was produced in 1980 by Robert Kee, a lot had changed and a lot of history has been explored further with new depths found in well known events. With this in mind, Hegarty faced quite a challenge being the first person, along with Fergal Keane, to follow this up in thirty years. Growing up at that time he remembered the series well but saw why the focal point had to be a lot different back then than what he could focus on now in 21st century Ireland. “Then, Kee had to concentrate on the North; the hunger strikes were around that time and part of his job was to explain how he got to where he got to but now, I felt that we had the luxury of panning out a bit. There’s a lot about the North and about Ulster of course but it’s also about trying to set the Irish story against a broader context, an international context. That was one of the main things; to show the kind of stakes that other cultures, countries and civilizations have in the Irish story and, conversely, how we have a lot of stakes in the international story too.”
Story of Ireland is essential reading for any Irish person or anyone interested in learning about the history of such a small but historically important country. The history and events are laid out simply but intelligently so the book never reads as an academic book but as a vital text for Irish people to read to really understand the country they are from; from showing who actually brought Christianity to Ireland to the Norman invasion, the 1798 Rebellion, the 1916 rising to the very recent economic bailout by the IMF, Story of Ireland chronicles all that has been important in forming the Ireland we live in today.
Story of Ireland is out now, published by BBC Books
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