Fatal path - Ronan Fanning

This is a magisterial narrative of the most turbulent decade in
Anglo-Irish history: a decade of unleashed passions that came close to
destroying the parliamentary system and to causing civil war in the
United Kingdom. It was also the decade of the cataclysmic Great War, of
an officers' mutiny in an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army and
of Irish armed rebellion. It was a time, argues Ronan Fanning, when
violence and the threat of violence trumped democratic politics.

This
is a contentious view. Historians have wished to see the events of that
decade as an aberration, as an eruption of irrational bloodletting. And
they have have been reluctant to write about the triumph of physical
force. Fanning argues that in fact violence worked, however much this
offends our contemporary moral instincts. Without resistance from the
Ulster Unionists and its very real threat of violence the state of
Northern Ireland would never have come into being. The Home Rule party
of constitutionalist nationalists failed, and were pushed aside by the
revolutionary nationalists Sinn Fein.

Bleakly realistic,
ruthlessly analytical of the vacillation and indecision displayed by
democratic politicians at Westminster faced with such revolutionary
intransigence, Fatal Path is history as it was, not as we would wish it to be.