Rebellions - Tom Dunne

A blend of history, historiography and memoir, "Rebellions" explores the shadowlands of the historical and the personal. Tom Dunne relates his upbringing in a strongly Catholic family with deep republican roots, and of his years as a Christian Brother - examining how family and community shape the transmission of politics. This examination allows Dunne to bring an exacting scrutiny to bear on the commemorations of the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion, in which, he argues, some leading historians became complicit through a distorting exercise in feel-good history driven by nationalist imperatives rather than by a commitment to the faithful telling of profoundly violent and divisive events. Dunne concludes with a history of a single bloody day, 5th June 1798, which saw a crushing rebel defeat in the battle of New Ross and the massacre by rebels of Protestant non-combatants in a barn in Scullabogue. Dunne here fuses the personal - a well-remembered ancestor of his died heroically at New Ross - and the professional, tracing historical accounts of this day across two centuries in a subversive exposition of how ideology conditions memory.