The story of Ireland - William Magan

This work, originally intended as a chronicle of a single family, expanded in the writing into a full-scale panorama of the country's social and religious history. It accounts fairly and clearly for the causes and nature of centuries of discord between England and Ireland, at the same time using the long history of an ancient family to give an authentic picture of Irish life.;William Magan descends directly from one of the oldest Irish royal houses, the O'Conors of Connaught. The blood of his Celtic forebears was mingled with that of the pre-Celtic, or Pictish, rulers who held sway in Ireland before the first known invasions. The Magan family, whose ancestral home is close to the geographical centre of Ireland, split into Catholic and Protestant branches only in the 18th century.;This book was first published in 1983 as "Umma-More". This updated edition offers a new generation of readers an absorbing and impartial account of the passage of an old Celtic family through two thousand years of Irish history, offering insights into both the country and its people and how the English and Irish have regarded each other over centuries.