Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 - Softcover

Fanning, Ronan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571297404 ISBN 13: 9780571297405

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Ronan Fanning ... has crowned his career with this lapidary work. It is beautifully written, compellingly argued, gleaming with clarity as he confidently makes his way through a story of confusion, deceit and denial lightened by rare glimpses of honest men doing their best. (James Downey Irish Independent)

Absorbing [and] fascinating. (John-Paul McCarthy Sunday Independent)

'In his splendid new book on Britain's Irish policy in these formative years, Ronan Fanning stresses that his topic is not Anglo-Irish relations in the round but Britain's policy towards Ireland. Yet if this is essentially a study in British history, it is also required reading for students of Irish history because of the way it illuminates our perspectives on the mode of British decision-making through which the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland emerged ... a compelling read. (Joe Lee Irish Times)

This book provides valuable insights into the British government's attitude towards the Irish Revolution. (Ryle Dwyer Irish Examiner)

Book Description:

Fatal Path by Ronan Fanning is a powerful new history of Ireland, covering the decade of the Great War and the Easter Rising.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0571297404
• ISBN 13: 9780571297405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464