Diarmaid Ferriter is a historian in a hurry. Since his appointment as professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2008, at the age of thirty-six, he has astonished Ireland’s academic elite. Author of fourteen books on Irish history, he has set a pace that leaves more reflective historians scratching their heads.

His latest offering, dramatically dubbed The Revelation of Ireland: 1995–2020, reveals disappointingly little, but it does provide a well-researched summary of many important changes in Irish politics and society in the last twenty-five years. His decision to tackle such a recent period in Ireland’s past revives the old question about the value of contemporary history. F S L Lyons, former provost of Trinity College Dublin, argued that contemporary historians find it difficult to recognise what is of permanent importance. The late John A Murphy, former professor of history at University College Cork, asserted that ‘in the absence of both perspective and documentation, it is obvious that analysis and assessment can only be tentative’. While Ferriter admits the ‘drawbacks’ of contemporary history – the inadequacy of sources, a lack of perspective – he ploughs on. 

Ferriter, though, is no traditional historian in the mould of Lyons or Murphy. Outside academia, he spends his time offering opinions on current affairs in the media. For a decade he has had a column in the Irish Times (in a recent piece, he condemned Ireland’s ‘forelock-tugging’ to Trump).