Mary Kenny
Of Myths & Martyrs
The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic
By Ruth Dudley Edwards
Oneworld 408pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Nations often need a founding myth, and for the Republic of Ireland the events of 1916 provide that with poetic exactitude. Here was a rising led by a dissonant group of poets, dreamers, visionaries, hardened old Fenians, driven communists and patriotic rebels who had little chance against the might of the British Empire and duly met their deaths by execution.
In the midst of the mass slaughter occurring on the Western Front, the execution of fifteen (subsequently sixteen, when Roger Casement was hanged for treason) men was not numerically significant. But symbols and founding myths aren’t about numbers: they are about the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again so that they become woven into a collective identity.
The executions of the Easter Rising rebels ensured that the founding myth became embedded. The images of James Connolly, too wounded to stand, facing a firing squad strapped to a chair, of Joseph Plunkett, the consumptive poet with a face like St Francis, and of Seán Mac Diarmada, the polio-stricken
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger