Eoin Neeson

Life
1927- ; b. Cork; journalist; Director of Government Information Bureau; later civil service posts; The Civil War in Ireland, 1922-23 (1966); novels include Life Has No Price (1960); plays include The Face of Treason (radio and TV.); also vols. on folklore such as Book of Irish Saints (1967); First Book of Irish Myths and Legends (Mercier n.d.); a life of Michael Collins (1968); Birth of a Republic (1998) was published under the Prestige imprint from his home address. DIW

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Works
Mythology
  • The Book of Irish Saints (Cork, [1967]), 238pp.;
  • The First Book of Irish Myths and Legends (Cork: Mercier Press [1965]), 126pp.;
  • The Second Book of Irish Legengs (Cork: Mercier Press 1966), [q.p]];
  • Celtic Myths and Legends (Cork: Mercier Press 1998), 238, [2]pp.
  • Deirdre and Other Great Stories from Celtic Mythology (Mainstream 1998), 287pp.
History
  • The Civil War in Ireland, 1922-23 (Cork Mercier 1966, 1969; Dublin: Poolbeg 1989), 352pp.;
  • The Life and Death of Michael Collins (Cork, [1968]), 163pp.;
  • Birth of a Republic (Dublin: Prestige 1998), vii, 427pp.;
  • Myths of 1916 (Aubane Hist. Soc. 2007), 222pp.;
  • The Battle of Crossbarry (Aubane Hist. Soc. 2008), 70pp.
Miscellaneous
  • A History of Irish Forestry (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1991), 398pp.;
  • Aspects of Parallelism in Japanese and Irish Character and Culture [Hosei Daigaku, Inst. of Comp. Econ. Studies; No. 29: Ireland-Japan papers, No. 8] (Tokyo: Hosei UP 1992), 60pp.

 

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Commentary
Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1977): ‘One recent historian of the Civil War, Eoin Neeson, gives a conservative account of these “communists” [who established the ‘soviet’ in Limerick by taking over the running of a the Cleeve creamery factory at knocklong, Co. Limerick] as being “mostly irresponsible and disaffected individuals, as great a danger to themselves as to the community”.’ (Costello, p.190).

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Quotations
Civil War in Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg 1989) [rep. edn. with new preface], on Unionists and the PIRA: ‘[...] These people, originally of the same ethnic stock [...] and with similar traditions were, nevertheless, ‘Planter’ both alien and privileged in the land, homes, and territories of those they had dispossessed and persecuted. Moreover they subscribed to a variant sect. Throughout the succeeding centuries they preserved and developed an artificial sense of identity, redolent of 16th and 17th century Europe, conferred by these sectarian and ‘acquired rights’ differences. They maintained power and privilege (though admittedly at second-hand through the great Unionist landowners, professional classes, and industrialists who exploited their unthinking allegiance and commitment as of right) until the 1974 Strike ... It is little secret that, leaving aside strategic and economic questions, the social problems of Northern Ireland derive essentially [...] from Ulster Protestant loathing, fear, and misunderstanding of Catholicism, and their refusal to associate with their Catholic neighbours on an equal footing. If they did so then they could address the question of their identity in logical and modern terms.’ Further, on ‘despicable actions’ of IRA Provisionals, ‘a kind of self-perpetuating psychotic multicamerate viviparious and uncontrollable Frankenstein’. (Neeson, pp.2-3).

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Notes
Objectionable: Neeson writes to The Irish Times (8 March 2003), styling ‘Fintan O’Toole’s dancing on the new grave of Tom O’Higgins’ (“Opinion”, 4 March) as ‘one of the most objectionable pieces of writing I have ever seen in this newspaper’, adding that ‘the political traditions of Tom O’Higgins and my own family were different’. Note that a Ciaran McCourt, writing to the same column, defends Justice O’Higgins judgement that David Norris’s case for liberalisation of laws against homosexuality in Ireland failed in the light of the preamble and ethos of the Constitution.

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