Life
1915- ; b. Belfast; ed. Belf Acad. Inst., QUB and TCD; works dealing with
Irish history and the Six Counties. Novels, The Bishop’s Confession
(1943), and A Bomb and a Girl (London: Faber 1944); also many works
on N. Ireland. IF2
[ top ]
Quotations
‘A Comparison of Nationalism in India and Ireland’ [poss. in Belfast Telegraph, q.d.], tipped into Michael Sheehy, Divided we Stand (London: Faber 1955): ‘[...] When the hammer strikes upon the anvil, both hammar and anvil are fulfiling what for the time is their function; and it is not the part of either to resent the other. This visitor remained as he had come, a sympathetic but detached spectator. The passionate climate of the cult of 1916 was somehow not his. / That visit to the museum brought to mind a saying of Annie Besant, one of the very few Westerners, though not the only one, who became president of the Indian National Congress. She had said that Ireland is the India of the West. / There is, of course, always a certain resemblance between nationalist movements In various countries. They tend to be conservative, drawing strength from old vested interests. / Just as the nationalist movement it Ireland tended to draw strength from the farming class, the licensed victuallers and the Clergy, so in India the nationalist movement depended much upon the big textile magnates and the Indian equivalent of the Irish “gombeen man”. [...; &c.; for full text, see infra.]
[ top ]
References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels,
Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists
The Bishop’s Confession (London: Faber & Faber 1943) [purported
memoir of Rev. MacPeake of Church of Ireland, from childhood; late nineteenth
and twentieth c.]; A Bomb and a Girl (London: Faber & Faber
1944) [small town Ulster during World War I; injured youthful ego of spoilt
child, and reaction thereto].
Belfast Public Library holds Anglo-Irish Relations (1948); Belfast Royal Academy 1785-1935 (1935); A Bomb and a Girl (1944); Ireland Since the Close of the Middle Ages (1955); Modern Ireland (1952); Northern Ireland (n.d.); Not an Inch (1942); Recent Developments in Anglo-Irish Relations (1949); Ulster (1949).
Hyland Books (Cat. 219; 1995) lists Modern Ireland (1st edn. 1952), map.
[ top ]