It is far from romantic or sentimental, unlike so much drivel that Ireland inspires, especially from the constant hordes of Americans seeking some foothold in the ancestral bog. If anything, it could be hyper-critical and, at times, a little impatient, as the author finds himself waiting in the rain for a bus that doesn’t come or has trouble with the Irish immigration and customs officers who can’t understand that travellers might be weary and don’t like official wrangles, which, of course, the Irish themselves love and love to create.

It is also a strongly political book and should be closely read by those who wish to understand not just the Northern situation but the stance of successive Southern governments to that situation, and to the masters of all Ireland, the British (called aptly by the author ‘the master-race’).

Buckley’s ‘hidden theme’, as he calls it, attacks the popular (and politically useful) cliche that Ireland is bogged down in memory, a captive to its own history. This theme is:

Ireland’s loss of its own memory, forced out by dispossessors, abandoned by ignorance, sold by jobbers, collapsed for lack of visible support, or simply leached away by the green misty weather.

It is, as Buckley recognises, a paradoxical view and one likely to be hotly denied by the Irish themselves. Yet his case is a strong one. The politicians in Ireland, and their counterparts in Whitehall and· Brussels, urge on the people an oblivion of the past. It is understandable that they should, since politicians are, by definition pragmatic, and one, though by no means the only, or even central, factor in the Northern tragedy, is the adherence by both the IRA and the UOA to the respective histories of the Fenians and the Orangemen, and their sense of continuity with the oppressed and their oppressors.

The book ranges widely and, even the subtlety and acuteness of Buckley’s prose, is always interesting. I wondered how well people only distantly acquainted with Ireland would cope with the mass of detail, but from many accounts this appears to be no problem.

I would cavil myself with some of the author’s observations – the extent of the heroin problem in Dublin, for example – but such things are minor matters. We each build up a picture of an overall sense of another society from personal contacts and experiences, and while the author and I share a number of mutual friends in Ireland, our experiences, even with those same friends, have tended to be divergent. Buckley, having lived in Ireland with his, family, has experienced the natural way of life for most people in that country, even if, on occasions, it has left him a little enclosed. His remarkable knowledge, however, of Irish history, literature and culture, coupled with his memory of people, places and events, give this book astonishing range.

He is constantly struck by what he describes as the fatalism inherent in the Irish character – it angers and depresses him. After analysing this fatalism in a number of its displays, he concludes: ‘As a whole, it is petty bourgeois conformism whose other side is unmeditated anarchism. But it is, in total effect, anti-communitarian.’

He denudes the mythic ‘charm’ of the Irish, though not without understanding, and sees at the heart of society at once a fecklessness and a certain grasping mentality, the result of a ‘deprived and materialist society’. He speaks of atomism which involves an abrupt loss of corporate feeling’, a condition which is the opposite of tribal.

Society has been pushed to the smallest unit the mind will entertain. This is a disastrous psychology for a society, large parts of which have so recently been peasant, and which has always been short of a yeoman class.

If this is Yeats’s bitter complaint writ large and extended, it also has to be recognised as mostly true. I say ‘mostly’ because I cannot agree with the unqualified conclusions, even though the roads to those conclusions have been winding through qualifications and are full of understanding. My own experiences leave the matter much more paradoxical – the meanness and materialism cohabiting with extreme openness and almost wastrel mentality; the suspicion of strangers being also a form of play; the indirectness and inertia, a distrust of ‘the whole truth’, and the linear concept of progress.

Where there can be no disagreement, however, and where Buckley’s book serves as the best of its kind in Ireland, is in the analysis of how this state of mind and affairs-has come about.

In looking at the loss of national memory, Buckley recalls ancient Ireland and the past. He is dismayed at the carelessness with which historical monuments and places have been allowed to decay or become subsumed into the surrounding countryside, no record of their status or significance visible to any but the most diligent searcher. Yet he understands, and makes his reader understand, clearly why this is so.

For well over one thousand years, the Irish have had to fight for survival and that fight, incessant, brutal and murderous, has barely been won. ‘While men and women work hard, tediously, and decently, in the hope of managing their future, they have little sense of being able to build the future.’

The ancient struggle against invaders landlords, alien oppressors and the land itself, still persists. In the South it takes an economic form, unaided by a rigid Church afraid of losing its power, and rubbery politicians ready to do a volte-face on anything that will keep them in power until their sons can take over.

In the North, the struggle is more brutal for there, firmly ensconced and highly visible, is the master-race itself, propping up with tanks, armoured cars and guns, the puppets of its own creation, (and who are now a source of embarrassment and contempt).

The central part of Buckley’s book deals with the deaths of Bobby Sands and the nine other hunger-strikers who followed him. Buckley’s powerful and chilling poem ‘Hunger-Strikers’ is here given a prose elaboration and the three chapters are unforgettably moving. He is not trying to score political points: he is telling us what happened and what it felt like to be in Ireland at that time. He cuts through most of the propaganda people in this country were fed, e.g., that the IRA ordered the Hunger-Strike and sought martyrs for the cause. It was clear at the time, and clearer now, that the IRA High Command were embarrassed by the unilateral action of the men in Long Kesh and tried to order them off the strike. Buckley shows us the inept manoeuvrings of Southern politicians, Catholic bishops, the IRA and the barbarous intransigence of Mrs Thatcher and her advisers. As Buckley points out, compromise to avoid death could have been reached – it had already been reached for the UDA and UVF prisoners. But:

… the British cultural technicians employed slander against [the Hunger-strikers].
How merely formulaic the British when it comes to subject peoples. They are, of course, conditioned by a colonial and imperial past. Their very rhetoric shows this, with its self-righteousness blown up into the windiest kind of self-importance.

Despite such comments, these chapters are not merely anti-British fulminations. They are essays of concern, expressions of horror and of admiration for courage. Buckley relates the action of the hunger-strikers to an ancient Irish tradition: ‘In ancient Ireland it was a custom for a wronged man to sit and fast at his enemy’s gate: it was a form of litigation: you fasted at him.’

So, these men considered themselves wronged, and fasted at her. (Sands was given fourteen years when a handgun was found in the glovebox of a car in which he was travelling with three others.) She, however, remained unmoved: it was against her new policy of calling these men criminals not political prisoners. And so they died, one after the other: ten of them.

Buckley’s book, in its clearing of myth, and its perceptive analysis, and its compassion for a people whom he loves and is part of, should be read by all. It will not only help to dispel propaganda, myth, and romantic confusion, it will provide a deep understanding of a people deliberately misunderstood. It will also show a proud, lovable race, at ease with ambiguity, but involved in the patient, ancient struggle for justice and survival. It will, by inference, provide also a profound understanding of many aspects of our Australian society.