In the opening pages of The darkness echoing, author Dr Gillian O'Brien describes her book as ‘a personal odyssey into the dark heart of Ireland’ ― examining what she calls ‘the fragile legacy’ ― intending to discover what Ireland's dark history means: ‘to find out why we value these stories and what they reveal about who we are, and who we could be.’ This is a survey of over 200 tourism sites on the island of Ireland, from prehistory to the present, presented with the keen observance of an expert coupled with insightful and thought-provoking questions and statements. The book has chapters including ‘Rebellion and revolution’, ‘Maritime disasters’, ‘Famine’ and ‘Incarceration’, which help the flow of the narrative and its ability to traverse such a wide variety of time periods.

I had long awaited this book having heard the author, a Reader in Modern Irish History at John Moore's University Liverpool, interviewed on radio while she was undertaking her research for this publication. Most unusually, it was more than I expected. The darkness echoing is not just a critique of Ireland's dark tourism but also a contemporary commentary on a range of social, economic and political issues. It is written in an accessible way, with unexpected humour. One rarely laughs out loud when reading a history book, especially one described on the dust jacket as being on ‘Ireland's troubled history’. The humour dispels some of the bleakness of the overarching themes of this book ― death (often untimely and violent), illness, starvation, eviction, and emigration and loss.

O'Brien's past work seems to have led to this exploration, as her research interests have been diverse and publications in the past include topics such as primary education, Irish American republicanism, a murder in Chicago, newspapers, contemporary commentary on Brexit and travel to Ireland, and an essay on ‘“What can possess you to go to Ireland?”: perceptions of Dublin in the late Georgian period’. These diverse and wide-ranging research interests all inform this book. The main inspiration for this book also came from O'Brien's time working as an historical consultant at former prisons, forts and courthouses. So often, these types of books are written by journalists and one reads with a sense of distrust around the sources and scholarship which are not footnoted. I would have liked the academic scaffold of footnotes and endnotes, even only for additional information. The decision of course is de rigueur for non-academic publishing; this is published by Penguin Ireland under its imprint Doubleday Ireland.

What is ground-breaking is the way O'Brien looks at our historical past, weaving back and forth using her own experiences. It is a travelogue: although resident in Liverpool, she was a constant tourist to Ireland, as she describes on p. 179: ‘the truth is that, if I live anywhere, its seat 5D of a Boeing 737–800 somewhere over the Irish Sea.’ It is that unique perspective that strengthens the book as O'Brien makes herself the centre of the narrative, which the reader found unexpected once again, given my own training in the discipline of history. She writes as an unfolding journey, joined by a contemporary cast of tour guides, historians, curators, archivists, family and friends. I wonder if many will be surprised to be name-checked, although O'Brien spares naming the volunteer guide in Glenties courthouse who managed to lock her into a cell.

Rather unconventionally as a reviewer of a historical text I find myself writing about the author's husband, Al, the sometimes ‘reluctant and recalcitrant companion’. As an Englishman his reactions are a counterfoil to the author; he is becoming in many ways the mainstay of the book, as so much of the dark history story is of our conflict with our nearest neighbour. His presence allows the author to explore the complex relationship between the people of these two islands.

It then seems remiss to not mention O'Brien's deceased grandmother. The book's exquisite opening scene introduces us to Mai Crowe, so appealing I venture to suggest that some readers may wish that she was the focus of the entire book. O'Brien comes from a family of storytellers; indeed, her teenage father made pocket money inventing ghost stories for the newspaper. O'Brien uses the Department of Education's 1934 notes for teachers which directed that in a properly rounded primary education the Irish were a ‘race that has survived a millennium of grievous struggles and persecution’. Describing her own schooldays in the chapter Battles and sieges, she recalls on p. 31 a school tour to Drogheda to see ‘Oliver [Plunkett]'s head’. In her words: ‘Retrospectively, this seems a bizarre thing to have done; pile a bunch of under-twelves on to a coach and drive them thirty kilometres to St Peter's church to see the head of a man who had been decapitated.’

Roll on twenty years when O'Brien is visiting Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne in Ballyferriter in Kerry, seeking the gaps in her knowledge of a rebellion in Carrigafoyle in the sixteenth century. She learns little from the panels but more from the museum's questionnaire for children ‘There are two fields near here called Gort a'Ghearradh (the field of the cutting) and Gort na gCeann (the field of the heads). O'Brien asks her readers “Can you think why?” in her conversational style, then continues ‘more Horrible Histories than Ladybird guide’. The key to this book is the chapter does not end on that punchline, but the author follows with an historical account of what happened for the reader.

When Herbert Wood wrote his Guide to the records deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland (HMSO, Dublin 1919), he had no idea of how valuable it would become when the contents of the archive were destroyed in the Four Courts fire in 1922. The author of this book could not have known that her survey of Ireland's dark history sites would capture a time before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tourism industry. I am confident that The darkness echoing will be read well into the future and quoted not alone for its insights into Ireland's tourism sites in the opening decade of the twenty-first century but also for its social history references, the observances of the ordinary people she encounters on her travels. Indeed, O'Brien's work again seems timely, when she discusses how we tell our stories to each other.

In the recent report from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation death, suffering and misery abound. The role of women as one of the absences from the narrative of many museums is a subject that is touched on in the final chapter aptly described as ‘Your feedback is important to us’. As calls comes for a centre to tell the ‘survivors’ stories, O'Brien's words on p. 8 echo through my head:

I think again of O'Brien's call of ‘who we could be’ ― and think that the author's contribution to this ongoing debate of the omissions in our narratives will be sought out precisely because she captured the ‘fragile’ nature of our difficult stories in this publication. The author had a camera and notebook she took on all her visits, which she described as ‘her shield’. I would have liked some of O'Brien's photographs as illustrations.

While there were generic maps identifying the sites on the map of Ireland, it was O'Brien's own map I wanted to see. Her map started as a single dot on the map of Ireland, the map she used became creased and fragile over time as after every site visit, she took out a red marker and traced the route along motorways, national and local roads. She soon realised that it resembled ‘a diagram of veins, arteries of blood radiating from Skerries across the country. Far from tracing death’, she wrote, ‘it looked as if I was slowly bringing the country to life.’ With that I think O'Brien correctly assessed the value of her work. Although she set out to write about misery, suffering and death, what she succeeds in achieving is ‘bringing the country to life’.