In A History of Ireland in 100 Objects one of Ireland’s premier journalists skilfully introduces us to some of the most intriguing objects from Irish history. The objects come primarily from Ireland’s national museum collection, although some highlighted objects come from both other Irish museums and museums in the UK and Norway.
The challenge facing anyone who approaches the writing of a concise history is always what to leave out: this is also the case when using material culture as your starting point. Choosing 100 objects from the richness of the national collections must have been a very difficult task. Another challenge for any narrative history that uses museum objects as its form is to find a way to balance the weight and the power of the objects that are selected. Mixing objects of great artistic merit in their own right with humbler objects can prove distracting to the reader who is confronted with things of great beauty, such as the beautiful gold Broighter boat of c 100 bc juxtaposed with a 1950s washing machine. Of course, each object is included primarily to support a broader story: in the washing machine’s case, the modernisation of Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. This is where O’Toole’s natural skill as a journalist comes to the fore. Around each object he tells an arresting story which has enough detail to draw you in without losing your interest before moving onto the next object.
There are some magnificent objects featured in this volume; excellent photography and high production levels make one marvel afresh at the old standards (the Cross of Cong, the Ardagh Chalice) but there are also lesser known delights; the delicate 3,000-year-old Collegbeg gold hoard and the enigmatic three-faced Colreck Head, which links the old Celtic Luangnasha festival and the triple nature of the goddess, the Mórrigan, from Romano-British art. The story of Irish history is obviously long and complicated. One occasionally gets the impression that the need to capture a broad narrative is a little too much of a burden for one object to bear. An interesting example of this is the narrative that O’Toole weaves around a Boyne coracle made in 1928. O’Toole’s narrative attempts (generally successfully) to remind us of the thousands-of-years-old history of folk tradition, the fate of the Irish language and the ambiguities at the heart of the twentieth-century Irish state and emigration.
The book manages to capture all the great themes of Irish history, from the magnificence of the Celtic monastic tradition, the Norman conquest, the feudal legacy, the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the plantations, the Act of Union and the development of popular politics in the nineteenth century, with the inevitable and bloody consequences of the twentieth century. From more recent history there is a wonderfully vulgar chariot especially commissioned to carry Daniel O’Connell in triumph from jail to his home in Merrion Square, Dublin, in 1844. Two bloodstained cloths bookend the twentieth century: the shirt worn by James Connolly during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the blood-soaked handkerchief used by Father Daly as he escorted a group of people carrying the body of seventeen-year-old Jackie Duddy, shot whilst running away from paratroopers during the infamous Bloody Sunday protest in Derry in 1972.
One can always quibble about objects that one might wish for inclusion: such as a Blue shirt from the national costume collection, which places the Ireland of the 1930s into a larger pan-European narrative of fascism and corporatism. It would also have been very interesting to include some more recent examples of Irish art from the national collections – the famous portraits by Louis Le Broquey of Joyce or the romantic realist paintings of Sean Keating, who documented the travails of the new state with precision. But these are small quibbles; this book is a wonderful example of good writing, good historical interpretation and some great objects.
