Some readers of the Hibernian persuasion took issue with my
somewhat-less-than-friendly review of Tim Pat Coogan’s book 1916 in NRODT
a few weeks ago
Well, it’s
not just me. Kevin Myers, one of the best opinion journalists on the other
side of the pond (he appears frequently in the London Daily Telegraph as
well as doing a regular column titled “An Irishman’s Diary” for the Irish
Times) recently tackled Tim Pat’s previous book, Wherever Green Is Worn.
That book has just been re-issued in paperback, and Kevin used this as the
occassion to take a hurley stick to our Tim Pat. The Irish Times website
demands that you–gasp!–pay to read it, so for non-subscribers here are
some choice quotes from Kevin: “Without exception, it [i.e. Wherever Green
Is Worn] is the worst book about Ireland that I have ever read, an
execrably written and rambling farrago of errors in which just about the
only things that are crystal clear are an obsession with national victimhood
and the indefatiguably buffoonish egotism of the author…” “The author’s
apparent ignorance of history is at times morbidly compelling, rather like
watching a drunken ice-skater repeatedly fall on his bottom…” “Calling
Henry II, son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Maine, and Duke of
Normandy, ‘British’ when ‘Britishness’ was not to be invented for another
half a millennium is the sort of witless gibberish Christian Brothers used
to rant a couple of generations ago…” “There are over 700 pages of such
ill-informed vapouring. And what’s more unendurable than his wearying
conceit is the national self-pity that he peddles. Taking the index as a
guide, it is surely telling that there are four pages which refer to the
injustices done to the Birmingham Six and 28 to the Prevention of Terrorism
Act. However, only three pages are given over to the Birmingham bombings
themselves, and though this atrocity (his word) took the lives of, he
admits, ‘21 innocent civilians’ – are there any other kind? – the account
here deals almost entirely with subsequent Irish victimhood…” “Wherever
Green is Worn. Dreary rubbish about the Irish diaspora. Available now in
paperback…”