Books, Arts & Manners: Ireland Divided

The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, by Padraig O’Malley (Houghton Mifflin, 544 pp., $9.95, paper)

Winston Churchill’s 1922 comment about the Northern Irish, that “the integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world,” is still valid today. That quarrel also has a remarkable fascination for Americans. The three Democratic presidential candidates have called for an American special envoy to help resolve the Northern Irish problem in the direction of Irish unification, and Irish-American activists are petitioning the Democratic Platform Committee to issue a similar statement. Charles Haughey, the leader of the opposition party in the Irish Republic, has recently called on President Reagan to challenge the legitimacy of Irish partition.

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John P. McCarthy

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The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, by Padraig O’Malley (Houghton Mifflin, 544 pp., $9.95, paper)

Winston Churchill’s 1922 comment about the Northern Irish, that “the integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world,” is still valid today. That quarrel also has a remarkable fascination for Americans. The three Democratic presidential candidates have called for an American special envoy to help resolve the Northern Irish problem in the direction of Irish unification, and Irish-American activists are petitioning the Democratic Platform Committee to issue a similar statement. Charles Haughey, the leader of the opposition party in the Irish Republic, has recently called on President Reagan to challenge the legitimacy of Irish partition.