A Nation and not a Rabble : The Irish Revolution 1913–23

Rival Volunteer forces, revolutionaries who later sought military service pensions and the families of the Royal Irish Constabulary all feature in A Nation and not a Rabble, a history of Ireland's revolutionary decade from 1913 to 1923. It runs from the Home Rule crisis through the First World War, the War of Independence, the Treaty and the Civil War. The title comes from a report by George Gavan Duffy, foreign minister in the Provisional Government, who worried about public order and how the Irish were seen abroad. History Ireland's reviewer judged it useful to historians and general readers alike.

In A Nation and not a Rabble Diarmaid Ferriter draws on pension applications, Bureau of Military History witness statements, Dáil records, state papers, newspapers, letters and memoirs. Charles Townshend, reviewing it in The Irish Times, saw two books in one, with a central account of the revolution set between sections on how the period has been remembered and written about since 1922. He noted that this attention to historiography was unusual in a book aimed at a general readership.

Townshend praised its local detail, its fair handling of historical debates and its use of pension records, though he felt its ideas of the rabble and the nation were not fully developed. Roy Foster, in The Spectator Australia, wrote approvingly of the archival research and of its attention to the social conservatism of the revolutionaries. Shane Nagle in History Ireland called it a "valuable handbook" and found its account of the IRA pensions process revealing about the new state's conservatism.

Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, a weekly Irish Times columnist and a regular broadcaster. His other books include Judging Dev, Occasions of Sin, The Border and Between Two Hells.