Ireland: Dr Martin Mansergh played a central role both in Anglo-Irish and republican-State relations for more than two decades up to his resignation as special adviser to the Taoiseach in 2002 in order to contest a Dáil seat in his home county of Tipperary.
He is now a member of Seanad Éireann. Almost all of the articles, reviews and speeches in The Legacy of History were prepared when he was either an official of the Fianna Fáil party in opposition - when sabres inevitably had to be rattled accusingly in the general direction of Britain more loudly than when in government - or a special adviser during Fianna Fáil's various periods in office between 1982 and 2002. They include a number of addresses delivered at commemorations for icons of Irish nationalism, where he argued at once for the historical legitimacy and coherence of the republican ideal, including the use of physical force at times up to 1923, and against the futility of political violence in contemporary Ireland.
Irish historians have reason to be grateful to Dr Mansergh. He has provided much support for initiatives to open important State records, including the key 1916-1921 testimonies collected by the Bureau of Military History (on which he drew himself in 2002). He accepts that historical perspectives are not static, and that historians are obliged not simply to reiterate received wisdom but to reinterpret and to explore, particularly in the light of evidence that was unavailable when the first partial narratives and biographies were written.
His own PhD research was on 18th-century French political life, to the analysis of which he assuredly brought new insights rather than uncritically reiterating old orthodoxies. Yet on occasion he has taken considerable swipes at academics because of their alleged revisionist tendencies: "The type of history I would distrust . . . is that which would be virtually unrecognisable to those who lived through it, and history has to find a way of integrating how people felt and reacted at the time with other objective considerations that are now more discernible."
Whose feelings, and whose reactions, should we be considering in respect, say, of the home rule crisis of 1912-14, the 1916 Rising, and the War of Independence? Physical force republicans, constitutional nationalists, Southern and Ulster unionists, revolutionary socialists, people of no particular persuasion or faction? Where can we find evidence of how such people felt and reacted? Are we to treat as comprehensible and important only the memories and interpretations of those people who belonged broadly on the anti-Treaty side of politics, direct action or commentary, or are we to look at other perspectives and fresh evidence?
This extensive collection will be particularly valued by students of the Irish Peace Process, on which Mansergh may produce a further work. While rooted resolutely within a mainstream Fianna Fáil perspective on Irish history and on Anglo-Irish relations, his reflections have a much broader appeal. He writes about the influence and work of his father, Nicholas Mansergh, the first British-based academic commentator to understand the logic of Document No 2 and of de Valera's policies in the 1930s, and later an eminent historian both of Anglo-Irish and of Anglo-Indian relations.
Mansergh junior also considers his own experience as a member of an all-island minority religion, the Church of Ireland. Some readers may be inclined to glide over some of the more apparently arcane pieces, but to do that would be a mistake. Mansergh takes a long view of historical processes, and his ruminations on the 18th century, as much as those on Sean Moylan or Tom Maguire, are part and parcel of his overall argument about the forces that have shaped Irish history and which continue to frame contemporary Irish politics. We need not accept all his arguments to value them.
Eunan O'Halpin is Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary History at TCD
The Legacy of History. By Martin Mansergh, Mercier Press, 478pp. £20