A Policeman's Ireland: Recollections of Samuel Waters, RIC, edited by Stephen Ball, Cork University Press, 114pp
The Misfit Soldier: Edward Casey's War Story, 1914-1918, edited by Joanna Bourke, Cork University Press, 77pp
My Parents and other Rebels by Michael Kevin O'Doherty, Errigal Press, 143pp
Home Thoughts from Abroad: the Australian Letters of Thomas F. Culhane Glin Historical Society, 219pp. All £8.95 each
The first two books under review are further volumes in the excellent Irish Narratives series edited by Professor David Fitzpatrick.
The memoir of Samuel Waters provides a fascinating insight into the Royal Irish Constabulary and a unique perspective on Irish life between 1850 and 1920. It includes a personal account of the Fenian rising, the Land War and the Special Commission on Parnellism and Crime. Waters, who pioneered intelligence-gathering in the constabulary's Special Branch, exposes the Tory administration's complicity in the London Times campaign to denigrate the Irish Party. On retiring in 1906, he used police contacts for Unionist propaganda.
However, he emerges as an astute, genial officer, who served in all four provinces and rose to the rank of assistant inspector-general and whose recreations encompassed hunting, fishing and gambling. He qualifies the perception of the RIC as an essentially paramilitary force by illustrating that, during times of social peace, the constabulary functioned as a normal police service.
Dr Bourke has moulded Edward Casey's manuscript into another engaging narrative. Casey, a Cockney Irishman serving in the Dublin Fusiliers, was preoccupied with sex and survival. He demonstrates the brutalising effects of the first World War: the "bayonet-man" moving into action after the bombing of trenches; the sound of rats feeding off decomposing bodies; the exploitation of women to satisfy men's "carnal needs". This memoir was written in New Zealand 60 years after the events recorded, and Casey acknowledged that his "facts may be a little astray". One wonders if he confused attitudes to the British army in Ireland before and after the 1916 Rising.
My Parents and Other Rebels is lavishly produced and carries a commendation by Thomas Keneally. The author's mother, Kitty O'Doherty, supported the women's movement and labour cause, backed the republican campaign (on both sides of the Atlantic) and assisted in the writing of Dan Breen's My Fight for Irish Freedom. She reared a family which included the late Rev Prof Feicin O'Doherty.
HIS father, Seamus O'Doherty, was a member of the IRB military council that planned the Rising. Although favouring a constitutional strategy after 1916, he was deported, imprisoned and went on hunger-strike. O'Doherty writes that, being a Derry man, his father understood the Northern problem and that his aim after the Rising was to stop any further use of force - during the Civil War, the author's parents were horrified by the deaths of so many men they had known. Nevertheless, his mother carried $50,000 from the US to fuel the anti Treaty campaign; she "never wavered in her support for de Valera".
The magisterial correspondence of Thomas Culhane has been edited by Thomas J. Byrne, Tom Donovan and Bernard Stack. Culhane left Ireland in 1927 and died in Melbourne 42 years later. He never returned but, illustrating the distinction between exile and emigrant, at heart he never left home. A scholar and journalist, he retained a love of the Irish language. Steeped in the lore of his native west Limerick, he admitted that emigrating was the "one grave mistake" of his life.
Brendan O Cathaoir's Famine Diary was published recently