BOOK OF THE DAY: ANNE DOLANreviews Creating Ireland: The Words and Events that Shaped UsBy Paul Daly Hachette Books Ireland 312pp, €28.99
'NOT ALONE must we represent our people in parliament, but we must speak for them."
To some extent Paul Daly's Creating Irelandtakes this TD's pronouncement at its word. Creating Ireland is a political history recorded through the speeches, outbursts, condemnations and resignations of TDs, ministers, and taoisigh throughout the nearly 90 years of Dáil Éireann.
It begins with the first Dáil of January 1919 and ends with the departure of Bertie Ahern - with a couple of uncertain paragraphs about the fate of the nation in the hands of Brian Cowen - and tries to chart most of what came in between.
As a means of assessing this period, of introducing the reader to a gripping political narrative, which proceeds in places at a breakneck speed, this is an interesting device. However, the quotation at the outset captures something of the possible problems with it.
The TD in question was Oliver J Flanagan, speaking in response to Barry Desmond's Health (Family Planning) Amendment Bill in 1985. Flanagan tried to convince the Dáil "this Bill is to provide contraceptives for single teenagers", when he painted a vivid picture of the degradation of the nation that would naturally follow. Flanagan is possibly an unfair example; he has acquired a notoriety for his outbursts in the chamber, for his intolerances and his prejudices, for the extent to which he represents an Ireland we like to think we have left behind. But he is part of the make-up of the Dáil that Creating Irelandnever really engages with.
The Dáil, as portrayed here, is a chamber of ministers and taoisigh, of interjections and objections from opposition spokesmen, but little or nothing from the backbenches.
The book is about national issues, with scant reflection on the day-to-day work of the Dáil, on the questions raised and raised again about local issues and land disputes that formed the basis of many backbenchers' experience of the Dáil, and that often dictated whether a TD was ousted or returned again. Creating Irelandnever stops to explore whether words spoken in an often empty Dáil chamber are necessarily the most accurate measure of a nation's history.
Those words do reveal a great deal about Ireland's political culture over those decades, and while this underlies much of the book, it is never openly addressed. For a book so reliant on the speeches of individual politicians it never considers the words they use.
Resignation speeches are regularly cited, but whether "I have done the State some service", "you win some, you lose some" or "I will submit to the verdict of history", none of them are really analysed or considered in terms of the verdict of history they might be trying to court. There is no consideration of how or whether the nature of debate has changed. The book leaves the impression that from the period of the Arms Crisis ( arguably earlier, from the entry of the "men in the mohair suits") the rhetoric transformed, became altogether more personal and more vitriolic.
That might very well be the case. The problem is that there is far greater attention paid to the years after 1973, particularly the 1980s and 1990s, than to the preceding years.
In a crude count of the pages, the last 35 years account for approximately half of the book. More than 50 years are squeezed into the other half.
The personal attacks on Charles Haughey are judged "without precedent". They might not seem so extraordinary if compared to the attacks which prompted de Valera's defence of his parentage almost 50 years previously.
Readers might disagree whether the chosen speeches were the "words and events that shaped us".
But they will enjoy the arguments it raises.
• Anne Dolan lectures in Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. Her latest book , co-edited with Cormac KH O'Malley , is No Surrender Here!: The Civil War Papers of Ernie O'Malley 1922-1924; published by Lilliput Press in 2007