Books:From history to heavy weather

Conall Quinn reviews some of the non-fiction Irish books published this year

What the two most recent major histories of Ireland in the 20th century (Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, from 1988 and JJ Lee's Ireland 1912-1985, from 1989) could not do was assess the country in the light of the economic miracle of the 1990s and what impact, if any, this had on our understanding of that century.

Billed as the first comprehensive, social, political, cultural, intellectual and economic survey of the 20th century, Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 not only reassesses history in the light of the Celtic Tiger but it is also a bold challenge to the conception of how a modern history should be written.

Ferriter's is an exhaustive study that seeks to explain how Ireland transformed itself from an impoverished corner of the British Empire into Europe's economic shining light by the last decade of the 20th century.

By downplaying the emphasis normally attributed to the totemic figures of the century, Collins and de Valera, he has teased history from the traditionally neglected and stubborn corners of our past: family, sport, class, literature, the Church, even alcohol, and interwoven them within the broader historical framework. The result is a landmark book that proves how we see things is just as important as what we see, especially when it comes to history.

Dublin's Lost Heroines, Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City is oral history – the testimonies of ordinary women living, working and struggling to survive in the slums and tenements of Dublin over the last hundred years.

From the turn of the 20th century when conditions in parts of Dublin were as squalid as any in the world, through the 'slumland' of the 1960s and the drug-infested council estates of the late 1970s and '80s, Dublin's Lost Heroines is the result of 30 years of research trips to Dublin taken by Kevin C. Kearns, Professor Emeritus at the University of Northern Colorado.

A specialist in oral histories, Kearns gives a voice to the long suffering and silent caretakers of both family and community, a very moving record of how they lived and died amidst chronic unemployment, poverty and disease.

It was said by some at the time of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that the Unionists had won, but were just too stupid to see it. Unfair maybe, but it did serve to point up just how proudly unintellectual the Ulster Unionists were as a party. The one exception was its leader David Trimble. Perhaps it should have come as no great surprise that, in the end, he was unable to convince enough of his party of his vision for the agreement.

Dean Godson's 1,000 page biography of the UUP's intellectual scion, Himself Alone, David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism took five years to write and is a fascinating portrait of man reviled by many nationalists and unionists alike.

It is worth remembering that only a few years before Trimble became the Northern Ireland Assembly's First Minister, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, member of the Legion of Honour and a habitué of Downing St. and the White House, he was a struggling land law lecturer and would-be politician who had failed to secure either a professorial chair or a UUP nomination.

Routinely portrayed as something of an Ulster F.W. de Klerk, a reluctant apartheid-ist bringing down the curtain on a rotten discriminatory system, the picture that emerges here is of a much more complicated man, passionate about Wagner and catholic in his literary tastes. When asked by the SDLP's Sean Farren what he wanted for his people, he replied "to be left alone".

Austin Currie wishes he had left it all alone in his memoir All Hell Will Break Loose. "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?" W.B. Yeats wrote in a moment of conscience after the 1916 Rising. Currie suffers his own Yeatsian moment when he ponders whether his decision to stage a non-violent protest against the system of house allocation in the village of Caledon, led to the subsequent death of over three thousand people in the Troubles. Would he do it all again? Was it all worth even a single life? No, he concludes.

Sailing for Home is poet Theo Dorgan's account of a 30 day transatlantic voyage from Antigua to Kinsale undertaken in 2002. Those expecting A Perfect Storm or Moby Dick or (God forbid) The Life of Pi will be disappointed – the life of Theo aboard the 70 ft schooner The Spirit of Oysterhaven is all relatively smooth sailing, no shipwrecking or leviathans from the deep.

In fact, it is as much an internal journey as it is the story of a sea voyage. Though very much a novice, sailor and travel writer, Dorgan acquits himself admirably on both scores.

The book is full of literary and historical allusions with the kind of self-rumination only a vast empty ocean can inspire. And while there are many descriptions of sail-handling, watch-keeping, genoa sails and goosewinging, Dorgan manages to imbue it all with a poetic resonance.

"I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve. They weren't built for any other purpose," George Bernard Shaw's paean to that most iconic and melancholy of human structures.

Befitting its subject, The History of the Fastnet Lighthouse by James Murray is a tall, elegant folio with beautiful photographic reproductions and other archive material.

The first Fastnet lighthouse was built in 1848 after the American steam-packet Stephen Whitney went down with the loss of 90 lives off the Cork coast the previous year. It took almost six years to complete. In 1896 work began on a new granite lighthouse to replace the original cast iron structure.

Most poignant is the story of James Kavanagh, the Fastnet foreman, who refused to go ashore as long as work was continuing on the lighthouse. He lived on the rock continuously for 10 to 12 months every year, from August 1896 to June 1903. When he completed his work, having set every stone with his own hands, he came on shore and promptly died.

For a country obsessed by the weather it comes as no great shock to find that many of our proverbs are derived from its vicissitudes. The Weather is a Good Storyteller is a collection of proverbs given a modern interpretation by Carmel Fitzgerald, illustrated with black and white and colour photographs by Ben Elves. It contains such nuggets of wisdom as "A fine day is great help to everyone" and "A new broom sweeps clean but an old one knows the corners".

Undoubtedly, the old broom of Irish theatre was Maureen Potter, who passed away earlier this year. Be Delighted is a book of tributes by friends and colleagues from all walks of life including Bertie Ahern, Ben Barnes, Maeve Binchy, Pat Kenny and Nuala O'Faoláin. €1 from each copy sold will be donated to the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Finally, if you feel you need to modernise your Latin vocabulary in this age of the War on Terror and with Christian Muslim relations at their lowest ebb since the Crusades, there is X-Treme Latin.

As Bush might say to Blair, "Tristis nuntio Martios descendisse et, eheu, truculentos esse, sed laetus nuntio illos odisse Arabes oleumque octanum meiere". (The bad news is the Martians have landed and, boy, are they mean; the good news is they hate Arabs and they piss gasoline).

Or for the office Christmas party, "Nisi mecum concubueris, phobistae vicerint", (If you don't sleep with me, the terrorists will have won).