Pakenham Thomas. The Year Of Liberty. The Great Irish Rebellion of 1798

Little, Brown Book Group, 2000. — 424 p.This classic account of the great Irish rebellion of 1798 remains the only full-scale history of that tragic event. As relevant today as it was when first published in 1969, THE YEAR OF LIBERTY is now reissued with the addition of a chronology and a glossary of terms. In May 1798 a hundred thousand peasants rose against the British government in Ireland. By the time the revolt had been put down four months later, thirty thousand dead were rotting in heaps in a smoking and desolate countryside. Yet it was not a schoolroom story of the heroic oppressed rising against the brutal oppressor, but the result of a complex, tragic, often absurd, and sometimes heroic interplay between different groups of people. A tough and arrogant oligarchy of country gentlemen, mainly Protestant and mainly British in origin, lived off a Catholic peasantry. Meanwhile, idealistic merchants and hot-headed young lawyers dreamed and plotted for the Irish Republic on the French model. From a mass of sources including confidential government reports, contemporary newspapers, poems, broadsheets, and letters, the author pieces together a story at once complex, tragic, absurd, and heroic.