Can we have our money back?

Garret FitzGerald

• The Unresolved Question by Nicholas Mansergh
  Yale, 386 pp, £18.95, October 1991, ISBN 0 300 05069 0

The subtitle of this book is ‘The Anglo-Irish Settlement and its Undoing 1912-1973’. But the great bulk of the book is devoted to the settlement itself – the Treaty of 1921, its background and its immediate aftermath. By contrast, the section on the undoing of the settlement is relatively brief: indeed, the period from the declaration of a republic in 1949 to the fall of Stormont in 1972 is dealt with by way of an epilogue of ten short pages, and even the treatment of the earlier events of 1948-49 is relatively cursory. That is a criticism, however, of the description of the book rather than of the book itself. The account of the course of events between 1912 and 1925 which it contains lives up to the expectations aroused by the late Professor Mansergh’s eminence in this field of history, and though one might have wished for a fuller treatment of the subsequent half-century, what he has to say of this aftermath contains much that is thought-provoking and acute.