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The Damnable Question: A Study of Anglo-Irish Relations
The Pulitzer Prize-winner in History analyzes the legal, economic, and social turmoils that led to two centuries of conflict in Ireland -- with profiles that humanize the politicians, rebels, and bystanders in this Irish drama. Starting with the Act of Union in 1800 that conjoined Ireland and Great Britain, and moving on through the great famine, the partitioning of Ireland, and other cataclysmic events, Dangerfield untangles a complex story about Gaelic pride doomed to end in violence.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2026
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-damnable-question-one-hundred-and-twenty-years-of-anglo-irish-conflict-by-george-dangerfield/
Dating from 1976, this was the last book of Anglo-American journalist George Dangerfield, celebrated for his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, published forty years earlier. I found it thorough and (mostly) fair, and am a bit surprised that it’s not better known. I guess it was overcome by the substantial academic works of the 1980s, by Roy Foster and Joe Lee, and of course Charles Townshend’s more recent work has retrodden exactly the same ground and got a lot more detail out of it. But I guess there were not many warts-and-all summaries of Ireland from 1880 to 1925 available in the mid-70s. I spotted only a few mistakes, and they were trivial (“Eann Comhairle” for “Ceann Comhairle”, that kind of thing).
Dangerfield ends the book with a brief but very provocative counter-historical speculation: what if the Irish side had rejected the Treaty in December 1921? His view is that Lloyd George’s threats of terrible war were a bluff, and he would have resigned, putting the Conservatives in charge, with no choice but to completely own the inevitability of Irish independence (as Bonar Law actually did when he came to power a year later); and that the British government and an Irish movement which was not split by the Treaty would then have been in a position to force the Ulster Unionists into a united Irish Free State.
I’m really not so sure. I think that the coercive capacity of both Dublin and London was pretty weak by the end of 1921. Unionists still had the strength to resist, and Ulster Catholics would have paid the price for that resistance in the first place. I also think that once a negotiation has broken down, one cannot assume that the next set of negotiators will be able to simply pick up the pieces and resume the process to take it to a better place – Cyprus and Palestine are obvious cases in point. The most likely outcome of a failure in December 1921 would have been a messy, semi-frozen conflict, and a lot more civilian deaths, probably including more senior political leaders than were killed in our timeline.
Still, it’s an interesting summary.
Dating from 1976, this was the last book of Anglo-American journalist George Dangerfield, celebrated for his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, published forty years earlier. I found it thorough and (mostly) fair, and am a bit surprised that it’s not better known. I guess it was overcome by the substantial academic works of the 1980s, by Roy Foster and Joe Lee, and of course Charles Townshend’s more recent work has retrodden exactly the same ground and got a lot more detail out of it. But I guess there were not many warts-and-all summaries of Ireland from 1880 to 1925 available in the mid-70s. I spotted only a few mistakes, and they were trivial (“Eann Comhairle” for “Ceann Comhairle”, that kind of thing).
Dangerfield ends the book with a brief but very provocative counter-historical speculation: what if the Irish side had rejected the Treaty in December 1921? His view is that Lloyd George’s threats of terrible war were a bluff, and he would have resigned, putting the Conservatives in charge, with no choice but to completely own the inevitability of Irish independence (as Bonar Law actually did when he came to power a year later); and that the British government and an Irish movement which was not split by the Treaty would then have been in a position to force the Ulster Unionists into a united Irish Free State.
I’m really not so sure. I think that the coercive capacity of both Dublin and London was pretty weak by the end of 1921. Unionists still had the strength to resist, and Ulster Catholics would have paid the price for that resistance in the first place. I also think that once a negotiation has broken down, one cannot assume that the next set of negotiators will be able to simply pick up the pieces and resume the process to take it to a better place – Cyprus and Palestine are obvious cases in point. The most likely outcome of a failure in December 1921 would have been a messy, semi-frozen conflict, and a lot more civilian deaths, probably including more senior political leaders than were killed in our timeline.
Still, it’s an interesting summary.
October 30, 2021
Still a damnable question. Some select implications for decolonisation efforts world wide. Mostly is bogged down in the wickedness of the problem which has not changed.
March 29, 2008
England's union with Ireland never took. It was a transplant that the body politic rejected. This is the story fo how the English tried to hold on to Ireland and how it failed, the first unraveling of its imperialist domains after the United states. But the misrule of Ireland was far uglier than the relationship with the colonies.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews