Troubles

by J.G. Farrell

One of the results of partition was that in both the North and the South a religious minority was left to fend for itself as best it might among a more or less hostile majority.

The uprising had been deeply unpopular among the majority of the Irish people—legend has it that lady passers-by belabored with their umbrellas the rebel force as it entered to occupy the General Post Office in Dublin on that Easter Monday morning—and both the English and the Anglo-Irish regarded it as a stab in the back by an ungrateful rabblement at a time when thousands of young men, many of them Irish, were dying in the defense of liberty in the killing fields of France.

Edward Spencer—a name that will have an allusive echo for anyone who knows the history of Elizabethan Ireland—is one of the great comic portraits in modern literature.