In an interview on The Narrative of Irish History

Your next book is difficult to find but, according to you, well worth it – Speeches from the Dock or Protests of Irish Patriotism by A M Sullivan.

Yes, I couldn’t believe my luck when I came across it – I had often heard my mother talking about it. And it really is astonishing. One of the characters in my book says, ‘Only in Ireland could Speeches from the Dock become a bestseller.’

And it was indeed a huge bestseller. This again is going back to men like Patrick Pearse who were hanged or shot for their commitment. Many of them were Anglo-Irish and some of them Anglo-French. National narrative can sometimes be driven by mythological and literary figures. Think of Shakespeare’s non-historical characters like King Lear or Hamlet that play deeply into the subconscious of the British. In Ireland we have, of course, figures from literature – Bloom, Juno, Christy Mahon – and Dublin has produced more Nobel prizes than any city in the world. However, historic and tragic figures like Wolf Tone or Robert Emmet are even more powerful. From the time I was five I could recite lines from Emmet’s last speech. And every single child in my class knew these lines:

‘Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. Let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’

It is almost Keatsian. And, of course, his epitaph hasn’t been written because we are still not a united country.