Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
The European Irishman
By John Banville
Independent Spirit
by Hubert Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 588 pp., $35.00
I grew up in the 1950s in Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland. It was a small town with a history. Here, in the twelfth century, a gang of Anglo-Norman robber barons, seeking land and Lebensraum in an as yet unplundered territory, had made the short sea-crossing from Wales and set up an enclave which they were to defend with unflinching tenacity in the face of an outraged but disorganized Irishry and a suspicious and jealous English king. So was inaugurated that connection between Britain and Ireland which was to bring eight hundred years of troubles to these islands, troubles that are with us to this day. There are historians who argue that, ironically, it was not greed that impelled Henry II of England to take control of Ireland—the English Pope Adrian IV had, with characteristic papal insouciance, 'granted' the island to him in the bull Laudabiliter in 1155—but fear that the Norman lords would set up a power base on the other side of the Irish Sea from which to challenge his authority. Thus, stumblingly, does history blight the generations.
Review, 4032 words
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