‘History Books That Make You Feel As Though You Were There’ – Launching Many of Our Best Lie There at Chapters Bookstore
There are book launches, and then there are evenings like Thursday night at Chapters Bookstore on Parnell Street.
Mercier Press was proud to launch Many of Our Best Lie There: Dublin, July 1922 – May 1923, the sixth and final volume in Derek Molyneux and Darren Kelly’s landmark series on revolutionary Dublin. It was an evening thirteen years in the making – a journey that began one Sunday morning in January 2013, when Derek rang Darren with a simple question: ‘You fancy writing a book?’ Neither had a degree in English. Neither had written a book before. Six volumes later, they have carried readers from the first shots of Easter Week 1916 to the final, bitter months of the Civil War – and built one of the most significant bodies of work on Ireland’s revolutionary period in the process.
The crowd said it all. Readers travelled from California, Florida and Britain to be there, joining family, friends, fellow historians, former members of the Defence Forces and librarians – one of whom, from the acquisitions team at South Dublin County Libraries, spoke movingly from the floor about the books’ extraordinary granularity: ‘when you’re in the muck and the dust, and you’re losing people on your left and right – that’s what you’ve managed to capture.’
A story that had to be finished
Darren Kelly kept his speech short and sweet, but its message was clear: the goal the pair set themselves all those years ago – to tell the whole story, from the Rising to the end of the Civil War, through the eyes of ordinary people rather than leaders alone – has been achieved. ‘A lot of books concentrate on the leaders,’ he said. ‘We were trying to get ordinary people into the story.’
Derek Molyneux was candid that this final volume was by far the most difficult of the six to write. Covering the darkest stretch of the Civil War – the executions, the reprisals, the atrocities and incarcerations, the long-suffering civilians caught in the crossfire – it is, in his words, a harrowing story, ‘but it’s still a story that needed to be told in the way that we’ve now told it.’
It is also, for Derek, a deeply personal one. Research for the book finally unravelled an almost century-old family mystery about his own grandfather, Michael, whose health was catastrophically destroyed by his Civil War experiences and who died at just twenty-nine – three months before Derek’s father was born. The book is dedicated to them both.
And fittingly, the series ends where it began: with Volunteer Joe O’Connor, whose prologue opened When the Clock Struck in 1916 and whose epilogue now closes Many of Our Best Lie There – a man haunted by what we would today call PTSD, who found unexpected solace one day in the sight of the tricolour flying high above Collins Barracks. For all the grief and shattered dreams, it wasn’t all in vain.
‘The real keepers of the flame’ – Marcus Howard’s launch address
Filmmaker and historian Marcus Howard, who has championed the series from the beginning, delivered a launch speech that nobody in the room will forget in a hurry.
‘There are history books that tell you what happened,’ he began. ‘There are history books that tell you why it happened. And then, every so often, there are history books that make you feel as though you were there.’
For Marcus, the great problem with history is certainty: ‘The further away we move from the event, the more certain we become about it. Everyone knows who the heroes are. Everyone knows who the villains are. Everyone knows what should have happened. But anyone who has spent years buried in witness statements, letters and military reports discovers something very different. The past is rarely tidy. It’s untidy, it’s contradictory – and nowhere is that more true than the Irish Civil War.’
That, he argued, is why this book matters: ‘This book is written with both the unflinching eye of a battlefield commander and the burning heart of a patriot who knows glory and horror are forever intertwined. They are not asking the reader to admire one side or condemn the other. They are asking us to look history squarely in the eye. We as readers are treated as adults – we can handle it.’
He singled out the book’s devastating opening – the death of Cathal Brugha, and nurse Linda Kearns holding his severed femoral artery closed with her fingers all the way from the burning Granville Hotel to the Mater Hospital. ‘That sequence says more about courage than almost any battlefield story.’
And he drew out the tragic irony at the heart of the conflict: ‘Many who argued most passionately for accepting the Treaty did so because they believed it would prevent civil war. Yet the very decision taken to avoid war became the road into an even more bitter one. History has a cruel habit of mocking the hopes of those who make it.’
Above all, Marcus returned again and again to the people at the centre of these pages: ‘Behind every headline, behind every battle, behind every execution, every political speech, stood a human being like you or me. Someone who laughed, someone who loved, someone who believed they were building a better Ireland. Someone who never came home. As historians, we owe these people one thing above all else: the truth. Not a comfortable truth, not a convenient truth – just the truth. That’s the standard Derek and Darren have set themselves throughout this remarkable series, and they’ve achieved it.’
His verdict on the series as a whole – six books, nearly ten years of work, thousands of documents, hundreds of witness statements, countless forgotten lives restored to history: ‘They have restored forgotten men and women to the centre of history, and reminded us that ordinary people are the ones who make history extraordinary. When we want to understand not just what happened during the Civil War, but what it felt like to live through it, we’ll come back to these books. That, in the end, is the highest compliment I can give.’
He closed by calling Derek and Darren ‘the real keepers of the flame’.
Thank you
Derek closed the formal proceedings with warm thanks to his daughters, Shannon and Katrina, his family, long-time readers Paul Green and Pat Rooney, the wonderful team at Chapters – and to everyone at Mercier: ‘It’s been an absolute pleasure and an adventure to work with Mercier. The company has been around since 1944. It survived the Second World War, the Cold War, recessions, financial crashes, pandemics, technological revolutions – and incredibly, they have even survived me and Darren.’
The celebrations continued late into the evening at Wynn’s Hotel, with readings, music and more than a few glasses raised – not least to Michael Molyneux, and to all of those who never came home.
Many Of Our Best Lie There
Molyneaux, Derek
Former comrades turn guns on each other as Ireland’s revolution becomes civil war nightmare. Michael Collins is killed, ‘The Terror’ begins with daily executions, and heroes become traumatised survivors. Brutal street warfare, prison escapes, botched firing squads in ten months of hell. Modern Ireland was truly forged not in the glory of Easter Week, but in the ashes of the civil war.
ISBN: 9781806900008
Buy Now
Many of Our Best Lie There: Dublin, July 1922 – May 1923 by Derek Molyneux and Darren Kelly is available now from Chapters Bookstore, all good bookshops and mercierpress.ie – along with the five earlier volumes in the series.