Review of Donegal: The Irish Revolution, 1912-23 by Pauric Travers (Four Courts Press, £22.50/€24.95) VISITORS who arrive in Donegal from countries elsewhere, including from Britain, wonder at the incongruity. It is Ireland’s northern-most county yet it is “in the South.” Surely it makes no geographical sense. Naturally, they ask why? How come it wasn’t hived off with those other six counties that comprise 'Northern Ireland'? After all, it’s in Ulster, isn’t it? Although I have answered that question many scores of times down the years, the simplicity of my reply rarely fails to elicit a measure of surprise, even shock. Perhaps it’s my bluntness: “Too many Catholics about the place.” I particularly enjoy saying this to British people because so few of them know anything about their state’s closest colony. Home Rule bills, the Rising, the Tan War, partition, the civil war – not to mention, the hundreds of years of British rule that went before – are usually a revelation. Irish history gets little, if any, airing in the British schools’ curriculum. When my visitors stand on the beach at Rathmullan and gaze at the statue representing the Flight of the Earls, they have no idea who sailed away and why. They know nothing of the subsequent Plantation of Ulster, the confiscation of land on behalf of the Protestant settlers and the dispossession of the indigenous Catholic inhabitants. Therefore, they have no clue as to how that policy culminated in Ireland’s partition and, fifty years’ later, generated the conflict they know as 'the Troubles'.