This work s cluttered cover-design - a sepia picture of the IRA hero Frank Ryan above a banner proclaiming, IRISH REPUBLICANS GREET SPANISH REPUBLICANS - SMASH ALL IMPERIALISMS - is unpromising. Armed Irish republicanism has an almost Haitian ability to worship with vagarious simultaneity at rival shrines, including mass-murdering sectarianism, ostentatious Communion-gobbling Catholicism, sickly Bodenstown sentimentality and socialist self-righteousness.
The cover misleads: for In Spanish Trenches is unquestionably the definitive work on the Irish of the International Brigades in Spain. This excellent study does not purport to assess O Duffy s anti-Communist volunteers, and I dislike its generic description of these hapless and inept gossoons as fascist . With comparable inaccuracy, their Irish opponents are sometimes known as the Connolly Column : this was a highly imaginative PR term coined by Peter O Connor in the 1970s to encompass disparate units and many different experi