This week my reading neatly dovetailed with a short lecture on the ‘Tan War – a Just War’ for the Peadar O’Donnell Republican Socialist Forum, which will be broadcast in November. At the end of the panel discussion, the chair asked me to make some concluding remarks. A contributor had expressed uncertainty regarding Sinn Féin’s future left-wing never mind socialist orientation if it carried its current opinion poll ratings into the next general election and became the main party of government in Dublin. This had followed on from a wider question as to whether the decade of commemorations had generated renewed enthusiasm for republican and socialist ideas. I responded by paraphrasing Marx in the Holy Family that

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a…