Irish Gold

Andrew M. Greeley “Irish Gold”  Tom Doherty Associates, 1994, 334 pp.

Author, Andrew M. Greeley (born February 5, 1928, Oak Park, Illinois) is an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and fiction writer. He was seriously injured this past summer when getting out of a cab, catching his clothing in the door, and dragged some distance.  He has been a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and is a Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.

I have to read more of his books.  A Wikipedia entry concerning this author intrigues me: “At the height of the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, Greeley wrote The Priestly Sins (2004), a novel about a young priest from the Plains States who is exiled to an insane asylum and then to an academic life because he reports abuse that he has witnessed. His book, The Making of the Pope (2005) was intended as a follow-up to his The Making of the Popes 1978. This was a first-hand account of the coalition building process by which Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as Benedict XVI.”

I read “Irish Gold” during a two day respite from heavier reading.  I believe anyone of Irish heritage, especially if they have roots in the Connemara of Ireland, will enjoy this novel.  It is a far-fetched tale involving lost gold bars delivered by the Germans in 1916 to support the Irish uprising and the question of who really killed Michael Collins in 1922.  The Grandparents of the protagonist Dermot Coyne were involved in all this and had to leave Ireland, forever, because of it.  Dermot is assisted by Nuala McGrail, a Trinity College student in finding answers to his Grandparents (now deceased) history.  The Grandmother had kept diaries written in Galelic throughout the Troubles of 1919 to 1922; Nuala is the translator of these documents.

My Notes:

Pg. 25:  “The Troubles” is the polite name for the era after the end of the Great War—1916 to 1923.  It includes the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence 1919-1921, and then the Irish Civil War 1921-1923. 

The rebels of 1916 were poets and dreamers.  If the British had imprisoned them after they shelled their handful of outposts into submission, it would have been the end of the matter, since most of the Irish thought the rebels were a crowd of idiots.  Typically the Brits overreacted, shot most of them, and, predictably made them heroes.  Typically too they missed the dangerous men—the politician Eamon DeValera and the brilliant guerrilla leader Michael Collins.  I personally never liked Eamon DeValera but have always admired Collins.  Collins’ assassination site was certainly on my agenda when I visited the ol’ sod.