Cromwell – God’s Executioner

A mention in dispatches for Micheál Ó Siochrú’s book, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (Faber & Faber). There is a two-part series on RTÉ based on the book. The first one was broadcast last night – and I missed. However, I have to say that I am not worried. The book is very, very good and well worth getting. Ó Siochrú’s great gift is that he knows his history but that he also knows how to write. The tragedy, political double-dealing, incompetence and sectarianism of Irish political life of the time and the slaughter of Cromwell’s campaign are all here. This is a book by an academic – he is a lecturer in history in TCD – but it is not an academic study, that is, it is written with style and an eye to that fabled creature ‘the general reader’.

I interviewed Ó Siochrú (in Irish) for today’s Irish Times in the Tuarascáil column which, if you do not have the paper, should be on-line in an teanga bheo section of the website. Amongst the many interesting things he said, was the suggestion that we think we know about Cromwell but that we don’t. He also said that we need to better understand that era if we want to understand today. It is certainly true that events that took place so long ago can still have such an emotional affect on us today.

Talking of remembering, is it not about time that a statue was put up to the O’Neills? Owen Roe O’Neill died before he fought Cromwell but he is certainly a figure of great historical importance and deserves recognition in Ulster – which is not to say that Cromwell did not learn to curse the name O’Neill. Ó Siochrú writes that O’Neill’s nephew, Hugh Dubh (of whom I knew nothing before reading this book), bloodied Cromwell’s nose at Clonmel, killing between 1,500 and 2,000 of his soldiers. It was, says Ó Siochrú, “the single biggest loss ever suffered by the New Model Army on any of its campaigns in Ireland, Scotland or England”. Cromwell was so infuriated by the losses that he allegedly said “by God above, he would follow that Hugh Duff O’Neill wheresoever he went”.

Certainly, it seems strange that a statue of Cromwell stands in London but that there is not – to my knowledge – a statute to Owen Roe O’Neill. Indeed, where is the statue for Hugh O’Neill who fought against Elizabeth I? After all, if his adversary Chichester gets a street named after him in Belfast, then surely parity of cultural esteem means that the O’Neill should also be recognised. If memory serves me right, Hugh did not lose the war entirely, signing favourable enough terms, but he did lose the ‘peace’ that followed.