Tread Softly on my Dreams by Greta Curran Browne

I didn’t deliberately arrange it so that I finished a book about Irish history just in time for St Patrick’s Day, honestly!   This book starts with the 1798 (Wolfe Tone) Rebellion, but its main focus is the 1803 Rebellion led by Robert Emmet, and it generally does a good job of getting across the horror of the very heavy-handed way in which the rebellion was put down but without sounding like a piece of propaganda.

Robert Emmet’s a figure who has been romanticised, because of his relationship with his sweetheart Sarah Curran, and the rebellion itself is often portrayed as a working-class, Catholic uprising, which is unfortunate because it masks the fact that this was an uprising of the United Irishman, and that Emmet himself was from a Protestant Ascendancy background. This book successfully steers clear of all that. It shows that this was an uprising of Irish people from…