In The Kaiser’s Holocaust , David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen give us the unknown story of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Germany’s forgotten African empire – an atrocity that foreshadowed the Nazi genocides. It’s an important book and a fascinating – and often grim – read. Here is David Olusoga introducing it, putting the events into a wider context.

 

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The story of the extermination of the Herero and Nama was not so much forgotten as deliberately written out of official history. It is a story that was entombed, initially by the German colonial authorities and later by the South Africans who replaced them. In the decades after the genocide, up until the end of South African rule and the birth of modern Namibia in 1990, no group with any power in the country had any vested interest in the story being exhumed.

The German community sought to deny what their nation and their ancestors had done in the Camps and in the Omahake, while the South Africans, covered-up the genocides in the name of white unity. Both groups, along with the Pretoria governments, who ruled over South West Africa as a virtual province of South Africa, set out to expunge the genocide from official history of the country. All were content to conceal this history behind a semi-mythical version of the nation’s past, that both the German and South African populations of South West Africa could rally behind.

Containing a great deal of new archival research, The Kaiser’s Holocaust will help this history to break-out to a new and wider audience. The book also offers a detailed account of the genocides but especially of the concentration camps placing them within the wider context of German and European history, challenging the notion that events that took place with the colonial realm had little impact upon European history.

The excellent national archives in Namibia still contain large numbers of files and photographs through which the real story can be pieced together.

There is a view shared by some historians of this event that the openness of the soldiers and administrators who filled the death registers, took photographs of the dying and who wrote letters offering human remains for sale simply felt there was no need to hide what they were doing, at the personal level, as they did not believe it was wrong. They were also confident that the direction of history would demonstrate them to have been right and that the suffering of the people they enslaved and exterminated would never be deemed valuable enough to be explored by historians. What the letters and documents in the archives reveal is this incredible openness but also that unsettling combination of killing and cold bureaucracy that is so redolent of the world’s other systemic genocides – the Nazi death camps and the Soviet GULAG.

What is most uncomfortable about the history explored by The Kaiser’s Holocaust is that it challenges the theory that the Nazis and their crimes were an historical aberration. The book argues that the Herero Nama genocide, and the German genocides in the East during World War Two, were both part of a much larger phenomenon; the rise in Germany of a form of racial colonialism, informed by a radical interpretation of Social Darwinism and founded upon the 19th-century Lebensraum Theory. While the extermination of the Jews was motivated, above all, by Nazi anti-Semitism even that holocaust took place within the context of the Nazis’ war for space and empire.

The racial theories that motivated the extermination of millions of Poles, Russian, Ukrainians and others were steeped in the traditions and theories of late 19th-century racial colonialism.

– The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen is available now in hardback.

As Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces there is no one better placed than Lucy Worsley to take us on a tour of the history of Kensington Palace.

In her new book Courtiers she gives us the men and women who considered it home, worked there and visited during the time of George II, and in this accompanying Q & A she explains why she considers it to be one of London’s great undiscovered secrets.

She tells us what life in the Georgian court would have been like, especially for ladies, and provides a guide to Georgian etiquette. She also explains what she does in her day job with Historic Royal Palaces, and when you might be seeing her on your television in 2010 …

On Courtiers

Why did you write ‘Courtiers’? How did it start?

I got the idea for Courtiers from my work as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. Several times a week, I climb up the King’s Grand Staircase leading to the state apartments at Kensington Palace. In the 1720s, William Kent painted the staircase with murals, including portraits of 45 servants in the royal household at the time. Looking up at their faces, I found myself increasingly curious to find out who they all were. When I started looking into the subject of who was who, I found that all the different guidebooks contradicted each other, and that many of their identifications were quite mistaken.

So, I decided I had to do the job properly, and start research from scratch. Five years later … Courtiers was the result. It tells the story of the Georgian court through the eyes of some of the people who knew it best: the royal servants.

Do you have a favourite courtier from the book? Why?

I have a soft spot for the three main female characters in the book: firstly, Queen Caroline, who was a fat, funny German immigrant who never expected or wanted to become queen. She would have preferred a life as a philosopher. She did a great job as queen, despite being cruelly abandoned by her husband George II, and suffered a horrible death with extreme bravery. She had an infectious laugh and her servants adored her. The way her husband left his mistress and came back to her towards the very end is one of the eighteenth century’s greatest love stories.

Secondly, there’s Henrietta Howard. Rather bizarrely, she was Queen Caroline’s bedchamber servant as well as being her husband’s mistress: a very odd love triangle. Caroline and Henrietta actually got on rather well together, as Henrietta only worked in the royal household to escape from her violent alcoholic husband. The queen sympathised with her and shielded her. Nor was it terribly shocking to the court as a whole that the German-born king was unfaithful to his wife. When his grandmother heard about Henrietta, she said ‘at least she will improve his English’.

Finally, there’s Molly Lepell, the young and glamorous Maid of Honour, who made an impulsive, secret and crazy marriage to the court’s bisexual Vice-Chamberlain, a mistake which could have wrecked her life. Molly, who struggled with depression and dabbled with laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol), eventually escaped from court to live serenely on her own, comforted by books.

Is there a courtier that you dislike? Why?

Oh, the more you know about people, the more you understand them, and the more you understand them, the harder it is to dislike them. On the surface, King George II is a deeply unpleasant man: unfaithful to his wonderful wife, constantly at daggers drawn with his father and with his children, bad-tempered and short-sighted. But I warmed to him when I understood what a poor hand life had dealt him.

When he was eleven, his mother was imprisoned for adultery. His father, King George I, kidnapped four of his children, and one of them died in his care. His wife and five of his eight children died before him, and he only realised too late how much he loved them. This helps to explain his celebrated blustering and bad temper.

You clearly think Kensington Palace is important: why so?

Kensington Palace is most famous as the home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but there’s much more to it than that. It’s one of the great undiscovered secrets of London, because most people don’t even realise that it’s open to visitors, or that it contains objects and stories covering the whole of royal history from the seventeenth century onwards. We’re carrying out a big project to open up the palace to many more visitors, which will be complete in 2012.

I particularly like the way the palace captures four centuries of royal history. We go from William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to spectacular eighteenth-century state apartments of the Hanoverians, to the childhood of Queen Victoria (who was born, grew up, met Albert and became queen at Kensington Palace), to the modern royal family: Princesses Margaret and Diana are key twentieth-century Kensington residents.

The other thing I like about Kensington Palace is the way that it’s a curiously feminine place, and many of the princesses who’ve lived here have been mad, sad and sometimes bad. I’m fascinated by the job of princess: duty and pleasure in constant conflict.

Why did so many people clamour to become courtiers if the job was so awful?

People made enormous efforts to obtain court posts, and underwent humiliation, gruelling work and financial ruin to keep them. The explanation is ambition. At court, you could potentially win power, royal favour or great riches. Although the eighteenth century sees the rise of Parliament and the gradual decline of royal power, the court still matters in this period. It’s really the last great gasp of palace life.

What are a few of your favourite anecdotes from the book?

I’ve always been horribly fascinated by Queen Caroline’s death. She collapsed in November 1737 with a pain in her stomach, and it turned out that for several years she’d an umbilical hernia – basically a hole in her belly – which she’d kept secret from everyone but her husband. She didn’t want to be examined by doctors, or to have to admit such an embarrassing, immodest complaint. In 1737, a loop of her intestine popped out through the hole. What the doctors should have done is push it back inside. What they actually did was to cut it off, destroying her digestive system. It took her ten days to die.

Another rather curious episode revolves around the missing letters in the courtier John Hervey’s letter book. Ancestor of the various frivolous Herveys of Ickworth House who are active upon today’s social scene, he was a likewise a great socialite, but nearly lost everything though his weakness for young men. Sodomy was still a crime still punishable by death. His relationship with his lover Ste Fox is well known to historians, but rather mysteriously letters from the period 1730-1732 have been cut out of his letter book, and his memoirs for those years are likewise missing. I argue that the excisions were made by a prudish, Victorian, Hervey, who wanted to cover up the evidence that his ancestor also had a second, secret and even more dangerous sexual relationship: with Frederick, the Prince of Wales.

Peter the Wild Boy has an incredible story; do you think the court showed compassion or cruelty when they decided to keep him as a type of ‘pet’?

Peter the Wild Boy had a heart-rending story: he was an autistic child found wandering in the woods near Hanover, and was brought to court as a kind of human pet. The courtiers loved the puzzle he presented: what did it mean to be human? Did Peter, who possessed no speech, possess a soul?  These questions were central to the Enlightenment.

Peter’s tutor, Dr John Arbuthnot, did his best to teach the Wild Boy to talk, but ‘he had a tendency to run away if not held by his coat’, and was beaten with a leather strap. He had to wear an iron collar (middle picture above) marked with his name.

You can’t help feeling sorry for Peter, but by the standards of the rest of the courtiers he had a happy ending. He did not end up crossed in love, or addicted to alcohol, but was sent to live on a farm in Berkhamstead where he passed the time in singing or stargazing.

The acceptance of mistresses at court is unimaginable by today’s standards. Do you think this role offered women more freedom, or was it just another type of constraint?

Ooh, interesting question. It’s tempting to see royal mistresses as feisty females, using their brains and wiles to get on in the world. And some of them did, very successfully. But you can also see, in the distressing story of Henrietta Howard, someone who was forced into the role of mistress. Her husband was a violent spendthrift, so she had to take a job as the queen’s servant in order to escape from him and to support herself. Then, to keep her job, she had to become the king’s mistress, which was clearly no joke. But Henrietta had a stroke of luck: an unexpected legacy allowed her to leave both her first husband and her royal lover, and to get married a second time to the true love of her life.

The next king after George II (George III) was determined never to have mistresses like his predecessor, because he thought that princes fallen into female hands ‘make miserable figures’. Morally he may have been correct, but women were much less influential at his court, and their voices less clearly heard.

A Fact Sheet on the Curious World of the Georgian Court

The Georgian royal household was staggeringly vast and complicated. The highest ranking of its members, the courtiers proper, were the ladies and gentlemen in waiting. These noblemen and women were glad to serve the king and queen in even quite menial ways because of the honour involved. Henrietta Howard, for example, had to hold the basin into which the queen spat while cleaning her teeth.

Beneath these top courtiers were about 950 other servants, organised into a byzantine web of departments ranging from hair-dressing to rat-catching, and extending right down to the four ‘necessary women’ who cleaned the palace and emptied the ‘necessaries’ or chamber-pots.

What did you wear at court?

If you were a lady, you had to wear the court uniform: the ‘mantua’. A coat-like dress spread out sideways over immensely wide hoops, this formal court dress became trapped in a fashion time warp when the rest of the world moved on. Tightly-laced, uncomfortable, and immensely heavy because of the silver thread, the skirts got wider and wider as the eighteenth century went on. Gentlemen wore a wig, an embroidered suit and a sword, and under their elbows they carried a flat, unwearable version of a hat. Because you had to bare your head in front of the king, no one wore real hats at court.

How do you walk in a dress like this?

It’s quite hard to walk in a mantua – the whalebone hoops force you to take tiny steps, and you have to go through doors sideways. (Grand palace doorways are just the right width to accommodate the hooped skirts.) Because of their tiny steps people said court ladies looked like they rolled about on wheels. Ladies in waiting weren’t allowed to sit down, or to fold their arms, and leave the royal presence they had to curtsey three times then back out of the room. Your dancing master trained you how to do all this.

How do you get about town?

Travelling by sedan chair, you would fold up your whalebone hoops on each side: ladies were described as looking like strange winged insects. This reveals everything underneath, and Georgian ladies didn’t wear underpants (not invented yet). But they didn’t mind what their footmen saw.  You also had to tilt your head back and remain motionless so the roof didn’t squash your piled-up hair.

How do you go to the loo in a dress like this?

Easier than it looks, as you weren’t wearing knickers. You would either squat over a chamberpot, or use a ‘bourdaloue’: a little jug like a gravy boat that you clenched between your thighs. However, if the queen didn’t grant you permission to go, you just had to try to hold on. Once, one of Queen Caroline’s ladies couldn’t wait, and a humiliating pool of urine crept out from under her skirt and ‘threatened the shoes of bystanders’.

What messages can you signal with your fan?

Most people think that the secret language of the fan – ‘beware, my husband approaches’, ‘you are cruel’, ‘don’t forget me’, etc. – is a Victorian invention. But I believe it was already in place in the 1720s. According to the language of the fan, the ladies painted by William Kent on the staircase at the Kensington Palace are all saying variations of the same thing: ‘I am married’, ‘I wish to get rid of you’ or just plain ‘no’. Either this is a very strange coincidence, or else William Kent was playing a joke in depicting all these ravishing ladies making such cruel denials.

Q & A on Historic Royal Palaces and life as its Chief Curator

What is Historic Royal Palaces and what is your job?

Historic Royal Palaces is the independent charity which looks after the five unoccupied royal palaces in London: Hampton Court, The Tower of London, the state apartments at Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. We get no money from the Royal Family or the government, so we’re really grateful to every single person who buys a ticket to visit us!  As well as having a day out, they’re supporting our conservation and education work.

My team of fifteen curators are based across our various sites. It’s our job to research the history of each palace, make new acquisitions for the collections, put together new displays, supervise archaeological digs, write guidebooks, give tours, make TV programmes: all the fun stuff.

That sounds interesting! And where do you actually work?

My main office is at Hampton Court Palace, in what used to be a courtier’s apartment. It’s up a spiral staircase of fifty-one steps off Chapel Court, and it’s just like Hogwarts. My room is full of ‘resting’ exhibits, including a famous stuffed raven from the Tower of London called Black Jack. He was killed by the sound of the cannons going off at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1851.

During the course of a week I usually visit the Tower of London or Kensington Palace as well. We’ve got a big project going on at Kensington at the moment, because the whole place needs opening up and re-presenting. That’ll be finished shortly; in the meantime we’re having an exhibition of eighteenth-century court dress.

And how did you become a curator?

My father’s a scientist, and when I was sixteen I chose to study maths, chemistry and biology to please him. But I just wasn’t enjoying it, and I decided to follow my heart and change to history instead. Golly, my dad was cross. ‘You’ll never earn your living with a history degree!’ he said. So now I really enjoy thinking ‘Ha! I do’.

I did my history degree at Oxford, and while I was living in a fourteenth-century building there (New College) I got interested in historic architecture. My first job after leaving college was at a minor stately home called Milton Manor, where I worked in the archives and fed the llamas. After that I became the administrator of the Wind and Watermills Section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. This is a very august conservation charity that was founded by William Morris. Then I became Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings for English Heritage. I worked at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, putting together new exhibitions and doing research.

There I became rather obsessed with the character of the man who built the castle, the arch-Royalist Duke of Newcastle, whose interests were horses, women and architecture. He lost a vital battle in the English Civil War because he was sitting in his coach having a smoke at the wrong moment. I ended up writing about his life and houses in my book Cavalier (2007). When the job at Historic Royal Palaces came up I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do more. I’ve always had to work really hard, but you’ll hear no complaints from me: history is my vocation.

What TV programmes are you presenting during 2010?

First, in February, a half-hour programme for BBC1 South about King Alfred the Great. I present an assessment of his life kicking off from his jewel that survives in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Made in and around Winchester, capital of Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex, it’s part of the BBC’s festival called ‘A history of the world in 100 objects’.

Then in May, I’ll be appearing as a lead expert contributor for a Channel 4/The Smithsonian Channel documentary called The Curse of the Hope Diamond. I investigate the diamond’s theft, along with the rest of the French Crown Jewels, in 1792, and its subsequent possible ownership by George IV. I visit locations including the chateau of Versailles, the Grand-Meuble in the Place de la Concorde, the Musee Carnavalet, the British Library, Kensington Palace and the Wallace Collection in London.

Then, in the autumn, I’m presenting a series called If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, first on BBC4 and then on primetime BBC2. Four one-hour episodes will explore the history of the bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen.

– There’s more from Lucy at her website: www.lucyworsley.com.

Faber has just published Voices from the Grave, written by Ed Moloney and based on the testimonies of two senior figures in Northern Ireland’s long sectarian war, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine.  For many years Hughes was the close friend and brother-in-arms of Gerry Adams. Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA. Though no one believes him, the statements about him in this book are the first made by a republican central to the armed struggle, and Hughes’s account of his own part in the war is the first by a former leader of the IRA at the centre of the action. Until now silence and speculation has surrounded the leaders of the armed groups. Northern Ireland has had a purely political reconciliation accompanied by very little truth telling from those with blood on their hands.

Boston College years ago decided to fund a major series of interviews with former paramilitary leaders before too many of them passed away. They were encouraged to be frank; and to encourage honesty they were promised that nothing they said would be published before they died. Ervine died in 2007, Hughes a year later.

The book was eagerly awaited in Ireland, north and south. In one small bookshop-cum-newsagent in Andersonstown, the Republican working class estate in west Belfast, 85 copies were delivered at 8.30 on the day of the book’s release and were gone half an hour later. That pattern was repeated across the North of Ireland and throughout the south.

Ireland in the twentieth century was a place where the art of hiding crime and corruption in plain sight was brought to a very high level. And it demanded the willed blindness of those who couldn’t shoulder the consequences of seeing the truth and being forced to speak about it.

It was a common half serious threat – the last resort of a parent at wit’s end – that a child would be sent off to Artane or Daingean if they didn’t stop misbehaving. They were two of the ‘reformatories’ that everyone knew were hellholes, and that the people making them hellish were members of religious orders. But these grim oubliettes for the delinquent or orphan children of the poor were themselves immune to reform. Everyone could see, no one looked.

An Irish party leader and Taoiseach (prime minister), a modestly successful accountant before going into politics, was living by the early seventies the kind of life that Roman generals enjoyed after they’d plundered a province. He acquired a beautiful Georgian mansion with a 270-acre estate, a seriously large yacht, a string of racehorses, a private island off the coast of Kerry and a taste for very expensive old wine. He was tight with property developers, supermarket moguls, the big builders and their architects. Everyone saw what Charles Haughey was doing, but nobody dared look too closely. Writing about it could ruin your newspaper or your publisher and end your career.

The dogs in the street knew that Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy was a major figure on the IRA Army Council and in the South Armagh IRA, and that he ran a huge smuggling operation from his farm straddling the border with Northern Ireland, where crime and the armed struggle met. They also knew that Gerry Adams was the dominant personality in the IRA. Barking any of this aloud was a different matter.

As a young publisher, I was taught that staying away from Irish dogs that bark gives you one less headache in a profession already driven by anxiety. If the English libel laws are oppressive, the operation of essentially the same laws in Ireland is suffocating. The rich and powerful know they can intimidate journalists into cautious blandness. Much of the Irish Times, the best newspaper in the country, is written in an impenetrable language of court and tribunal reports, paraphrases of legal argument and studiedly careful allusion, with almost no explanation provided for the uninitiated of what is really going on. Meanwhile, paramilitary figures scan the index of every new book on the Ulster conflict while praying for a careless phrase that will allow them to sue.

Yet even the most cautious publisher has to get off the fence when what is hidden so publicly begins to become embarrassingly obvious, to stare you in the face. The first time I took such a step was when Fintan O’Toole began his vivid and scrupulous reports for the Irish Times on the so-called Beef Tribunal in the early nineties. This body was set up to investigate how one of Ireland’s then richest men, Larry Goodman, presided over a scam exporting substandard meat to Iraq. For this operation, which involved the detailed mislabelling of meat, Goodman was given incredibly generous export credit guarantees by the Fianna Fail government led by Charles Haughey. When Saddam Hussein failed to pay up, Goodman didn’t lose a penny. The question of who knew what was going on – who saw and bothered to register what they were looking at – was, as ever in Ireland, hotly contested. It was a huge political scandal, the first of many.

O’Toole was a brilliant essayist, cultural commentator and drama critic – his superb biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Johnston were yet to come – and sending him to cover this numbingly boring tribunal seemed like despatching James Wood to write about the inquiry into the third runway at Heathrow. But O’Toole had asked for this assignment: he saw its importance in exposing the way power and influence worked in Ireland. He wrote Meanwhile Back at the Ranch in a few months, a burning indictment of the system that had enabled the fraud.

I remember sitting at a dinner for the nominees of the Irish Times Literature Prizes beside Conor Brady, the then editor of the paper, who passionately admired Fintan’s work. When I mentioned that I was publishing the book – which touched on Haughey, his successor Albert Reynolds and other big fish in the stagnant pool of Irish power – Brady told me with great emphasis that I was taking a huge risk. ‘These are people who will spend a hundred pounds to take a penny off you’, he said. This was the received wisdom from the school of hard knocks. Few knew better how determined ‘these people’ could be. I spent some sleepless nights after that. Random House, for which I then worked, had an extreme aversion to libel risk.

But Fintan was very careful. Everything was sourced in evidence to the tribunal. A very clever lawyer who’s now a judge of the Irish Supreme Court read the manuscript for us as a pro-bono gesture to helping let more light into the murk. We published, the book became a best seller in Ireland and we waited for the legal letters. None came.

The second time I decided to step into an unsafe Irish area was in the tragic case of Eamon Collins. He was a low-level IRA man – the ‘intelligence officer’ of the Newry IRA – who had through his work engineered the murders of seven people. He had never pulled a trigger or planted a bomb, but he tracked targets and set them up. One of his victims was a colleague of his in the Customs Service, where he had his day job. Eamon had been arrested after other members of his unit had helped the South Armagh IRA in a mortar attack on Newry RUC station that killed nine officers. He was interrogated, manhandled a little, stressed and cracked. He talked and talked, and became briefly a supergrass, a pariah to the IRA. But then he was worked on patiently by those who came to visit him, and he withdrew his evidence. At his trial the judge, sitting without a jury, decided that the RUC evidence against him was tainted and the self-confessed conspirator in seven killings walked free.

Despite his change of heart, for most of his former comrades he was a ‘tout’, an informer, unreliable at best and at worst a traitor. He couldn’t take the ostracism. He had given his all, in his mind, for the cause of Irish freedom and now he was being treated like shit. So he started writing down what he had done, obsessive descriptions of his operations and his comrades, a weird mixture of gloating triumph, admiration for the hard men he had encountered – Eamon himself was a very small man with a desperate need to assert his toughness – and remorse for the people he had helped kill and bereave. He found his way to a TV production company and a diligent, patient researcher called Mick McGovern. They made a film, confessional and disturbing, and Eamon wanted to write a book with Mick’s help.

Until then no IRA man had given an honest, raw account of what his or her trade actually involved. Gerry Adams’s memoirs were masterpieces of sentimental obfuscation, and the novels of his cheery and ruthless sidekick Danny Morrison were even worse. Eamon Collins’s story was full of nauseating self-exculpation, self pity and bravado, but it was also relentlessly honest, packed with convincingly messy and squalid details about the stakeouts, the safe houses and weapons, and also about the cruel ineptitude of these part time guerrillas in a small northern town who couldn’t help fucking up: they killed a young boy in a bomb explosion because they gave inadequate warning, and a supposed RUC man who was in fact an elderly retired clerk. They occasionally got lucky, killing an actual armed policeman, narrowly missing a patrol of Royal Marines.

By the time Eamon found his way to me, two dozen publishers in these islands had turned him down. He was not a nice man. There was a demented, morally obtuse and childish quality about him, a lust for violence that came out even in his expressions of regret for what he had done. But he was driven to lay it all bare, and for me this was the first breath of truth about the reality of a dirty war from inside the group that was mainly responsible for prolonging it. Random House took a different view. The house was not yet the publisher by appointment to the court of Tony Blair, but by 1995 it was going that way, and sponsoring the memoirs of an unconvicted killer and terrorist would make for ‘very bad PR’, in the words of my otherwise supportive boss. And because Eamon was naming names, or barely disguised names, the cold lick of libel could be felt in all our discussions about the book.

Pressures like these, and the sheer boredom of working for a very large organization, made me move to Granta in 1995. Rea Hederman, the proprietor of Granta and the NYRB, had been a great newspaper editor in Mississippi and believed in publishing the truth and taking reasonable risks to achieve that aim. When Killing Rage was published, it was received pretty much as I’d hoped it would be, though we were denounced by Kevin Myers for pandering to obscenity. The obscenity was part of the point, and readers got it. The book has sold nearly 150,000 copies.

We were sued, but none of the libel claims amounted to anything significant, and it was possible to believe that one kind of Irish silence had been broken.

The book ultimately had a terrible outcome for its author. Republican writers attacked it, but none of Eamon’s revelations led to arrests or new trials. The ‘movement’, by then deep in the peace process, could treat the book as a work of ancient history and, as many of the principal actors in that process liked to say then and later, ‘move on’, with official amnesia intact. Eamon was less disposed to move.

He stayed put, against all advice, in the middle of a Republican estate in Newry, walking every day past graffiti denouncing him as a tout. He became something of a commentator for the newspapers. I think he thought that this public work and his successful book made him invulnerable. And he wanted to jerk the tail of the movement that he felt had betrayed him. When Tom Murphy sued the Sunday Times in 1998 over its claim that he was a member of the Army Council and Northern Command, among other things, Eamon gave evidence for the Times that he had met Murphy more than once in his capacity as an IRA leader. As he left the courtroom he called out ‘No hard feelings, Slab!’ Murphy lost his case, and at least half a million pounds. A few months later, after his family had been subjected to terrible bullying and derision for, Eamon Collins was stabbed to death as he walked his dogs early one winter morning on a quiet road outside Newry. No one has ever been charged with his murder.

Gerry Adams denied that the IRA had anything to do with his death, but in a chilling TV interview he declared that ‘that man’ (he refused to use Collins’s name) ‘had many enemies in many places’. This at least was true; and nearly all of them were in Adams’s party.

In the years since, much of what Irish people knew about their society has at last became sayable. Brave campaigners forced out the truth about the regime in the reformatories and Magdalene laundries and industrial schools. The sexual abuse of minors by men in positions of trust (not all of them priests) has become an international crisis for the Catholic Church. Charles Haughey, the great untouchable of Irish life, whose circle was considered to be so intricately mired in corruption that none of them would ever talk, had to endure in his final years seeing all his expensive linen being washed in public. Payoffs, kickbacks, overdrafts of half a million provided by compliant banks, enforced ‘donations’ from businessmen, money stuffed into brown envelopes: it was worse and more banal than anyone had ever imagined.

By then the Celtic Tiger was rampaging around the world. What started as a boom led by foreign technology companies and by EU investment seemed to promise a great new start for one of Europe’s most backward countries. That Beef Tribunal was such a big event, after all, because the export of cattle was still the country’s most important single industry in 1990. The Republic contained 3.5 million people and 8 million cattle. By 2000, young people had forgotten about emigration – their parents’ bad dream – and drank in bars staffed by Spanish and Polish immigrants.

A  different kind of hiding in plain sight now became obvious. Instead of investing in technology and education, those with access to capital embarked on a wild property boom that no sober economist should have viewed with anything other than alarm. Any naysayer was denounced as a traitor to the nation’s economic destiny. The government let the boom rip, refusing to regulate insane levels of debt and allowing banks to lend many times their capital to developers speculating on an unstoppable rise in property values.

Fintan O’Toole was one of the very few writers to challenge the official optimism, which had an almost North Korean tone, with paeans to the wisdom of the leaders and moguls. The wealth-creators were those with the capacity to innovate, to build and think big. You were not supposed to ask what was innovatory about a property bubble. When it burst, Fintan wrote Ship of Fools, a blistering polemic hammered out in an answering burst of creative anger. Even then, I had to listen to cautious Irish voices saying that Faber was being a little too brave for its own good. But there was little risk in telling the truth about this disaster. There was no hiding place for the reality of lost jobs, worthless building sites bought for €50 million an acre, the ghost estates built with tax breaks in desolate parts of Leitrim and Cavan.

Every other publisher who saw the proposal for the book turned down Voices from the Grave, as had happened with Killing Rage. The omertà of the ex-gunmen was again being matched by the caution of publishers. Whatever you say, say nothing: a Northern Irish mantra that has too often become a general rule of behaviour. Many publishers have in fact been very brave about publishing controversial Irish books, but sometimes there is a flinch away from trouble. I can understand this reluctance very well – who needs trouble, in this economic climate? -  but this seemed to me a potentially very important book, making it difficult for certain fictions to sustain themselves in Irish life. In that sense it may be historically significant. In its first week it entered the Irish bestseller list at no. 1, which does not happen very often. It will be interesting to see what effect the book has on our view of the Irish troubles and those who took part in them.