Our front cover features a painting of the Lancaster bomber—VN-Z ME798—crewed by Irish airman Sergeant P.B. McRann, the subject of a piece of family history detective work by Desmond Gibney on pp 44–6. For male readers of a certain age the image will surely conjure up nostalgic memories, particularly olfactory ones, of Airfix model-making. But of course it was also an instrument of death and destruction, including, in this case, of McRann himself and the entire crew.
Death and destruction, particularly of civilians, is the subject of our Big Book review (pp 60–1) by Fintan Lane of Cormac Ó Gráda’s The hidden victims: civilian casualties of the two world wars. Depressingly, the author has doubled previous estimates; genocide was an outcome of both wars, and human-made famine was the biggest killer. The parallels with the present situation in Gaza cannot be avoided: as well as the death and destruction wrought by conventional warfare, the supply of food has now been weaponised in an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
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The 1,000th anniversary of the birth of William the Conquerer, 2027, has been designated ‘the Year of the Normans’ and has already provoked some controversy in Ireland (to which we shall return). Ireland was the last of the French Norman conquests (albeit by then self-described as ‘English’), which included England, Sicily and the Crusader states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem, the latter demonstrating that in the longue durée of history a confessional state in the Middle East backed by Western military power is nothing new.
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And we haven’t forgotten about another milestone anniversary—the 250th of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, who will be the subject of a History Ireland Hedge School—The Liberator reassessed—in Glasnevin Cemetery visitor centre at 4.30pm on Wednesday 30 July (details on p. 71).
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