Irish Studies: A more accurate subtitle for this book would have been "The mind of a revolutionary". The mind of the revolution was formed by Pearse, Connolly and the Gaelic League.
The 1916 Rising was an IRB conspiracy, however, and as the late Prof F.X. Martin observed: ". . . if any single person is to be given credit for acting as stage manager of the drama enacted in Easter Week, it is Seán Mac Diarmada". Despite being crippled by polio, he was the only full-time political activist among the seven signatories of the Proclamation.
While he exaggerates in claiming to rescue Mac Diarmada from obscurity, Gerard MacAtasney is to be congratulated on producing an overdue, well-researched biography.
A conspirator is an elusive subject for the biographer. Few leave caches of letters like the Irish-American leader, John Devoy, did.
This biography comes to life with the return of Tom Clarke to Ireland at the end of 1907. He had survived 16 years in an English prison for his part in the dynamiting campaign of the 1880s. On release he went to the US and became an assistant to Devoy on the Gaelic American newspaper.
The old Fenian transformed Mac Diarmada's political outlook. After meeting Clarke, he saw Ireland's future through the eyes of a revolutionary. Henceforth, when travelling the country on behalf of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, he also recruited for the IRB. In 1915 he was imprisoned for four months for making a speech "calculated to discourage those present from joining the British army".
Following his release he became a habitué of Clarke's shop in Dublin, which police dismissed as "one ruffian visiting another".
In the fraught atmosphere leading up to the Rising, Bulmer Hobson was sidelined ruthlessly, and Eoin Mac Néill deceived. Denis McCullough, of Belfast, recalled an IRB meeting to elect a chairman of the Supreme Council. McCullough intended to propose Pearse. Mac Diarmada, sitting next to him, whispered: "Shut up . . . sure, we couldn't control the bloody man." Instead, Clarke and Mac Diarmada had McCullough installed as nominal president while they controlled the IRB executive.
On Easter Monday, Clarke handed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to Pearse, who read it out on the steps of the GPO.
Clarke and Mac Diarmada, the first and second signatories, beamed with satisfaction. After six days' fighting the insurgent leaders decided to lay down their arms on realising that the poor of Dublin would be slaughtered, too.
Detained in Richmond Barracks following the surrender, Mac Diarmada scribbled a note on the back of Clarke's letter to his wife, Kathleen Daly of Limerick: "I never felt so proud of the boys. 'Tis worth a life of suffering to be with them for one hour."
Illustrating Pearse's maxim that laughter is the crowning grace of heroes, Mac Diarmada forfeited his life gladly "that the Irish nation may live". His valedictory message ended with the Fenian mantra "God save Ireland".
Mac Diarmada, who was self-educated, used to meet his girlfriend, Min Ryan, on the steps of the National Library, before they went to Bewley's café together for coffee.
Her son, Prof Risteárd Mulcahy, provided access to 15 letters by Mac Diarmada. His biographer notes the irony of relying extensively on police reports in writing about someone whose watchword was secrecy.
Though agreeably illustrated, better editing would have tightened the narrative of this important book, while correcting such infelicities as "met with" and inaccuracies like describing Wolfe Tone as the "leader of the 1798 rebellion".
Maria Luddy's diarists were also flawed but heroic. During the Crimean War, 15 nuns from Ireland and Britain volunteered to nurse sick and wounded British soldiers. The diaries of three of the Irish Sisters of Mercy are extant.
"To live for the poor had been for many years the resolve of each heart," wrote Sr Aloysius Doyle in the best of those journals. The soldiers suffered terribly from wounds, disease and frostbite.
Underlining the monstrous folly of this war, linen uniforms were not replaced before the Crimean winter. As if there wasn't enough pain to endure, the sisters were sickened by the cries of an orderly being flogged. They attended to the spiritual and temporal needs of Catholic soldiers in the hospitals, but to the "corporal wants only" of Protestant troops.
Occasionally, Sr Joseph Croke is insightful: "Awakened last night by a rat in the bed . . . No bread for breakfast." A sister of the future archbishop of Cashel, her compassion did not extend to the Victorian icon, Florence Nightingale.
The leader of the nuns, Francis Bridgeman, was not prepared to accept Nightingale's authority, and much of the third diary is taken up with the hostilities - sustained by jealousy in a bitterly sectarian age - between those two formidable women.
The editor's annotations are exhaustive, but do we need, for instance, to be told who founded Islam?
Samuel Ferguson wrote not "to sweeten Ireland's wrong", pace Yeats, but to enlarge the Irish mind. Eve Patten, a lecturer in English at Trinity College, explores the complex ideological make-up of this influential 19th-century writer. Underlying his cultural politics - temporary diversions into Repeal, on the one hand, or hardline unionism on the other - was an enduring affiliation to traditions of civic virtue and patriotism. While ingratiating himself into the Dublin literary scene, he retained the proclivities of his Northern liberal heritage.
His flirtation with Young Ireland - although he never wrote for the Nation - was a protest against the process of centralisation under the Union.
The Dublin Castle administration was dominated by English bureaucrats, who lacked commitment to Ireland. Their catastrophic neglect reached its apogee during the Famine.
Symbolically, Ferguson's marriage to a scion of the Guinness family in August 1848 coincided with the dispersal of his Young Ireland associates. Ultimately, his quest for cultural unity foundered in the slough of Protestant insecurity and Catholic assertiveness.
Seán Mac Diarmada: the Mind of the Revolution, By Gerard MacAtasney, Drumlin Publications, 224pp, €20
The Crimean Journals of the Sisters of Mercy, 1854-56, Edited by Maria Luddy, Four Courts Press, 260pp, €55
Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of 19th-century Ireland, By Eve Patten, Four Courts Press, 207pp, €55
Brendan Ó Cathaoir is a historian and an Irish Times journalist