MORAN, the embittered, patriarchal father in John McGahern's sombre masterpiece Amongst Women (1990), considers the past as he waits for death. Central to his memories are the events of the War of Independence and the part he played in them. He does not glorify those years. It is obvious their hatreds and resentments have been eating away at his should for years. The family has gathered for a revival of a lapsed holiday, Monaghan Day, a gesture carefully planned by his grown daughters and intended to please him. Their kindness does not go unnoticed by Moran: "As if he suddenly wanted to return the girls' favour on this Monaghan Day, he spoke to them - openly about the war for the first time in their lives: `The English didn't seem to know right what they were doing. l think they were just going through the motions of what had worked before . . .'"

Cautioning them against the folly of mythologising his side's performance in the war, he continues: "Don't let anybody fool you. We didn't shoot at women and children like the Tans but we were a bunch of killers. We got very good but there was hardly a week when some of us wasn't killed. Of the 22 men in the original column, only seven were alive at the Truce. We were never sure we'd be alive from one day to the next. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for a whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put flowers on the ground.

"What did we get for it? A country, if you'd believe them. Some of our own Johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishman. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing is a cod."

That war, of course, was followed by an even more vicious one. Traces of all the hatreds and resentments which have been so influential in the shaping of modern Ireland persist. In exploring the same period for his persuasive new book, 1922 - The Birth of Irish Democracy, Tom Garvin, Professor of Politics at University College Dublin, recalls being "horrified by the intensity of the hatreds, or possibly the angers. l certainly don't feel the bitterness of Moran - but then it's been two years since I read that novel . .. The thing that astonished me was both the hatreds of Dev and also the way in which many people deeply loved him. Some revered and loved him even while disagreeing with him.

"They loved him enough to be able to forgive him. There is an astonishing sentimentality about Collins, about the time. In fact, they're a very sentimental lot, at least in public. So different to the way we are now.

Currently working in the area of comparative nationalism, Garvin does not practice a trendily belligerent, score settling form of history. There are no demons in his book. "I hate that sort of stuff, I don't like this trend for demonising. I don't think the history of the past should be used to settle she disputes of the present. I'm just fascinated by the period.

"Old men I knew as a boy - dignified, quiet old men - turned out to have been involved in it. Tom McMahon lived across the road and I gather he once wanted to blow up the British parliament building but Collins persuaded him against it."

The contrasting personalities of Collins and de Valera epitomise the extremes of the time and the two emerge as three dimensional characters in his book. Garvin makes effective use of Collins's graphic, somewhat exasperated remark about de Valera as recalled by Michael Hayes: "How could one argue with a man who was always drawing lines and circles to explain the position; who, one day, drew a diagram (here Michael illustrated with pen and paper) saying take a point A, draw a straight line to point B, now three fourths of the way up the line take a point C. The straight line AB is the road to the Republic; C is where we have got to along the road, we cannot move any further along the straight road to our goal B; take a point out there, D (off the line AB). Now if we bend the line a bit from C to D then we can bend it a little further, to another point E and if we can bend it to CE that will get us around Cathal Brugha which is what we want!' How could you talk to a man like that?" Garvin sees the quote as one which clearly illustrates the practical man confronted by the theoretician.

Two other men have a powerful presence in Garvin's book - Liam Lynch and Cathal Brugha. Lynch's contempt for politicians and his utter rejection of Free State democracy emerges as one of the most powerful images in this book. Lynch's death is the event which Garvin believes finally ended the Civil War: "I think they gave up when he died, although many had wanted to surrender even much earlier. The loyalty was gone." Brugha, an older man, continued to work as a chandler: he was from an earlier generation, a dedicated part-timer, almost from another age, among professionals. "These guys were heroes" Garvin stresses.

Although he is not attempting formal pen portraits of the central protagonists, de Valera, Collins, Lynch and Brugha come alive in his brief, intense study of this relatively short period of time. of history.

Interviewing Tom Garvin is a thematic experience. The clarity and economy of his book does not prepare one for the man. "Lectures should never be clear, books should be clear. A lecture is work in progress," he says. His conversation tends towards frenetic stream of consciousness. No, it does not tend. It is stream of consciousness. "I know, I go all over the place" he agrees sympathetically, before dashing off on to another topic. "I'm interested in lots of things, things seem to hit me." Ideas, observations, memories, remembered conversations "I can't remember exactly what he said, it was a conversation which took place over 30 years ago. It's the mood you remember."

Sharp featured, fast talking, he alternates between impersonal expert and enthusiastic boy - the guy who always had all the answers; the clever fellow who became a professor. A self confessed optimist, he certainly acts younger than his years.

Does working with students confer a lasting,, sense of youth? "It used to, not any more.

POLITICS and history are closely linked and particularly so in Ireland. Our conversation swings round to outstanding academics who entered the political arena to either survive or fail dramatically few have dominated, possibly because politics in Ireland is geared more to the street fighter than to the intellectual.

Several of these historians turned politicians have written outstanding works of history. One of the finest is the late David Thornleys magisterial study, Jsaoc Butt (1964). At the mention of Thornley's name Garvin looks up at his shelves and immediately locates Thornley's book: "A terrific historian and destroyed by Irish politics." He refers to Maurice Manning's The Blueshirts (1972), which remains the standard study and was the first study of a collective movement to come out of the politics department in UCD: "His book on John Dillon will be out soon."

A scenes of articles led Garvin to this book - does he see the historian as detective or interpreter? "Interpreter: subjects like history, political science or sociology - have many houses - they all blend together. I'm interested in ideas and cultural movements. If you live in Ireland and grow up in a family like mine with associations with the west and the Irish language...

One of the elements of Garvin's book is the prominence he gives to the influence of local government, as an elementary yet often overlooked political reality. All democratic politics, remarked the late Tipp O'Neill, is local.

"The Civil War in Ireland has many echoes of the French Revolution, which was fought between those who believed the will of all should prevail over Rousseau's general will or the will of a virtuous minority - the will of all versus the general will, the will of those counted by heads, by votes."

In placing the Irish democratic political system as part of a general wave of democratisation occurring across Europe in the aftermath of the first World War, Garvin stresses that Ireland, despite its undeniable oddities, is not unique.

"Irish political ideas are, recognisably, local versions of European and American political ideas," he argues. "Irish constitutional traditions are heavily influenced not just by some British Isles parochialism but by American and continental European example as well. Furthermore, Ireland is not merely an ideological importer: Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Daniel O'Connell, James Connolly and Conor Cruise O'Brien all owe their political thought to the Irish experience, and have certainly contributed, in utterly different ways, to the general human debate on how human beings should be governed.

"Similarly, Irish republicanism and nationalism have clear classical, medieval and Enlightenment roots...

Allowing for his fascination with the period inspired by the survivors he met, Garvin describes his prevailing emotion throughout researching and writing his book as one of surprise and sympathy. The government's belated recent release of a 70 year backlog of official records has, he suggests, stimulated "an information revolution in the study of Irish politics".

Describing his book as "part of a very preliminary reconnaissance, focusing on the dramatic changes which took place in the years 1921-1923", he says it is "all part of a revolution". It is, he adds "a revolution which began in 1912, or further back, in 1906, or even earlier. I think the Irish revolution really started in 1858 with the Fenians. A few people decided to have a revolution, obviously inspired by the United Irishmen. But it Was the scandal of the Famine that got them going."

Garvin is a political scientist, not a historian. Why? "I think I was resisting the official style of academic history as received at the time, in the early 1960s. It was academic political history.

"To be fair, some social history was taught, but not too much. So history was about what powerful people did to each other, and to everyone else as well."

Why does - or, rather, did - the political dimension tend to dominate all other aspects of history? "I really don't know. But I suspect it was a lot to do with the fact that history in Ireland was informed by the old English tradition of imperial history and English history was about very powerful people who ran empires - the tea cup .school, we used to call it what Bismarck had for lunch, what Adolf Hitler had for lunch.

"Admittedly, modern European academic history developed in part as an attempt to glorify the newly invented nations of the new nation states. I'd have preferred to hear about the administrative system of the German war machine, or of the Gulag, or of the collective history of. for example, the United States in the 19th century. As well as the tea cup stuff - I liked that as well."

Political science may be traditionally perceived to be based on theories and ideas rather than specific events. But the boundaries between the two complimentary disciplines of history and political science are increasingly blurred and Garvin agrees that - he is essentially an historically minded political scientist.

"Why is it that there was an explosion in Irish academic publishing during the last 20 years and it is not being reflected in the review columns of Irish newspapers? There is a hunger for intellectual journalism which Irish newspapers are not supplying."

For all his clever, fragmented observations and his curious habit of swinging between theory, ideas and everyday comments, Garvin does avoid the role of the academic under siege. Yet he is acutely aware of the challenge to the humanities. "The loss of the classics curriculum in schools and in colleges has been a major cultural tragedy," he says. "The Catholic church defended the classics curriculum and then dumped it overnight. My generation is among the last to have learnt Latin and Greek at school.

"In UCD, the Catholic church had a very heavy influence on the social sciences with the exception of politics. This has faded over the last 10-15 years, but it does look like commercial and bureaucratic pressures are in danger of taking over. Instead of free intellectual inquiry, we are going to get applied research taking over from basic academic research."

Of his youth growing up in Dartry, he says, I knew the public libraries. I fell in the river, I don't know. The river on one side and the city on the other. I'm a townie. My life is very ordinary. A suburban life. This is the place I know. I don't know much about the country. Having read Todd Andrews, his boyhood in Terenure sounds a bit - like mine, 40 years on. Except he didn't write about being beaten up by the priests - I am sure he was everyone was - I was. It was traumatic."

UCD has been much of his life, aside from brief teaching periods in the States. "I first went from here to the States, to Georgia, in the late 1960s, right into the middle of Vietnam and a race war." His eye catches a paperback: "I love Iain S Banks, his science fiction, it's over the top. It can be self indulgent - `Look here, we've got a spaceship to land with 17 million people on board' - the whole idea of the galaxy being filled with people like Californians all rushing about the place and every now and then, a million people being exterminated - it's wild, great stuff." Garvin also admires the futuristic British novelist J G Ballard, one of contemporary fiction's most singular imaginations. "I love him. I first read him in the 1960s - just recently I read The Empire of the Sun. I love his fascination with machinery." Garvin recalls his own interest in second World War planes. "Oh and how about H. G. Wells? The War of the Worlds, fantastic stuff." He quotes from memory the famous opening sentence: "No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water." A happy smile of satisfaction wreathes his face. He bounces back in his chair. Still the cleverest boy in the class.

HE has held the chair of politics since 1991. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), the great French historian, thinker, politician and author of Democracy in America (1835) is Garvin's hero. It was de Tocqueville who, on being sent to the United States in the 1830s to study in his role as a magistrate - the penal system, became interested in the complex question of the liberal society. De Tocqueville set out to examine the image of democracy "in order", he explained, "to learn what we have to fear and to hope from its progress". Garvin refers to Democracy in America as "an absolute masterpiece, one of the great, great books". Later, he adds, "Wise old Alexis, he congratulated Gobineau on his book about racial theories and suggested he not translate into German because our friends on the other side of the Rhine might take your theories literally. In the light of what happened, it is a real prophet. He knew that democracy was coming, even to France and in America - he saw America as the tyranny of the majority."

Fiction rather than de Tocqueville's writings or history in general dominated Garvin's reading as a schoolboy at Belvedere. "It was science fiction even then. I also read Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, oh - crowds of people. Huxley, Waugh - everything except Brideshead Revisited. Frank O'Connor, a hero of mine, I'd love to have met him. I like Kingsley Amis, Joseph Heller. You know Collins read H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, Galsworthy, Conan Doyle? They were the trendy novelists of his day."

Does the character of Collins appeal to him? "No. Too physical, rugger bugger. I certainly would not have disliked him. I'd say he was a bully, enormously attractive.". Legalism preoccupied the approach of the Treatyites, while a romantic moralism dominated the minds of their opponents. Although Garvin says he has "no strong perception of de Valera" he does refer in his book to de Valera's tendency to keep his intellect private and his rhetoric public. How then did he arrive at a distinction as precise as this? "I think the Dev folklore backs it up. He was a man who never allowed his left hand to know what his right was doing." Of the two, Garvin asks rhetorically "Which would I prefer to go for a pint with Collins", adding, "As long as it's just a pint."

He completed an MA in politics in 1966, while working in the Civil Service, in the Department of Finance. However, he quickly realised he did not want to be a career civil servant. When he told his father he wanted to return to academic life, John Garvin's reaction resounded with an exasperated logic. "Don't go in there. You're not religious and you're not related to anyone."

"Implicit in my father's words, was `If you stay in the Irish civil service, it's fair, free and you'll go far,'" says Garvin.

Outside UCD's administration building, briefcase in hand, Garvin stands characteristically cheerful, edgy, a bit unpredictable. He strikes me as the sort of person who could begin a conversation on any subject - except of course, the countryside, wildlife or gardening.

"Ireland is getting better," he says. As for University College Dublin - never the most aesthetically beautiful of campuses - much of its former rawness has been softened by maturing shrubs and trees, heavy foliage and multiplying planter boxes. With the ever present Belfield breeze buffeting the surface of the lake, Garvin gestures towards his surroundings. "It will be good. It will be a university city."