Interview: Diarmaid Ferriter may not be speaking literally when he says that what pleased him most, as he read back through the proof copy of his mammoth new history, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, was the index.
There's a great deal more to be proud of in its 800-odd pages, in its spirited voyage through the social, cultural and political landscape of 20th-century Ireland, from British rule to the dotcom boom, from tenements to tribunals, from rampant public drunkenness to . . . well, some things, it seems, take longer than a century to change.
Ferriter's exploration of modern Ireland combines fresh perspectives on key figures - Pearse, de Valera, Collins, McQuaid - with an openness to the stories of ordinary people from every decade, affording equal space to Ireland North and South, male and female, subdued and subversive.
But the index, it must be allowed, is impressive. "When I started going through it, I realised it lists an awful lot of subjects that would never have been dealt with in standard histories," says Ferriter. By standard histories, he elaborates, he's talking about books such as Joe Lee's Ireland 1912-85 and Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, both published in the late 1980s when Ferriter - now aged 33 - was just out of secondary school and beginning his studies in history.
These were seminal volumes, he says, "indispensable for history students in many ways", but they were written at a time when most of the the sources Ferriter availed of for his own research weren't yet released. And partly because of the emergence of new sources, and partly because of an interest more inclusive than academia might previously have allowed, Ferriter's emphasis and approach in writing the book were consciously different from those of Lee, Foster, and other important historians. "So much information was coming out, particularly at the end of the 1990s," he explains, "that I thought about fitting it into a different framework, about asking new questions, getting away from the standard political narratives that we already had."
After secondary school at St Benildus College in Kilmacud, Dublin, he went to University College Dublin, where he completed his PhD under Prof Mary Daly in 1996. He would describe himself, he says, as a social and cultural historian rather than as a political one. A glance through the index illustrates that poltics doesn't dominate the book: Anglo-Irish relations sit between Amnesty International and the Ansbacher operation; entries on Belfast come after Behan and before The Bell. The playwright quoted by every modern Irish historian, meanwhile - Brian Friel - has as his bedfellows Sigmund Freud and the Friendly Societies of the early 1900s. And the IRA finds itself neatly sandwiched between Irish introversion and the Iraqi beef trade.
It's a patchwork, but one with discreet seams; holding these diverse subjects together is a breadth of vision which Ferriter feels is the mark of his peers among younger Irish historians. "I think it's a tribute to that younger generation that I was able to draw on so much new research that's based on social history," he says. "I think, by the 1990s, the idea that you could begin to look at new organisations, or look from new perspectives, was something that came out very strongly. There's an awful lot of work being done there, as opposed to going over the old debates about the Anglo-Irish treaty, which were hugely relevant, but were getting quite tired."
Ferriter, who lectures at St Patrick's College, Dublin, has a number of works to his name; Mothers, Maidens and Myths: A History of the Irish Countrywomen's Association (1995), A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in 20th Century Ireland ( 1999) and Lovers of Liberty? Local Government in 20th Century Ireland (2001) .
Ferriter speaks rapidly, articulately, his accent undiluted Dublin; relaxed and open to every angle. His experience as a broadcaster is clear (he presented the historical radio series What If for RTÉ Radio 1 and is presenting a new series this autumn.)
At times, in fact, in his denim jacket and sipping a bottle of beer, Ferriter looks almost serenely at ease, which may have much to do with the fact that, after this interview, he has a new baby daughter to go home to; Enya arrived two days after the first edition of her father's new book was delivered by his publishers (Profile). After his wife, Sheila Maher, went into the maternity ward, he says, "the book was completely forgotten about", and remained so until now. Apart, that is, from the moment this morning when he put his copyinto the Moses basket beside Enya, one of his babies beside the other. "I wanted to take a photograph of the two of them," he says, the unabashed pride of every new father taking over from the studied modesty of every newly published author.
But there is one subject on which Ferriter's mellow tone becomes charged with an intensity that seems closer to anger. The book, he says early on, is "an attempt to stake a claim to a post- revisionist interpretation" of Irish history, and when we come around to a discussion of exactly what it is that this approach is designed to shake off, he slips into the grip of a passion, an argument with revisionism, which is clearly long held. "Remember when the Mountjoy 10 were taken out of Mountjoy prison a couple of years ago, and there was that question of reburial?" he asks. "And there was a lot of what we'd call the usual revisionists saying this was a glorification of murder and all that? Well, I thought that the response of people on the streets of Dublin to applaud [the 10] was an answer to whether or not the revisionism debate was dead. In the sense that here were people who, particularly post-ceasefire in Northern Ireland and all that, were basically saying that these people gave their lives for the cause of Irish freedom, to use a contentious phrase that I don't have a problem with. We're applauding them for what they did, which doesn't mean that we approve of violence now, that we are fellow travellers with the Provos. That, for me, marked a huge kind of maturity in some respects."
Ferriter's quarrel with revisionism - though he's anxious to say he thinks the whole debate was "overblown", in any case - stems from the curbs he perceives it to have placed on the ambitions of young historians; while it reigned in the 1980s, it painted "a morality tale of Irish history, it was black or white, it was violent or not violent, and if you did try to approach some issues, to take halos away from some people, you were immediately accused of being a revisionist".
But so many questions, he argues, demand to be asked, and a move beyond revisionism is the only way to ask them. "The idea that we could go around in circles, debating whether the War of Independence was justifiable or necessary," he almost spits. "And I think one of the things that was neglected was that there was never enough emphasis on Britain's failure to understand, or to know, Ireland. There were an awful lot of people making serious policy decisions before Independence who knew nothing about Ireland and were blinded by their own prejudices and their own upbringing in terms of how Ireland was viewed. So there was more of a focus on what we were doing to each other or how we viewed each other within Ireland. And now there is much more of an emphasis on understanding, say, unionist culture, the cultural priorities and so on, rather than just the Ulster unionist political machine."
What enables these broader brushstrokes is not just an attitude that admits subjects not previously considered worthy of historical endeavour, but the wealth of material now available to researchers. Apart from the mass of State papers now released under the 30-year rule, the main political parties have now made their archives available.
And of invaluable importance, he feels, are the files released just last year from the Bureau of Military History, almost 2,000 statements taken from participants in the revolutionary events of 1913-21. Their impact on his own book is profound; these are the ordinary voices that fuel its arguments with such conviction. "You're getting, in them, the rank and file of volunteers, men and women, and it just gives you this extraordinary cross-section of experiences," says Ferriter. "And, I suppose, the youth of them, and the passion of them, and the idealism of them . . ."
Ferriter's survey of the rest of the century is fleshed out with voices of similar frankness - from sources that historians have previously either discounted, or simply not had available to them. Memoirs of Irish childhood have been useful to him, as have papers from the former department of local government (now the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government); the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, the archives of organisations such as the Irish Countrywomen's Association or the Irish Housewives' Association, and cultural journals such as The Bell, Studies and The Furrow.
Journalism, particularly from the 1960s on, provides a constant reference point, and he has no qualms about drawing on works of fiction, on poetry and drama to support his arguments - authors from Canon Sheehan to Colm Tóíbín (with whom he wrote The Irish Famine: A Documentary in 2001) weave through the narrative, with John McGahern's work seeming to serve as a measure of the century.
"I think one of the points I was making in the book is that there hasn't been enough humanity in the writing of history," he says. "In terms of taking account of the experiences of people. And if you want to do that, you have to draw on other disciplines, if you're a historian. You can be purist about it, and say, I'm only going to look at official State papers. Or, I'm only going to go into the archives of organisations that I know have papers. But you do have to broaden your mind and look at the kind of totality of experiences, and some of the stuff you might be a bit dubious about. But it's better to look at as much of it as you can, and then begin to discern what's good and what's not." History, he says, "is not an exact science".