New Ways to Kill Your Father

Abstract

In 1969, two years after my father died, my mother, my sisters and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising called The Year of Liberty by Thomas Packenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where "our side", the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say facts) about the Rising, how the English had muskets whereas we just had pikes, how the English poured boiling ..