The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Insurrection, another of O’Flaherty’s novels set against the backdrop of Irish history. The history in this case is the 1916 Easter Rising, a spectacular failure from the military point of view but which had profound political repercussions later on. O’Flaherty focuses his story on a small group of people involved in the rising – a small unit sent to defend the Dublin-Dun Laoghaire road from the expected British troops, as well as the mother of one of the unit members. O’Flaherty shows how the rising was both badly planned and badly executed and doomed to failure early on but many brave men stuck it out, knowing that things were not going well. It is certainly not a great work but still worthwhile, whether you are interested in Irish history or not.