The transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmuid Ferritery - your opinion?

Thanks OP, you've reminded me what I was going to buy and read over Christmas.

One thing I would suggest is that it's easy to fall into the trap of intepreting history from today's standpoint.

I am genuinely non-political (no affiliation to any party) but how can Ferriter be described as a Historian when his bias for certain political figures is so VERY heavy in his writings. What happened to balance... Sadly, his is not a history of Ireland, but a heavily weighted version of same!

As miserable as the history of the new state was after independence - crippled by overt Roman Catholic social control, a counter revolutionary crack down on republicanism, a bitter hatred for Britain, a lack of any meaningful attempt to engage with the Northern Ireland, social, cultural and political isolationism from the wider world, mass poverty and emigration - things could have been a whole lot worse. De Valera's steered a middle way between the radical socialist republicanism of the IRA and the right wing extremism of the likes of the Blueshirts in the 1930s which probably saved us from a renewed civil war and either a fascist style or communist dictatorship.
The most patriotic of the War of Independence and Civil War period killed each other or else left the country when they faced the adult reality of post independence rather than the Celtic mystical utopia they dreamed of.
Later Ireland's neutrality during World War 2 was motivated by both anti-British sentiment more than practical military reality.
Early on in the war when Hitler seemed about to defeat the British neutrality was a wise course but after 1943-1944 when Nazi Germany was clearly on the ropes and America and the Soviets were leading the war effort with Britain very much as a junior partner, De Valera should have declared war on Nazi Germany. We would not have been asked to send very many troops much like Brazil and other countries who only send small token forces and the war would not have reached these shores at that stage in the war.
De Valera's expressions of sympathy upon the death of Hitler was ludicrously wrongheaded.
Many of our public figures were pro-Nazi and indeed many Nazis found refuge in Ireland after the war while thousands of men who fought bravely against the Nazis and the Japanese were considered traitors.
In the 1950s when Europe rapidly recovered Ireland was needlessly left behind until we belatedly modernized and opened up our economy in the 1960s.
If we had leaders with more vision between the 1920s and 1960s the North need not have been left to fester.
By the time Lemass met Terence O'Neill an explosion in Northern Ireland was all but inevitable.
During the Troubles in the south we had political leaders like Haughey who were too hardline republican or like Fitzgerald who were too Anglophile and therefore the south was reduced to an irrelevance during the 1970s when the six counties were torn apart.
However the conflict might easily have spilled over the border and led to a wider war between Ireland and Britain which would have led to military occupation of the whole of the island.
The greed of the Celtic Tiger has done immense damage to our society while the North has simply been parked although peace is most welcome.
We still have a divided politics since the Civil War and the Troubles, we have institutions that badly need to be reformed and we have a tired apathetic public who seem to have a fatalistic attitude about the future.
Once again our best and brightest are leaving in droves and the stage is still being left to the gombeen men.

Unlike many histories of twentieth-century Ireland, which often focus exclusively on political history, Ferriter's Transformation is very good on social history, such as poverty, unemployment, women etc.
However, he doesn't have a thesis or an argument. Therefore, he presents history as 'one damn thing after another' (to quote Arnold Toynbee) in shopping-list style: this happened, then this, then this etc. I found that this made the book a bit of a struggle to read at times. Moreover, there's no conclusion, no attempt to make sense of all the 'damn things'. This seems to be Ferriter's modus operandi as he does the same thing in his book Occasions of Sin (2009).
Nevertheless, he uncovers some good material so I'll probably read his new book Ambiguous Republic.