STILL a teenager when he started collecting people’s stories, Tomás Mac Conmara’s new book The Time of the Tans is backboned by many years of work. It’s an oral history of the War of Independence in Clare and he said the fact that he spent so long gathering the information and accounts at the core of the book, means The Time of the Tans means a lot to him. “I’d say it is the most important one at a personal level. Anything you do like that, in terms of publishing a book, you put a lot of years and time into it, and you should do so as a historian. But because it has been 20 years in the making, almost all of the people who I interviewed and who were good enough to share their memories with me have passed away. It’s very sad in one sense, but it was always my point, that they would be gone. Historian …
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