I found Catholicism in Ireland quite distasteful, but I knew that some Catholics had reached out to wider things in the Catholic community. And I was really interested in those patterns, those imaginative patterns that came there, and this was something that I was struggling about internally myself. The next book had to do with Irish history, it's called Parnell and His Party. My grandfather had been a member of Parnell's party, the party founded by Parnell, but when the party split in 1891 he was one of those who went against Parnell, which came to be regarded retrospectively by Irish nationals as very much the wrong side. You are demanding of your readers that they think differently, that they think courageously about some of the important issues of our time.
Impact is very hard to assess.
All you know about are reactions. I expected a lot of negative reactions to my critique of aspects of Irish nationalism. I got a fiercely negative set of reactions, of course, from sympathizers with Sinn Fein and the IRA, that is to say, people who are so nationalist that they were prepared to kill for nationalist objectives. But then I got a lot of other reactions from people who were interested in what I was saying. These include a number of other writers who have agreed that they were in some ways influenced by me, in other ways fought off that influence.