History!: Reading the Easter Rising takes a multifaceted look, through documents, poems, songs, eye-witness stories etc.,(which Eamon has drawn from various sources), at not only the Rising itself but at its violent aftermaths—the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War–bringing all to life, we hope, through the simple but directly affecting medium of the human voice. We intend neither simple celebration nor criticism, but rather to offer a view, our view, on it all.

Although he has called the play History!: Reading the Easter Rising, Eamon always says if he introduces that he is no historian. Yet, he says, he was always intrigued by a statement in Ulysses–in a conversation about Ireland/ England relations between Stephen Dedalus and the Englishman Haines, in which Haines says “It seems History is to blame.” That, he thinks, may have set him off.