On the border between dream and disillusionment

The Sky of Ireland is a captivating ballad written by Massimo Bubola and brought to fame by Fiorella Mannoia. It recounts the visual and chromatic splendor of the Irish land through evocative imagery. Line after line, the Irish sky is thus "an ocean of clouds and light" or "a swiftly moving carpet" or "a flock grazing in the sky." Finally, the Irish sky is metaphorically imagined as God playing the accordion and seemingly accompanying everyone, men and women, as they celebrate.

Reading and perhaps hearing these words sung, it's hard to imagine how painful Ireland's history was for long stretches, a nation subjected to harsh English rule from the sixteenth century onwards and only gaining independence after a long war in 1921. At the end of that conflict, however, some Irish provinces remained subject to Great Britain, and thus Northern Ireland was born, a borderland deeply divided between pro-English Protestants and Catholics determined to reunite with Ireland. The result was decades of fighting and a fratricidal war that lasted from 1968 to 1998.

A European war too often forgotten, the Northern Irish one, is brought to life in William Wall's thrilling novel The Liberty Tree (Aboca Edizioni, 2025, pp. 208, also available as an e-book), a book that begins in Southern Ireland in 1969. While man is preparing to land on the moon, two brothers, Liam Óg and Seán, live in a small coastal village.

Their childhood is characterized by freedom, a love of nature, and adventures on Cannavee Beach, where they discover a large tree washed ashore by the tides, a tree that becomes the focus of their fantasies and games. The coastal landscape, the sea, and the tree represent a safe haven for them, a place of imagination and freedom. They represent their limbo from the ugliness of the world, ugliness that the two young people sometimes overhear from their parents' conversations. The boys' father is, in fact, a journalist sent to cover events related to the Troubles (political violence in Northern Ireland), and through the news and their mother's letters, the boys begin to sense the tension sweeping the country. The encounter with Monica, a girl whose house was burned down during the clashes between Catholics and Protestants, brings Liam and Seán to a more direct confrontation with the violence of the adult world. Monica tells them about a conflict that previously seemed distant… As daily life unfolds between explorations and new friendships, the reality of the Irish Civil War becomes increasingly present, increasingly burdensome, and increasingly moving, forcing Liam Óg and Seán to reckon with the history and current events surrounding them. The Liberty Tree is thus a novel that combines poetic and melancholic elements with harsh historical reality, creating a vivid portrait of an era and a generation that straddles the line between dream and disillusionment. But it is also a splendid generational parable that captures the transition from childhood innocence to an awareness of the complexity of the world.