The Easter Rising of 1916 has been so effectively revised that its seventy-fifth anniversary is a matter of official embarrassment. Nevertheless, the revisionists are now themselves more vulnerable to revision because their pseudo-scientific orthodoxy is so obviously tailored to match the prevailing political climate – especially in relation to the Northern crisis – that its claims to ‘objectivity’, to being ‘value-free’, have been abandoned as disguises no longer needed. Conor Cruise O’Brien has declared himself to be a unionist and, in that light, his writings can be understood as a polemic in favour of that position.