How the Irish Public Record Office burned

A blog post from John Grenham reviews a book by Michael Farmer, The Battle of the Four Courts: the first three days of the Irish Civil War which he assesses as a meticulous work of micro-history that assembles the story hour-by-hour  weighing maps and photographs against eye-witness accounts to reconstruct an utterly convincing version of what happened.

He concludes "The simple fact is that neither side cared a damn about the records. They were young men prepared to kill or die for their beliefs about the future. What did the past matter?"