SOURCE: "A Patriot for Whom? Erskine Childers, a Very English Irishman," in History Today, Vol. 38, October, 1988, pp. 27-32.

In the following essay, Foster discusses Childers's tragic involvement in the Irish struggle for independence.

At least two books have been published called The Riddle of Erskine Childers and there will no doubt be more. Superficially, it is an inevitable title: the gung-ho junior imperialist from the heart of the English establishment, who published The Riddle of the Sands in 1903 to warn Britain of the strategic threat to her supremacy from Germany, ended his life in 1922 as an irreconcilable Irish republican, doing his best to sabotage the Anglo-Irish Treaty. His writing in the last year of his life took the form of violent and exalted propaganda for the Irregulars in the Civil War; the spy thriller had become real. He was shot by the Free State government—after a highly...