Book description
In the spring of 1924 I was released from internment where I had
been held for a year since the end of the Civil War in what was then
the Irish Free State. I was a little over twenty-two years of age.' So
begins this extraordinary memoir, in which C. S. ('Todd') Andrews
gives a personal history of his varied and distinguished career in
public service to the Irish state. The early chapters cover what were,
for Andrews and his fellow republicans, difficult years under the
government of Cumann na nGeadheal. Andrews describes the ambience of
University College Dublin, where he resumed his studies after the end
of the Troubles, and writes with insight and sensitivity of the
founding of Fianna Fail, which forced anti-Treaty republicans to
decide whether to accept the established political order. Andrews
chose the constitutional path, and after Fianna Fail came to power in
1932 his working life, which had begun modestly in the Irish Tourist
Association and the ESB, was transformed by his appointment as
managing director of the Turf Development Board, later Bord na Mona.
This visionary enterprise, undertaken in the face of ridicule from
those who saw the bogs as an irremediable symbol of backwardness, was
immensely successful, and Andrews gave to it nearly three decades in
the prime of his life. Andrews' work for Bord na Mona, and later as
chairman of CIE and RTE, brought him into daily contact with Eamon de
Valera, Sean Lemass and the other leading political figures of
mid-century Ireland, and Andrews writes of these men with an
analytical and often acerbic eye. He makes a spirited defence of his
closure of uneconomic railway lines and of his handling of labour
disputes during his tenure at CIE, and rites bitterly of what he saw
as the betrayal of Fianna Fail's idealistic origins by those who
sought to enrich the party by cultivating big business. Man of No
Property is the plain-spoken, often controversial testament of a
singular figure in twentieth-century Irish life, and is necessary
reading for anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of the Irish
state in its first half-century. 'The total autobiography adds up to a
sharp and penetrating study of the nature of our society. Reading it
forces one to stand up and look around.'- The Irish Times. 'One of the
most riveting books I've read for years.'- Sunday Independent.
'Andrews has become an important historical figure, firstly because of
his public life ... A second reason for his historical importance is
his two memoirs, Dublin Made Me and Man of No Property. They are
easily the most complete and truthful accounts of what it was like to
have experienced that extraordinary epoch in Irish history; nothing
else quite like them has survived elsewhere.'- Tom Garvin, Magill
