Man of No Property

'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 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 nGaedheal. Andrews describes the ambiance 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 ne 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.