Joe Cahill, the rebel with a flat cap

When I was in school, revolutionaries were pictures in history books or on old people's walls: men with powdered wigs, big Fenian beards or fierce moustaches.

Others, clean-shaven and earnest, throttled by celluloid collars, had the air of clerks in drapery stores.

Can I help you into a new Ireland, sir? I'm sorry, madam, I'm afraid we only have it in green.

Then there were the pikemen, heroic statues in town squares. They ...