MacBride’s Wars

Charting one of the most romantic and tragic love triangles of the early twentieth century


What Major John MacBride learns when leading the Irish Brigade in the Second Anglo-Boer War against the British Empire isn’t much help when fighting his estranged wife in the French courts. She is the beloved muse of Ireland’s leading poet and so charismatic that militant Irish nationalists think she is worth a platoon of heavy dragoons in Ireland’s fight for freedom.


Back in Ireland, MacBride’s involvement in that fight moves the same poet to say that he has transformed from a drunken, vainglorious lout to a major player in the ‘terrible beauty’ of the 1916 Easter Rising.


This is a rollicking story of a life-long struggle against an implacable foe with a tragic love story thrown in.


Dermod Judge is an Irish author currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s had a varied career in storytelling across theatre and film – including in broadcasting, writing, designing, directing and filmmaking. Dermod is an international award-winning filmmaker, script editor and international lecturer on storytelling and filmmaking. He has already published three Irish-based novels with The Book Guild – Clash, Two Jam Jars for the Manor and Bopping in Ballymalloy. 


Dermod says, “After a lifetime in the media, most of it as a professional writer, I felt the need to write only books and this is my fourth. I have always considered the Anglo-Boer wars as the first freedom struggles of the modern era and deserving of much description and comment. The fact that many Irish patriots who took up arms directly against the British empire, gained their experience while fighting for the Boers in South Africa should be acknowledged.”