Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Getting Them Out
Coolacrease: the true story of the Pearson executions – an incident in the Irish War of Independence, by Paddy Heaney et al Aubane Historical Society, 470 pp, €20.00, ISBN: 978-1903497487 Since the publication in 1998 of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923, the experience of the Protestant community…
A Policeman’s Lot
The stereotype of the Irish cop was born in Boston, where being on the force in the latter half of the nineteenth century meant you were mostly concerned with protecting Brahmin property and cracking immigrant heads, a good portion of…
Getting and Spending
For centuries the climate dictated the way we made our living, the way we lived our lives. We are an indoor people. For centuries we made sense of ourselves and our lives by sitting around the fire telling stories. This…
Not So Dark
Here is Dowden’s description of Angola at the height of the civil war, in the 1980s: “a marxist regime armed by the Soviet Union and protected by Cuban troops is kept going by revenues from oil extracted by American oil…
Riddled With Light
O Death, you have taken Muircheartach from us, / far too late in everyone’s opinion; / snatch Tadhg quickly also to the graveyard, / those two should never be separated … / Hell is not punishment enough for him, /…
The Government They Deserved?
However what was required was not direct political action so much as a change of consciousness in the minds of Italians. As such, Gobetti’s project was to be a long-term, gradual one which aimed to defeat fascism not for his…
Discordant Notes
Haven’t all local places got uniqueness, by definition, and hasn’t the whole island got “history”, sharing as the western seaboard does, for instance, the Famine? But then Wexford, Drogheda and Co Antrim could be said to have plenty of history…
Rough Justice
Leitrim was fond of money: in his office at Lough Rynn he was Midas in his counting house … He took over an encumbered estate and debts of about £55,000. At his death his gross rental income was about £30,000…
The Harvest In
O’Driscoll raises the matter of the many conferences, launches, conferrings and other public events in which Heaney participates. “Ongoing civic service, I suppose,” Heaney responds … Life has been good to him in many ways; poetry has enriched his existence…
Fallen Skies
Social partnership has been the only real government achievement of recent times and even this can be read – particularly under Ahern – as an expression of the pervasive electorally-oriented politics of emollience. In general, Irish politicians have declined the…
The High Road
Chief among them is Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), a book – length sequence which can be read as an autobiographical account of a breakdown and as a response to the chaotic and destructive emergence of the new state.These poems’…
Everything He Hated
Like Swift and Twain, Roth is aesthetically propelled by anger; it supplies the energy needed for the massive, self-imposed task of dissecting, novel after novel, the suffocating paradoxes of twentieth-century America. Like Lenny Bruce, Roth in his early work used…