Helping Spain
‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism […]
Looking for an Enemy
Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834 The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians, […]
The Evaporation of Hatred
In May 1909, Leonard Dunning, the head constable of Liverpool, wrote to the Home Office in London to warn that some very serious disturbances were looming in the city. Dunning had previously spent thirteen years in the Royal Irish Constabulary and, as he reminded Whitehall, ‘had a good deal of experience of troubles between Orangemen […]
Power and the Polis
In much of the ancient world a city’s emblem was its walls. ‘O Ur-shanabi,’ proclaims the hero in the last lines of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!’ Realising he cannot escape death, Gilgamesh takes comfort knowing the city walls of Uruk will be his legacy. The Old […]
Written on Water
In a moving obituary in New Left Review, the great sociologist Stuart Hall noted Raphael Samuel’s talent for ‘quarrying’ lives and historical themes. Inadvertently or not, in employing this verb – it recurs three times in the relatively short text – Hall evokes one of his friend, comrade and colleague’s short studies, ‘Headington Quarry: Recording […]
The Gunman’s Shadow
On January 7th, 1922, at the end of thirteen days of extraordinary debate about whether to endorse the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Dáil Éireann voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to do so. Éamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, who had led the arguments against it, said: I would like my last word here to be […]
Keynes in Dublin
I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect Free Trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. These are the opening words of a lecture delivered by the economist John Maynard Keynes in Dublin in April 1933. […]
Rational Creatures
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s […]
The Tale of a Tiger
Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O’Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one […]
Whatever you say, say nothing
Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working […]