Britain and Ireland Begin
Two studies of early British history and prehistory and of a roughly equivalent period in Ireland leave the reader in no doubt as to how closely interrelated the two countries are, and indeed have been from time immemorial.
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The Insurrectionist
1916 leader Sean Mac Diarmada despised Ireland’s involvement in the British parliamentary tradition. He believed that an uprising, and the likely self-sacrifice of its leaders, would lead Ireland to independent nationhood.
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The Big Smoke
A comprehensive new study of Ireland’s capital bridges social and cultural, political, economic, educational, administrative, demographic, maritime, infrastructural and architectural histories of the city and deals as easily with the world of the locked out and the urban poor as…
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Out on the Edge
The people known as the Normans flourished in many parts of Europe in the early centuries of the second millennium AD. Their castles and fortifications are found as far west as Ireland, as far south as southern Italy and Sicily…
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A Month in the Summer
In the midsummer of 1914, Ireland’s nationalist and unionist communities were on a collision course over developments affecting the future government of Ireland. Just as the crisis was about to materialise in violence, it was averted – for the moment…
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Who Fears to Speak of ’99?
What would have happened if General Cornwallis had been sent to Ireland a year earlier? Certainly repression would have been less, though perhaps the revolution would have happened anyway, though somewhat later, and while it would probably also have failed…
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A Crowded Stage, an Empty Room
Contrary to popular opinion, there has in fact been a working class Protestant contribution to culture in Northern Ireland. What is more problematic is a specifically Loyalist contribution, as the recent staging of a new play, Tartan, and surrounding events…
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The French Connections
Two new books of essays, one in English and one in French, and a study of Charles de Gaulle’s Irish antecedents reveal the many links, political, historical, cultural and artistic, between ourselves and our next-nearest neighbours.
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History: Discipline or Instrument?
Was professional history, based on dispassionate sifting and analysis of evidence, replaced after the 1960s in response to the developing Troubles by a public history more interested in reception than in method, which saw historians take on the role of…
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Response to Review
The author of Massacre in West Cork maintains that Gerard Murphy’s review contains many errors. The author, Barry Keane, also argues that the reviewer engages in crass speculation regarding his motives.