Nick Maxwell

Northern Nationalism: nationalist politics, partition and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland 1890-1940 Eamon Phoenix (Ulster Historical Foundation, £14.95)

Reviewed by Michael Farrell ‘You had opponents willing to co-operate… We were willing to help…[but] you went on the old political lines, fostering hatreds, keeping one third of the population as if they were pariahs…and relying on those religious differences and difficulties so that you could remain in office for ever’. Joe Devlin, the northern … Read more

British High Politics and Nationalist Ireland, Margaret O’Callaghan and Ideology and the Irish Question, Paul Bew

British High Politics and Nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Foster and BalfourMargaret O’Callaghan(Cork University Press, £30hb, £15.95pb) Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916Paul Bew (Clarendon Press, £20) Reviewed by Martin Mansergh In Ireland, history is ideology. Over the last few decades, historians of different tendencies have sought … Read more

News stories

International Conference on Hunger An international conference on hunger, featuring nearly fifty speakers—including Homi K. Bhabha, Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane, among many others—will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine on 19 and 20 May 1995, at New York University’s Loeb Student Center. Sponsored by the Glucksman Ireland House, a centre for Irish … Read more

Personal narratives as historical sources: the journal of Elizabeth Smith 1840-1850

Janet K. TeBrake     Among the many resources available for historical study and research on nineteenth-century Ireland are the numerous personal narratives by women, the most common form of writing women have traditionally produced. One of the earliest and best known of the genre is the diary of Mary Leadbetter. Another noteworthy example is … Read more

‘A Star Chamber affair’: the death of Timothy Coughlan

Gabriel Doherty   It is a dry, frosty January night in Dublin. Suddenly the silence of a suburban street is shattered by the sound of automatic gunfire: it appears that an IRA man has been shot dead while attempting to assassinate a police detective as he returns home from work. However, the situation turns more … Read more