Nick Maxwell SAMUEL G. BECKTON Peter Lang £30 ISBN 9781803749891 REVIEWED BY Ivan Gibbons Ivan Gibbons is a former Director of Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. This book is a fantastic read—in the original sense of the word. In the tradition of counterfactual or alternative history, it is a fantasy asking a fundamental conjectural question. … Read more
JAMES QUINN UCD Press €30 ISBN 9781068502347 REVIEWED BY Timothy Murtagh Timothy Murtagh is a Research Fellow with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin. The literature on the 1798 rebellion is unusually crowded for an event that remains, for many readers, oddly elusive. Its narrative complexity, geographical fragmentation and moral ambiguity have … Read more
By Daragh Fitzgerald An American visitor to our shores recently asked me whether Catherine Connolly was Ireland’s first female president and was delightfully surprised to hear that three of our last four presidents have been women. While we still have a lot to do regarding the position of women in Irish society, that we have … Read more
St Comgall’s School, Falls Road, Belfast www.wherethetroublesbegan.com By Donal Fallon In August 1969, the Falls Road was described to readers of the New York Times: ‘At best, this is a dim Victorian district of redbrick row houses, second-class stores, cheap cafes and dowdy pubs. Today, the streets were littered with glass, stones and bricks. Shops, … Read more
RTÉ1, 29 December 2025, and RTÉ Player By Sylvie Kleinman ‘Daniel O’Connell almost single-handedly raised a nation from its knees, and forced Britain, the most powerful empire in the world … to grant the Irish people their democratic rights’ (our emphasis, as are all italics in quotations below). An arty map shows this empire—in 1886. … Read more