Nick Maxwell Owen McGee Merrion Press €25.19 ISBN 9781785370090 Reviewed by Patrick Maume This fascinating and exasperating book attempts two tasks: to produce a professional study of Arthur Griffith—filling one of the major gaps in our understanding of twentieth-century Ireland—and to offer a wholesale reconceptualisation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish history. McGee approaches Griffith as … Read more
The Journal of the Old Athlone Society, Vol. III, No. 10 (2015) (Athlone, €22 pb, 194pp). Diarmuid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan (eds), Years of turbulence: the Irish Revolution and its aftermath, in honour of Michael Laffan (UCD Press, €36 hb, 302pp, ISBN 987910820070). UCD Press Centenary Classics Series box set, with a series introduction by … Read more
By Tony Canavan The fact that the historic streetscape and buildings of Dublin have changed so little over the last century means that the city itself is a kind of museum for the 1916 Rising. Key buildings, squares and streets remain in appearance today much as they did then, a fact that helped in filming … Read more
RTÉ1, January 2016 By John Gibney RTÉ is naturally investing a great deal of capital in the centenary of the Easter Rising across all of its platforms: TV, radio, archives, on-line and even the Century Ireland collaboration with Boston College, which has just launched a new guide to the Rising on its website.* But the … Read more
‘Imagining the past to remember the future’?: Easter 1916 in 2016 By Fearghal McGarry In ‘Easter, 1916’, Yeats identified the sacrifice of the insurgents with resurrection, just as Patrick Pearse had intended: ‘Life springs from death’. Many veterans also recalled the rebellion as transformative. ‘Then came like a thunderclap the 1916 Rising’, recorded Ernie O’Malley, … Read more