Nick Maxwell Is not the pastness of the past,’ asks Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, ‘that much more profound, more complete, more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’ The stories told about the civil rights era invite a positive response to this question. Indeed, the mythologising of the movement began as the events … Read more
The response of the Dublin government to the urgent message from the war room at Stormont was remarkable, given the historically tense relations between the two jurisdictions. While hundreds of firemen from both Glasgow and Liverpool were dispatched, they could not reach Belfast until much later on the day of 16 April, following the previous … Read more
Tuned out: traditional music and identity in Northern Ireland Fintan Vallely (Cork University Press €39) ISBN 9781859184431 This book considers the attitudes of Protestant performers and of the broad Protestant community towards Irish traditional music in Northern Ireland. It also discusses how political attitudes have affected traditional music throughout Ireland and how they continue to … Read more
The recent controversy surrounding the inclusion of a creationist perspective at the National Trust’s new £18.5 million Giant’s Causeway interpretive centre has prompted much public discussion in Northern Ireland and further afield. To date, the debate has been one of ‘science versus creationism’ and of whether and to what extent the Trust—or, indeed, any museum—should … Read more
Sinn Féin and the politics of left republicanism Eoin Ó Broin (Pluto Press, €67.50 hb, €25 pb) ISBN 9780745324630, 978745324623Close observers of the politics of Irish historiography will have suspected that there was something odd about this book when it was reviewed prominently in the Irish Times, and commended by its resident revisionist, despite being … Read more