Nick Maxwell The first edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (1997) was immediately hailed as a classic. For its time it was a ground-breaking publication, featuring a previously unsurpassed array of maps, aerial photographs and detailed explanatory text combining broad overviews of Irish rural settlement with detailed treatments of individual regions. Perhaps unavoidably, the … Read more
Bookworm’s eye was caught recently by a stunningly beautiful book—Rural Ireland: the inside story, edited by Vera Kreilkamp (University of Chicago Press, $45, 204pp, ISBN 9781892850188). It is based on an exhibition of the same name hosted at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art, and consists of a catalogue of over 60 paintings of Irish … Read more
Traditionally, newspapers were owned by businessmen who were keen to protect their own interests. During the early years of independence the two daily nationals, the Irish Independent (which incorporated the Freeman’s Journal after 1924) and the Irish Times, in common with most regional newspapers, were profoundly middle-class and anti-republican. Fianna Fáil published the Nation weekly … Read more
The Little Museum of Dublin is a brave and imaginative response to the lack of a museum dedicated to the capital’s history. It has a good start thanks to a location on one of Dublin’s busiest squares and attracts many tourists visiting the city. Number 15 St Stephen’s Green is a historic building in its … Read more
Green is the colour was a four-part history of association football—‘soccer’ in Ireland—launched in conjunction with a book of the same name co-authored by veteran sports journalist Peter Byrne (Green is the colour: the story of Irish football by Peter Byrne, Carlton Books, £14.99) and presumably intended as a prelude to what turned out to … Read more