Nick Maxwell Sir, —I was delighted to see that you featured Altirí na hAiséirighe in your September/October 2009 issue. It brought back boyhood memories of going with my pals to attend their meetings in the city centre. There was something flamboyant about that organisation that made it more attractive to us than the staid images of … Read more
I found Tom Landers’s letter (Democracy?) in the last issue (HI 17.6,Nov./Dec. 2009) silly and puzzling. What connection had Hitler with theShannon scheme, which was started before he was even heard of andcompleted nearly four years before he came to power? While Siemens hadthe contract, it was Irish-financed and built by Irishmen. My father, aUCC … Read more
Sir, —I wish to point out that R. M. Douglas has his facts a bit mixedup in his article ‘Ailtirí na hAiséirighe: Ireland’s fascist New Order’(HI 17.5, Sept./Oct. 2009), where he states that Michael Donnellan,leader of Clann na Talmhan, boasted of the similarities between hispolitical mission and that of Adolf Hitler. In the research for … Read more
Sir —Myles Dungan’s article on Captain O’Shea and the Fenians contains interesting information about politics in Clare, but he is surely misinterpreting the situation in speaking of a ‘sustained and practical nature of the [Fenian] alliance with O’Shea’ (p. 37). It was a very regular occurrence from the late 1860s until the mid-1880s for … Read more
Richard S. Grayson (Continuum Books, £25) ISBN 9781847250087 Richard Grayson’s Belfast Boys is the latest addition to a small but growing number of popular and academic books on the Irish experience of the Great War, a subject that just ten years ago was ignored by all but a handful of pioneers. In essence, the … Read more