Between comrades: James Connolly, letters and correspondence, 1889–1916 Donal Nevin (ed.) (Gill & Macmillan, €29.99) ISBN 9780717142231 At last! After decades of calls to action, a beginning has been made. In this volume nearly all of James Connolly’s letters are collected. In addition, the first pages contain much correspondence unconnected with him save insofar as … Read more
The ‘Captain Rock’ campaign of 1821–4 is one in a series of outbreaks of agrarian unrest that began in the 1760s and continued until the eve of the Famine, when starvation finally made concerted action impossible and the landlords closed in to make the evictions and clearances they had long desired. The Rock years were … Read more
Ireland and Romania lie at opposite corners of Europe. An obvious link is that both countries have well-developed rural cultures and have only relatively recently escaped the embrace of adjacent domineering empires. Another is that for just over a century they have shared the sinister figure of Count Dracula. Dracula, the 1897 novel by Dublin-born … Read more
The first Irish census was taken in 1821, and thereafter censuses were taken at ten-yearly intervals until 1911. The only census records to survive in their entirety are those for 1901 and 1911. The records for 1821–51 were lost in the destruction of the Public Record Office at the beginning of the Civil War in … Read more
The post-medieval archaeology of Ireland, 1550–1850 Audrey Horning, Ruairí Ó Baoill, Colm Donnelly and Paul Logue (eds) (Wordwell, for the Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group, €70) ISBN 9781905569137 This welcome collection serves several purposes and prompts even more questions. First, it surveys comprehensively what post-medieval archaeologists have achieved, mainly during the last 30 years. It also … Read more