Reviewed by Ciarán Parker Irish Convict Lives, a sequel to Exiles from Erin, aims to explore the personal aspects of the Irish convict experience in Australia. The eight essays present pictures of a small sample of the men and women who received sentences of transportation and who responded to their new involuntary environment in different … Read more
Reviewed by Cormac Ó Gráda Ralahine, Prosperous, Kingwilliamstown, Dolly’s Brae, Ceim an Fhia, Carrickshock: small, insignificant places, yet places with strong resonances in Irish history. Is Ballykilcline, an obscure Roscommon townland containing fewer than five hundred souls on the eve of the Famine, now about to join them? Probably not, for a few reasons. Part … Read more
Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill The 1889 Light Railway (Ireland) Act was the first to provide government grants for the construction of railways, which had previously been the domain of private enterprise. This and subsequent acts of 1890 and 1896 brought the railway to remote, thinly populated districts which were considered commercially non-viable by the railway … Read more
Christine Kinealy 1995 marks the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of a new and deadly strain of potato blight in Ireland; a blight that reappeared in varying degrees over the next six years. As a consequence of the resultant food shortage and the more general disruption to economic … Read more
Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Vol.1 (West Cork), Vol.2 (East and South Cork) Denis Power (comp.) (Stationary Office, £20 each) Guide to the Archives of the Office of Public Works Rena Lohan (Stationary Office) Irish Archives Journal (Spring 1995) (Irish Society of Archives, £4.95) Reviewed by Kevin Whelan In recent years, there has been a … Read more