The Ulster Covenant was written and presented by William Crawley and was broadcast the evening before the centenary of ‘Ulster Day’, 28 September 1912, the day on which 237,368 Protestant Ulstermen signed the titular declaration and pledged themselves to use ‘all means necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament … Read more
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
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
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
A history of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: democratic socialism and sectarianism Aaron Edwards (Manchester University Press, £60) ISBN 9780719078743This book is one of a series of Critical Labour Movement Studies, of which ten have already been published. Although there is a nod in the direction of mainland Europe with a book on Swedish social … Read more