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
Tom Garvin (Royal Irish Academy, E30) ISBN 9781904890577 Tom Garvin opens his introduction to this book with the truthful statement that ‘Seán Lemass is commonly seen as the architect of modern Ireland’. Regrettably, he does not acknowledge that, in current circumstances, this could earn the said architect some censure as a jerrybuilder. What Garvin … Read more
Brian Hanley and Scott Millar (Penguin Ireland, €20) ISBN 9781844881208 The front page of the September 1971 Official Republican paper The United Irishman displayed a photograph of a gunman crouched under a Starry Plough flag and silhouetted against a blazing truck. (See ‘Second glance’ on pp 46–7.) The headline read ‘Army of the People’, … Read more
Manx Museum/Thie Tashtee Vannin Kingswood Grove, Douglas, Isle of Man www.storyofmann.com, enquiries@mnh.gov.im, +44 (0)1624 648000 Mon.–Sat. 10am–5pm by Tony Canavan Even the first-time Irish visitor to the Isle of Man will find it a familiar place. The landscape looks a lot like parts of Ireland, as do the farmhouses, some of which are thatched. … Read more
Après le deluge . . . ? What next for the Catholic Church in Ireland, indeed for Irish society in general, in the wake of the publication of the Murphy report (November 2009) into clerical sexual abuse of children in the Dublin diocese? What started as a trickle of ‘isolated cases’ in the early 1990s … Read more