The history of cricket in County Kilkenny—the forgotten game Michael O’Dwyer (O’Dwyer Books, ‘Garvaghey’, College Gardens, Kilkenny, e35 + e7 p&p) Michael O’Dwyer’s book is correctly subtitled ‘the forgotten game’. Whatever else we may think of when we think of Kilkenny, cricket hardly leaps to mind. And yet this book, drawing on the ample documentation … Read more
In February 1948 Éamonn de Valera and his party lost power after sixteen years in government. A few years earlier he had looked unassailable, and was admired for his calmness and statesmanship during the Emergency. Now the opposition parties rallied behind the slogan ‘Put them out!’, and the electorate did their bidding. The ensuing excitement … Read more
During the Irish revolution, the creation of the physical-force tradition necessitated the humiliation of constitutional nationalists by their social inferiors in Sinn Féin and the Volunteers. The resentment generated by the destruction of the parliamentary tradition led to violent feuding between republicans and nationalists in County Galway between 1914 and 1918. While the much less … Read more
Compared to the carnage of the previous year (221 civilians murdered), 1977 was relatively quiet in Northern Ireland (55 civilians murdered). May witnessed the failure of the second loyalist workers’ strike, led by Ian Paisley and faced down by the brusque secretary of state, Roy Mason. Peace People Betty Williams and Mairéad Corrigan won the … Read more
Spies, informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’: the intelligence war in Cork City, 1920–1921 John Borgonovo (Irish Academic Press, e30) ISBN 0716528339 ‘Intelligence’ is perhaps the trickiest aspect of the Irish revolution to write about in a scholarly way. Sources are often fragmentary and unreliable, mythologies are ample and enduring, and many events only make … Read more