20th-century / Contemporary History

Politics and Irish Life, 1913-1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution, David Fitzpatrick. (Cork University Press, £14.95) ISBN 1859181740 The Two Irelands, 1912-1939, David Fitzpatrick. (Oxford University Press, £8.95) ISBN 019289240

It is a pleasure to note that David Fitzpatrick’s Politics and Irish Life is once more available, this time in paperback, twenty-two years after its original publication. That the book did not reach a wider circulation was due to a warehouse fire. But flames could not extinguish this fine work which has well stood the … Read more

The First Agricultural Broadcasts on 2RN

The Dublin Broadcasting Station (2RN) began operating in January 1926. The Cork Broadcasting Station 2CK started up the following year. Both were operated by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. Studios and transmitters were based in urban centres and were low-powered. The director of 2RN, Seamus Clandillon, a countryman himself, was keenly aware of the … Read more

Leaving the “dreadful rocks”

The ‘island of dreams’ notion hardly applies to the small islands off the north and west coasts of Ireland.  These have always been what Americans would call ‘hardscrabble’ places. Island life was especially hard in the past. The unusual survival of census documents from 1821 for the Aran Islands demonstrates this clearly. They show a … Read more

Rethinking Irish History: Nationalism, Identity and Ideology Patrick O’Mahony and Gerard Delanty (Macmillan Press, £45) ISBN0333627970 The Geopolitics of Anglo-Irish Relations in the 20th Century, G.R. Sloan. (Leicester University Press, £45)

Both these books contain stern critiques of twentieth-century Irish nationalism, which has underpinned the creation of a sovereign twenty-six-county Republic. They represent interdisciplinary forays into history by on the one hand two sociologists from Cork and Belfast and on the other by a British defence specialist with rather mixed results. Rethinking Irish History represents the … Read more