Martyn Frampton’s Legion of the rearguard is an attempt to come to terms with the veritable alphabet soup of ‘dissident’ (itself a contested term) Irish republicanism. His contribution is the first major work on the subject since Mooney and O’Toole’s Black operations: the secret war against the Real IRA, now almost ten years old and … Read more
The term ‘revisionist’, now a slur, has been used in recent years to attack historians and their works, and is frequently, although not exclusively, used by non-academics to assail ideas with which they disagree. Jeremy Smith traced the revisionism of War of Independence historiography to the 1940s, when academic historians began to study the war … Read more
According to Teagasc, a French field is likely, on average, to change hands once every 70 years. But this will only happen to an Irish field once every 555 years. It is an extraordinary statistic, one on which this assured and elegant documentary ultimately rested. Directed with great skill by the veteran Seán Ó Mordha, … Read more
Of three major productions shown in Ireland this spring, The Big Fellah is the most obvious one to review for History Ireland but not necessarily the best. The historical and contemporary resonances of the recent production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Lyric, Belfast, show the power of theatre to reflect society through the … Read more
Ireland: the politics of enmity 1789–2006 Paul Bew (Oxford University Press, £35) ISBN 9780198205555 According to the preface, this book ‘is about the conflict between the Protestant British—both on the British “mainland” and in Ireland itself—and the Catholic Irish’, from the 1800 Act of Union to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. The various attempts by … Read more