John Minahane has provided a clear and comprehensive translation of Disputatio Apologetica de jure Regni Hiberniae, which made the first full statement for Irish separatism. It was made after the 1641 rising, when a proto-national government, the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny, was struggling for survival. This radical political endeavour was the work of Conor O’Mahony, … Read more
Remember the furore a few years back when Minister for Education Mary Hanafin decreed that every school in the state receive, at taxpayers’ expense, a copy of the Royal Irish Academy’s Judging Dev by Diarmaid Ferriter? (God be with the days when such largesse was flung around like snuff at a wake!) Would biographies of … Read more
History Man: the life of R. G. Collingwood Fred Inglis (Princeton University Press, Ä33.55) IBSN 9780691130149 Robin George Collingwood was born on 22 February 1889 in the English Lake District and died there on 9 January 1943. He wrote extensively on the philosophy of art, metaphysics, the nature of knowledge, archaeology and religion, but … Read more
Behind the Green Curtain: Ireland’s phoney neutrality during World War II T. Ryle Dwyer (Gill and Macmillan, €25) ISBN 9780717146383 The reasons for Irish neutrality during the Second World War are widely accepted: that any attempt to take an overtly pro-British line might have resulted in a replay of the Civil War; that Southern … Read more
The Big House in the North of Ireland: land, power and social elites, 1878–1960 Olwen Purdue (University College Dublin Press, Ä60hb/Ä28pb) ISBN 9781906359218 hb, 9781906359256 pb Singing of the beleaguered stately homes of England, Noel Coward observed: ‘Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt And frequently mortgaged to the hilt Is … Read more