According to the foreword by Kevin Myers to The Wexford war dead: a history of the casualties of the World Wars (Nonsuch Publishing, 336pp, Ä20, ISBN 9781845889647), compiled by Tom Burnell (who co-edited two similar works on Wicklow and Tipperary) and Margaret Gilbert, ‘the only axe being ground in the pages that follow is that … Read more
Outrageous fortune: capital and culture in modern Ireland Joe Cleary (Field Day Publications, e42) ISBN 9780946755356 Books that are assembled by drawing together a set of essays previously published or delivered as seminar or lecture papers by the author often suffer from a lack of focus or any sense of overall theme. Such books … Read more
Over the past four decades, beginning with Tim Pat Coogan’s The IRA and J. Bowyer Bell’s The secret army, the IRA in its various mutations has been the subject of a vast range of books of varying quality. The historiography of the republican movement up to 1969 has developed over time, as more records and … Read more
During a speech last May in UCD, delivered to the Institute of British–Irish Studies (IBIS), Brian Cowen spoke with a sense of both foreboding and cautious expectation about the prospect of entering a long decade of commemoration. From 2012 to 2022 all Ireland will come face to face with a procession of potentially volatile centenaries. … Read more
Olivia Manning, the English-born and domiciled novelist, said that her Irish childhood produced ‘the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere’. While one of Heather K. Crawford’s Irish Protestant interviewees expresses similar sentiments, most counter the false idea that a Protestant cannot be fully Irish. Crawford suggests that guardrails placed around the concept of ‘Irishness’ kept … Read more