Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin labour movement John Newsinger (Merlin Press, £14.95) ISBN 085036518X Early twentieth-century Ireland witnessed massive labour unrest. John Newsinger’s book is a sympathetic account of the first wave of Irish syndicalism that saw the rise of James Larkin’s ITGWU and its eventual defeat in the Great Lockout of … Read more
Left to the wolves: Irish victims of Stalinist terror Barry McLoughlin (Irish Academic Press, hb e57.50, pb e29.50) ISBN 9780716529149, 9780716529157 One of the things the Soviets did well was compiling and preserving records, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalisation of access to its archives some brilliant studies have appeared … Read more
A New History of Ireland VII, Ireland 1921–1984 J.R. HILL (ed.) (Oxford University Press, £125) ISBN 0198217528 In 1962 the New History of Ireland (NHI) was first conceived. Seán Lemass was taoiseach, and Harold Macmillan occupied 10 Downing Street. Like Pandit Nehru, Chairman Mao and T.W. Moody, they are gone now: only Fidel Castro, … Read more
Not since Karl Marx planned to write a short pamphlet on the nature of capital, which eventually became his multi-volume opus, has a publication project expanded so spectacularly. Billy Colfer’s The Hook Peninsula (Cork University Press, pp260, €40 hb, ISBN 1859183786) started life in 1997 as one of six short case-studies in CUP’s The atlas … Read more
Irish rural interiors in art Claudia Kinmonth (Yale University Press, e58.80) ISBN 9780300107326 Traditionally, most mainline historians have made little use of visual sources when analysing Ireland’s past. This began to change in the early 1990s. A number of publications, such as Raymond Gillespie and Brian Kennedy’s Ireland, art into history (Dublin, 1994), appeared that … Read more