DONAL FALLON New Island Books €15.95 ISBN 9781848408722 Reviewed by Evan Comerford Evan Comerford is a civil servant with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Donal Fallon provides a fresh and engaging take on Dublin’s social history with a trip through the streets, broad and narrow, of the capital city in Three castles … Read more
ELIZABETH BORAN, E. CHARLES NELSON and EMER LAWLOR (eds) Four Courts Press for the Trustees of the Edward Worth Library €50 ISBN 9781946820233 Reviewed by Mary Davies Mary Davies is the co-author (with Patricia Butler) of Wicklow through the artist’s eye: an exploration of County Wicklow’s historic gardens, c. 1660–1960 (Wordwell Books, 2014). The Edward … Read more
TONY GAYNOR Four Courts Press €54 ISBN 9781801510370 Reviewed by Daniel Ayiotis I’ll start this review with my only criticism, to get it out of the way: the title of this book undersells it. When this nearly 400-page tome arrived in the post, I anticipated a chronological trudge through biographies of the 36 commanders who … Read more
Joe Culley @TheRealCulls Everything you know about the siege of Derry is wrong. For instance, it’s not entirely clear whether there were any apprentice boys at all. Yes, there were a handful of youths who initially shut the gates, some of whom might have been apprenticed at the time—but maybe not. They had, however, been … Read more
EMMET O’CONNOR UCD Press €27 ISBN 9781910820858 Reviewed by Niall Meehan Niall Meehan is the retired head of the Journalism and Media Faculty, Griffith College. Accounts of the 1912 and 1920 Belfast shipyard expulsions detail tens of thousands of Catholics forcibly driven from their places of employment, followed by being burned out of their homes. … Read more