The cries of despair and outrage from the tourist sector following the current closure of Newgrange, Cashel, etc. because of foot-and-mouth disease restrictions clearly shows the extent to which the industry has become dependent on these cultural amenities. Heritage presentation is big business and has become the flagship of the tourist industry. Ireland has built … Read more
In the period 1250 to 1650 covered by this book there was no single entity known as Gaelic Ireland. The term has been devised by modern historians to signify collectively the numerous quasi-autonomous Gaelic and Gaelicised lordships that existed in medieval Ireland. The sources from which the detailed workings of individual Gaelic lordships in the … Read more
Reading these histories of Ireland, I could not help wondering who they were written for. The writers’ fellow historians? Hardly! They know too much already to be interested in a brief general survey of our history. The general Irish public? Perhaps, though many of them know the outline already and are more likely to seek … Read more
As the Irish parliament enacts the union a deputation of dissident MPs burst into the study of Robert Emmet, demanding that he go immediately to France in search of armed assistance. Elsewhere Father Murphy organises his parishioners into an insurrectionary band. Later Michael Dwyer marries Anne Devlin, before both flee to Australia. These self-evidently ludicrous … Read more
I read this book full on the heels of journalist Susan McKay’s Northern Protestants: an Unsettled People, and just as avidly. Both books emanate from troubled hearts asking the question—what was this thirty-years war in Northern Ireland all about? Susan McKay’s book belongs to the present and is the testimony of Protestants from various parts … Read more