A state in denial: British collaboration with loyalist paramilitaries

MARGARET URWIN Mercier Press €13.49 ISBN 9781781174623 Reviewed by: Raymond Murray This is the third scholarly book in recent times that shows how successive British governments abandoned morality and law in dealing with conflict in Northern Ireland. Published in 2012, Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia: a secret history of torture reveals how the British government over … Read more

BOOKWORM

Reviewed by Joe Cully Jackie Uí Chionna, He was Galway: Máirtín Mór McDonogh, 1860–1934 (Open Air/Four Courts Press, €19.95 pb, 304pp, ISBN 9781846826252). Mick Moloney, Across the western ocean: songs of leaving and arriving (Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, €17.95 pb including CD, 56pp, ISBN 9780997837438). Angela Bourke, Voices underfoot: memory, forgetting, and oral verbal … Read more

BOOKWORM

By Joe Cully Michael Christopher Keane, From Laois to Kerry (M.C. Keane, €20 pb, 130pp, ISBN 9780992698867). Michael English, The Ha’penny Bridge, Dublin (Dublin City Council/Four Courts Press, €24.95 pb, 278pp, ISBN 9781907002298). Peter O’Keeffe, Tom Simington and Rob Goodbody, Irish stone bridges: history and heritage (Dublin City Council/Irish Academic Press, €35.99 hb, 370pp, ISBN … Read more

The adulterous muse

ADRIAN FRAZIER €20 Lilliput Press ISBN 9781843516781 Reviewed by: Anthony J. Jordan Anthony J. Jordan’s books on the Yeats/Gonne/MacBride triangle are now available on Kindle. This is a most interesting book by an author who is not in thrall to any of the main participants/protagonists, though he does jib at Maud Gonne’s use of the … Read more

‘A failed political entity’: Charles Haughey and the Northern Ireland question, 1945–1992

STEPHEN KELLY Merrion Press €24.95 ISBN 9781785370977 Reviewed by: Martin Mansergh While many books have been written about Charles Haughey by journalists, this is the first academic study focused on his Northern Ireland policy and that draws on archival sources available until the mid-1980s. For that reason alone it will be widely consulted. It is … Read more