GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIGH Quinnipiac University Press and Cork University Press €11.95/£9.95 ISBN 9780990468677 Reviewed by Proinsias Ó Drisceoil Neo-liberal notions of consumer choice may have influenced a tendency to attribute the shift from Irish to English as the dominant spoken language in Ireland to rational personal convenience, but what the author of this brief study … Read more
BRENDAN BRADSHAW Ashgate £75 ISBN 9781472442567 Reviewed by Hiram Morgan This book is a collection of essays by Brendan Bradshaw, the well-known historian of Tudor Ireland and opponent of historical revisionism. Besides a number of new pieces, it includes reprints of the various essays and reviews in which he laid down his famous challenge to … Read more
MAURICE WALSH Faber and Faber £26 ISBN 9780571243006 Reviewed by Padraig Yeates This is probably the best overview of the revolutionary era in the current crop of books prompted by the ‘decade of centenaries’. It is superbly crafted and a joy to read. It is particularly suited to an international audience wishing to know more … Read more
Tom Burnell, Irishmen in the Great War: reports from the front 1914 (Pen & Sword Military, £19 hb, 252pp, ISBN 9781473821200). Turtle Bunbury, The glorious madness: tales of the Irish and the Great War (Gill & Macmillan, €29.99 pb, 338pp, ISBN 9780717162345). Gerard Fitzgibbon, Kingdom overthrown: Ireland and the battle for Europe, 1688–1691 (New Island … Read more
Reviewed by Niall Meehan Head of the Journalism and Media Faculty in Griffith College, Dublin. Robert Savage has written a richly detailed history of the BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’, a story of how a sometimes-calculated self-censorship functioned before the British government made it official in 1988. Savage explains how, during the 1960s, BBC Northern Ireland news … Read more