JOHN HORNE AND EDWARD MADIGAN (EDS) Royal Irish Academy £15 ISBN 9781908996176 Reviewed by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh Production lines are cranking up for the centenary commemorations of the Great War. Dedicated shelves in bookstores and the documentary slots on television schedules are beginning to fill with material relating to the war that didn’t quite end … Read more
Darren McGettigan Four Courts Press £17.50 ISBN 9781846823848 This is an example of an expert book written by a self-confessed non-expert—and it is a resounding success. Darren McGettigan’s previous work has been focused firmly on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world of Red Hugh O’Donnell and the Donegal plantation. In a major departure … Read more
Seán Duffy Gill and Macmillan £24.99 ISBN 9780717157785 Forty-two years have passed since Gill and Macmillan, in what became a celebrated series of history books, enabled Donnchadh Ó Corráin to write that Clontarf ‘was not a struggle between the Irish and the Norse for the sovereignty of Ireland’ but rather a revolt of the Leinstermen … Read more
Ronan Fanning (Faber and Faber, £16.99) ISBN 9780571297399 ‘There is a path of fatality which pursues the relations between the two countries and makes them eternally at cross purposes’ (David Lloyd George, House of Commons, 22 December 1919). Author Ronan Fanning says: ‘Fatal path is simply a case study in the high politics of how … Read more
Billy Colfer (Cork University Press, €49) ISBN 9781859184936 Few counties in Ireland have been better served by their scholars and writers than Wexford—and, of these, no one has better honoured his county’s landscapes and people than Billy Colfer. Wexford castles is not only a worthy successor to his monographs The Hook Peninsula (2004) and Wexford: … Read more