Marie Bourke is to be congratulated for writing a comprehensible and detailed account of museums in Ireland, as it is a complicated story. For most of the period under discussion Ireland was not an independent country, so it could not rely on a royal patron to found institutions, as was the case in many European … Read more
The historiography of Irish republicanism has greatly improved in recent years thanks to authors such as Brian Hanley, Richard English and Martyn Frampton. This book, Matt Treacy’s first, adds significantly to this growing body of work, charting the internal debates and developments within the IRA and Sinn Féin from the collapse of the ill-fated border … Read more
Fighting like the devil for the sake of God is an arresting title for a book that purports to examine the origins of violence in Northern Ireland by pinpointing the moment in time and the unique set of circumstances in the nineteenth century that have fathered the core violence experienced in the recent Troubles. When … Read more
In Ireland we pride ourselves on our historical awareness. The Irish are interested in history, and in their own history in particular. This is obvious at a personal level in, for example, our collective excited engagement with the 1901 and 1911 censuses when they were made available to us on-line in recent years. At a … Read more
In the present climate of cynicism, where the stock of politicians is only marginally above that of bankers, property developers and paedophile priests, it is hard to believe that not so long ago images of political figures—Tone, Emmett, O’Connell, Parnell, etc.—regularly featured on the walls of Irish homes. It is equally hard to believe that … Read more