In the recent excellent Why pamper life’s complexities? Essays on the Smiths, co-edited by Seán Campbell and sociologist Colin Coulter, a recurring theme was the Irish heritage at the heart of the upbringing of members of the band. Those familiar with the politics and ideology of the band’s much-worshipped front man, Morrissey, were undoubtedly not … Read more
Martyn Frampton’s Legion of the rearguard is an attempt to come to terms with the veritable alphabet soup of ‘dissident’ (itself a contested term) Irish republicanism. His contribution is the first major work on the subject since Mooney and O’Toole’s Black operations: the secret war against the Real IRA, now almost ten years old and … Read more
The term ‘revisionist’, now a slur, has been used in recent years to attack historians and their works, and is frequently, although not exclusively, used by non-academics to assail ideas with which they disagree. Jeremy Smith traced the revisionism of War of Independence historiography to the 1940s, when academic historians began to study the war … Read more
In this book—number 4 in the Studia Traditionis Theologiae: Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology series edited by Thomas O’Loughlin—David Jenkins explores the layout of religious settlements in Ireland (from the sixth to the ninth century AD), arguing that a discernible pattern exists consisting of (a) an exterior enclosure, (b) tripartite zoning of the enclosed … Read more
The very title of this beautiful monumental book reflects attitudes of different scholars regarding the story of Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell. Was it a departure, a logical planned stratagem that envisaged a comeback and victory ahead with Spanish help? That would have been the attitude of Micheline Kerney Walsh and Tomás Ó Fiaich, shining … Read more