KEVIN HADDICK-FLYNN Matador €30 ISBN 9781838592004 Reviewed by Geoffrey Bell Geoffrey Bell’s The Protestants of Ulster was first published in 1976. Once, in the early 1960s when I was about thirteen, I was asked to take my English granny to watch a Twelfth of July march. We went to the Finaghy crossroads, on the edge … 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
In these days of steel, concrete and plastic we have forgotten what a fundamental raw mat-erial timber once was. It was crucial to shipbuilding until the first iron-hulled vessels of the 1800s; buildings, even when of stone or brick, needed timber for their roof crucks and beams; charcoal fuelled early industry; wooden barrel staves were … Read more
Though subtitled ‘the Irish Revolution 1913–1923’, this work is as much concerned with how the revolution came to be remembered and contested in memory as it is with telling the events of the revolutionary period itself. Indeed, the examination of the period’s legacy comes before the period itself. Anyone looking for the latest forensic analysis … Read more
Reviewed by Maurice Coakley Maurice Coakley lectures in journalism and media studies at Griffith College, Dublin What can the past teach us? Professor Bryan Fanning had the idea of examining the work of a dozen authors from the seventeenth century to the 21st to better understand Ireland’s current predicament and possible futures. This had the … Read more