Reviewed by Lar Joye Lar Joye is curator of military history at the National Museum of Ireland (Decorative Arts) Seán Murphy is a retired Irish Defence Forces officer and lawyer originally from West Cork who has written a fascinating book examining the Kilmichael ambush from the point of view of a professional soldier. On 28 … Read more
DONAL FALLON New Island €14.99 ISBN 9781848403260 When the Berlin Wall was attacked and conquered by an agitated mob in 1989, it was followed quickly by the tearing down of statues of the old regimes in Eastern Europe. More recently, in 2003 the world witnessed the attack on the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad; … Read more
ROBERT McLAUGHLIN University of Toronto Press CAN$29.95 ISBN 9781442610972 Any book on the Irish that begins with the 1998 peace talks in the North and ends with a reminder about Orange gunrunning during the Troubles is bound to fall into cliché. Robert McLaughlin’s Irish Canadian conflict and the struggle for Irish independence, 1912–1925 is no … Read more
ANDY BIELENBERG and RAYMOND RYAN Routledge £85 ISBN 9780415566940 This is a very comprehensive and hugely satisfying survey of its subject-matter. It begins with British prime minister Lloyd George’s last-minute offer of full fiscal autonomy during the Treaty negotiations that led to independence in 1922 and takes us right up to the bank guarantee of … Read more
GEMMA CLARK Cambridge University Press £72 ISBN 9781107036895 In this decade of commemorations, it is interesting but not surprising that the Irish Civil War has been excluded from the events chosen as suitable to remember. The Civil War remains one of the most divisive and controversial periods in Irish history: a short military confrontation followed … Read more