General

Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s

The French historian François Simiand once admonished historians not to ‘forecast the weather from your back garden’, warning against the tendency to seek for explanations in the local and immediate environment and the analysis of internal processes. This may be particularly true when it comes to small countries buffeted by events over which they have … Read more

New beginnings: constitutionalism and democracy in modern Ireland

Bill Kissane has long established himself as an innovative authority on modern Irish political and constitutional history. (As he points out, the two are not necessarily the same.) Nobody reading his nuanced The politics of the Irish Civil War will ever again view that conflict, pace Tom Garvin, as a Manichean struggle between small-d democrats … Read more

Irish Bulletin a full reprint of the official newspaper of Dáil Éireann, giving news and war reports—Volume I 12th July 1919 to 1st May 1920

The Irish Bulletin was a fact-sheet published by the Dáil government between 1919 and 1921 and circulated to opinion-formers outside Ireland to publicise repressive actions of Crown forces directed by the Dublin Castle administration. It is generally acknowledged as a very professional production which greatly assisted the Dáil government’s cause.   The Bulletin is unquestionably … Read more

Dublin 1916 and the French connection

Dublin 1916 and the French connectionW.J. McCormack (Gill and Macmillan, €29.99) ISBN 9780717154128
Dublin 1916 and the French connection
W.J. McCormack
(Gill and Macmillan, €29.99)
ISBN 9780717154128

‘What was to unfold in Ireland, between 1911 and 1921’, writes W.J. McCormack, ‘was effectively an ideological battle to fill the cheap places, to draw the lower middle class into this cause or that, social revolution, imperial retrenchment or nationalist separatism’ (p. 82). ‘Cheap places’ refers to a review of musical culture in the Dublin of 1913, in which the writer noted that the popularity of Wagner ‘grows and grows’. McCormack’s undertaking is to trace the ways in which challenging and often controversial ideas from Europe were conveyed to Ireland via intellectuals, after which they were absorbed (often unconsciously) by the general population. This is an extremely difficult task and McCormack submits a truly impressive range of material in the course of his quest, from the French syllabus read by Pearse and others at the Royal University of Ireland through articles in the Irish Review to the more circuitous connection between the French poets read by Yeats under the guidance of Iseult Gonne, who, through her father Lucien Millevoye, had some contact with the literary salon of the writer and right-wing politician Maurice Barrès.

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Atlas of the Great Irish Famine

Atlas of the Great Irish FamineJohn Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds) (Cork University Press, €59) ISBN 9781859184790
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine
John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds)
(Cork University Press, €59)
ISBN 9781859184790

When I got my review copy of the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, I was startled by the heft of the book; this is a seriously weighty tome! In spite of its cumbersome format, however, Cork University Press is to be congratulated for a fine publication with excellent production values. As far as content is concerned, ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’: this is an atlas, compiled and edited by geographers. According to the introduction, the cartographic journey to the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine ‘began almost twenty years ago with a discussion in the Department of Geography, University College Cork’. Anyone wishing to study or research the Famine will discover a fascinating assembly of relevant material contained in the maps, diagrams, graphs, illustrations, statistics and essays that adorn this publication. There is one major drawback, however—the absence of a proper index. There is, as you would expect from geographers, an index of places, but the reader will find this less than helpful when trying to make sense of the multitude of facts contained in the atlas.

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