Sir, —I must protest at the treatment given to my book Redmond: theParnellite by your reviewer in the Sept./Oct. 2008 issue. My complaintrefers not to any unfavourable evaluation of the book but to theslipshod nature of the review. There are many indications that the reviewer has only a passingacquaintance with the period covered by the … Read more
At the end of the nineteenth century most efforts at improving the lot of the Irish were constitutional, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell believed that solving the land question would be the first step on the road to Home Rule. For almost half a century—from the early 1870s to the end of the First … Read more
Of all the shadows cast by history, none stretch further than the enduring fascination associated with the Titanic. In popular culture it has transcended the purpose for which it was built, eclipsed the environment from which it came and relegated to the background the men whose needs brought about its birth. This year we will … Read more
Michael Davitt: freelance radical and frondeur Laurence Marley (Four Courts Press, €45) ISBN 9781846820663 Michael Davitt once took the sort of questionnaire that would now be found in a glossy magazine. We learn from it that his heroes were ‘those who minimise suffering’; his favourite food was ‘anything purchased by my own energy’; his favourite … Read more
In April 1912 the third Home Rule bill appeared to herald a new era, with the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) poised to reap the harvest of a generation of constitutional agitation. Chief among their number was Belfast’s Joe Devlin and, at his back, what Devlin himself described as ‘a Catholic organisation with a membership of … Read more