Northern Ireland 1920 – present

The Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture, Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (eds.). (Liverpool University Press, £15) IBSN 0853239517

This book represents Anderson and Bort’s fourth collaboration in four years. Having jointly edited two volumes on the eastern frontier of the European Union, they published The Frontiers of Europe in 1998 before bringing out this book, based on papers presented at a conference on the Irish border held at the International Social Sciences Institute … Read more

The Belfast Blitz: April-May 1941

On 29 October 1940, Northern Ireland Prime Minister Sir James Craig made his last major speech in parliament—a typically impassioned tub-thumping assault on a Nationalist motion supporting Irish unity. By 24 November, he had died peacefully at his home. After taking private soundings the Governor, Lord Abercorn, asked John Andrews, the Minister of Finance, to … Read more

Northern Nationalism: nationalist politics, partition and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland 1890-1940 Eamon Phoenix (Ulster Historical Foundation, £14.95) (3:1)

Reviewed by Michael Farrell ‘You had opponents willing to co-operate… We were willing to help…[but] you went on the old political lines, fostering hatreds, keeping one third of the population as if they were pariahs…and relying on those religious differences and difficulties so that you could remain in office for ever’. Joe Devlin, the northern … Read more

Re-presenting war: the Somme Heritage Centre (3:1)

David Officer Historians of Ireland regularly harp on about the often blunt and crude forms in which the past is mobilised by contemporary interests. However, historians themselves pay scant attention to the forms, methods and media through which the transmission of a historical consciousness is effected. It is inadaquate to describe such complex processes as … Read more

Dancing, Depravity and all that Jazz The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 by Jim Smyth

A protracted war of independence and a bitter civil war left the new Irish Free State with economic and social problems of enormous proportions – the economy and infrastructure were ravaged, unemployment and ill-health were endemic and the wounds of the civil war were far from healed. But the agenda of perhaps the most powerful … Read more