Colmán of Cloyne: a study Paul MacCotter (Four Courts Press, €30) ISBN 1 851 827935 Colmán mac Léinín, credited with the foundation of the sixth-century monastery of Cluain Uama, Cloyne, Co. Cork, has been rather neglected by modern scholarship. Paul MacCotter speculates that the absence of an extant Vita, if one was ever written, … Read more
Divided Gaels: Gaelic cultural identities in Scotland and Ireland c. 1200–c. 1650 Wilson McLeod (Oxford University Press, £50) ISBN 0 199 247226 Ulster and the Isles in the fifteenth century: the lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim Simon Kingston (Four Courts Press, £55) ISBN 1 851 827293 In the wake of the establishment … Read more
What was an ‘angel’? ‘Castle chamber’? ‘Raskins’? A ‘Cunningham acre’? So asks the dust-jacket of Byrne’s dictionary of Irish local history (pp352, £20 pb, ISBN 1856354237), published by Mercier Press. The description on the cover—‘an extensive range of key local history terminology, a must for all local historians’—is far too modest and is qualified by … Read more
James Joyce and Ulysses National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin, until summer 2005 by Tony Canavan By any standards this is a remarkable exhibition and probably represents the most minute analysis, discussion and display in one place of any book ever published. It sets a high standard for future events in the National … Read more
RTÉ One, 8 June Directed by Desmond Bell for Asylum Pictures & Poolbeg Productions by Eamon O’Flaherty The United States was becoming the greatest industrial power in the world on the eve of the First World War. Much of its phenomenal growth was due to the fact that waves of immigration from Europe and … Read more