Sir, —I wish to point out that R. M. Douglas has his facts a bit mixedup in his article ‘Ailtirí na hAiséirighe: Ireland’s fascist New Order’(HI 17.5, Sept./Oct. 2009), where he states that Michael Donnellan,leader of Clann na Talmhan, boasted of the similarities between hispolitical mission and that of Adolf Hitler. In the research for … Read more
Sir —Myles Dungan’s article on Captain O’Shea and the Fenians contains interesting information about politics in Clare, but he is surely misinterpreting the situation in speaking of a ‘sustained and practical nature of the [Fenian] alliance with O’Shea’ (p. 37). It was a very regular occurrence from the late 1860s until the mid-1880s for … Read more
Richard S. Grayson (Continuum Books, £25) ISBN 9781847250087 Richard Grayson’s Belfast Boys is the latest addition to a small but growing number of popular and academic books on the Irish experience of the Great War, a subject that just ten years ago was ignored by all but a handful of pioneers. In essence, the … Read more
Tom Garvin (Royal Irish Academy, E30) ISBN 9781904890577 Tom Garvin opens his introduction to this book with the truthful statement that ‘Seán Lemass is commonly seen as the architect of modern Ireland’. Regrettably, he does not acknowledge that, in current circumstances, this could earn the said architect some censure as a jerrybuilder. What Garvin … Read more
Cope (Boydell Press, £50) ISBN 9781843834687 The outbreak of the 1641 rebellion posed two related problems for the English administration in Ireland. First and foremost, the lords justices and council had to suppress the insurgency and organise efforts to defend the colony. Second, they had to relieve those who had been dispossessed by Irish … Read more