Over the past four decades, beginning with Tim Pat Coogan’s The IRA and J. Bowyer Bell’s The secret army, the IRA in its various mutations has been the subject of a vast range of books of varying quality. The historiography of the republican movement up to 1969 has developed over time, as more records and … Read more
During a speech last May in UCD, delivered to the Institute of British–Irish Studies (IBIS), Brian Cowen spoke with a sense of both foreboding and cautious expectation about the prospect of entering a long decade of commemoration. From 2012 to 2022 all Ireland will come face to face with a procession of potentially volatile centenaries. … Read more
Olivia Manning, the English-born and domiciled novelist, said that her Irish childhood produced ‘the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere’. While one of Heather K. Crawford’s Irish Protestant interviewees expresses similar sentiments, most counter the false idea that a Protestant cannot be fully Irish. Crawford suggests that guardrails placed around the concept of ‘Irishness’ kept … Read more
In 1957 David Gray, the US wartime minister to Ireland, wrote publicly that Taoiseach Eamon de Valera ‘maintained a neutrality, which served only Hitler’s objectives’. Ian Wood quotes Gray’s comment but never seeks to get behind it. Gray played an integral part in a conspiracy involving both Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt to distort … Read more
Gerard Murphy’s new book is the latest examination of the Protestant experience in revolutionary Cork. It offers an engaging narrative, often based on extensive research, that will open new doors for Irish historians. Murphy provocatively argues that the IRA secretly executed up to 40 Cork Protestants in 1922, prompting a sectarian exodus from the city. … Read more