This latest in the series by Tom Garvin on twentieth-century Ireland focuses on the 1950s, that pivotal decade during which Ireland belatedly caught up with the modern world. But it is history with a difference. Garvin reconstructs the period not on the basis of personalities or events but on what he calls ‘the public record … Read more
As the centenary anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War approaches, the body of literature on the Irish experience of ‘the war to end all wars’ grows apace. As with other areas of Irish history, popular historians lead the march and are some way ahead of their counterparts in the universities. The past decade … Read more
With typical Irish flare for understatement, the series of events outlined in Colin Barr’s book came generally to be known as the ‘Callan case’, which conjures up images of an insignificant incident in the rural Ireland of the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the title of the book intimates, however, there were far … Read more
‘The Four Masters’—what does that name bring to mind? A GAA club from Donegal, perhaps, but more likely the compilers of the seventeenth-century Gaelic history of Ireland. I’ve often felt that the somewhat eulogistic title of that band of authors in itself ensured for them a place in the canon of Gaelic literature, evoking, as … Read more
Remember the furore a few years back when Minister for Education Mary Hanafin decreed that every school in the state receive, at taxpayers’ expense, a copy of the Royal Irish Academy’s Judging Dev by Diarmaid Ferriter? (God be with the days when such largesse was flung around like snuff at a wake!) Would biographies of … Read more