Deirdre Lindsay and David Fitzpatrick (eds.) (Irish Famine Network, TCD, £4.50) Most records relevant to the Famine lack satisfactory published guides. The authors’ intention in publishing Records of the Irish Famine is to encourage local studies of the Famine and its effects. The volume is split into three sections sandwiched between an introduction and an … Read more
Donald E. Jordan (Cambridge University Press, £45 hb, £19.95) The Land League started in Mayo. Its first meeting was held in Irishtown. As Jordan emphasises the geographical location was important. It lay in the southeast of the county, ‘where the rich central corridor and the infertile eastern periphery meet’. Even the circumstances of the first … Read more
T.M. Charles-Edwards (Clarendon Press, £56.70) This large authoritative study (600 pages) of early medieval kinship compares and contrasts the ancient legal texts of two related Celtic societies. Eighth-century Irish law and thirteenth century Welsh law are examined, not as legal history, but for their information about the people who created these laws and the common … Read more
With the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921, with its subsequent ratification in Dáil Éireann on 7 January 1922, and with the establishment of a Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, responsibility for the administration of education in southern Ireland passed to it on 1 February 1922. Because political independence had … Read more
John Lynch talks to one of the most prolific Irish historians of recent years, Paul Bew, Professor of Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. JL: Tell me about your background. PB: I was born in Belfast in 1950, the child of a mixed marriage. My parents were both doctors. My father was an RAF doctor during … Read more