Noel Kissane (ed.) (Boyne Valley Honey Company, £9.95 PB) The appearance of this book is something of a milestone in the current revival of the fortunes of the National Library. The companion volume to an exhibition, it presents a beautifully-illustrated account of 100 items chosen by the Library’s various keepers as an example of the … Read more
Peter Collins (ed.) (Institute of Irish Studies, Belfast, £8.50) Peter Collins has put together a lively and engaging set of essays dealing with Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland in the period between 1885 and 1921. Brian Walker’s opening essay sets the tone admirably; the 1884 reform act democratised Ulster’s polity at the very moment when … Read more
Fr. Colman Ó Huallachain O.F.M. (Irish Franciscan Provincial Office, 1994, £10) Fr. Colman Ó Huallachain died in 1979, and the work of editing some of his best work on the Irish language fell firstly to his brother, the late Fr. Ronan Ó Huallachain O.F.M., and later to Fr. Patrick Conlan O.F.M. The resulting volume traces … Read more
Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, £35) ‘Ireland’, say Hadfield and Maley in one of the many rhetorical flourishes which enliven this collection, ‘was not a fixed, stable entity. It was a complex differentiated, heterogeneous and variegated text (their italics).’ In the wake of this ringing manifesto those anticipating the … Read more
Cormac Ó Gráda (Clarendon Press, £47) Since Louis Cullen’s path-breaking Economic History of Ireland since 1660 appeared twenty-two years ago, there have only been two rather less ambitious text-books to challenge its monopoly—Mary Daly’s Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800 (1981), and Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw’s Economic History of Ulster 1820 -1939 … Read more