At the end of the nineteenth century most efforts at improving the lot of the Irish were constitutional, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell believed that solving the land question would be the first step on the road to Home Rule. For almost half a century—from the early 1870s to the end of the First … Read more
Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. I was immediately transported back to my teenage years while leafing through Gary O’Neill’s book. Having been part of the early Punk scene in Dublin, memories come flooding back while looking through the section on the 1970s and ’80s. The book itself is a photographic record of those different youth … Read more
If you enjoyed the first instalment of David A. Wilson’s Thomas D’Arcy McGee biography (HI 16.6, Nov./Dec. 2008, reviews, p. 65), you’ll want to take a look at this second and concluding volume. Picking up the story from McGee’s 1857 arrival in Montreal, the author remains fundamentally sympathetic to his subject while avoiding the temptation … Read more
Francis Wheatley’s painting of the Volunteers commemorating King William’s birthday at College Green (4 November 1779), drawing readers to reach for this engaging book, has become the iconic depiction of Ireland’s ‘golden age’ of patriotism. Mirroring the harmonious lines of the Georgian streetscape forming its backdrop, this pictorial narrative of Protestant commemoration fused with a … Read more
At first glance, the publication of a book on a medieval Manx dynasty might seem to have little to offer Irish historians. Today, the Isle of Man barely registers in the Irish consciousness, having become largely peripheral to the cultural and political milieu of modern Europe. This, however, was not always the case. In a … Read more