By Joseph E.A. Connell Jr At the start of the First World War, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s (IRB) Supreme Council determined that a rising should be planned and undertaken in Ireland. While the original purpose of the Volunteers was to ensure that Home Rule was implemented, at least from September 1914 its covert purpose was … Read more
ANDY BIELENBERG and RAYMOND RYAN Routledge £85 ISBN 9780415566940 This is a very comprehensive and hugely satisfying survey of its subject-matter. It begins with British prime minister Lloyd George’s last-minute offer of full fiscal autonomy during the Treaty negotiations that led to independence in 1922 and takes us right up to the bank guarantee of … Read more
GEMMA CLARK Cambridge University Press £72 ISBN 9781107036895 In this decade of commemorations, it is interesting but not surprising that the Irish Civil War has been excluded from the events chosen as suitable to remember. The Civil War remains one of the most divisive and controversial periods in Irish history: a short military confrontation followed … Read more
ANN MATTHEWS Mercier Press ?14.99 ISBN 9781781171592 It may be a strange twist of historiography that the Irish Citizen Army has not attracted as much scholarly attention as the Irish Volunteers, the UVF or the ITGWU. It may also have been the case that the source material to sustain a full-length scholarly monograph was not … Read more
Tim Harris Oxford University Press £30 ISBN 9780199209002 This book is an ambitious attempt to investigate the problems faced by the Stuart monarchs of Britain and Ireland in the early seventeenth century. After James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I of England, the Stuarts became rulers of multiple kingdoms that had different political, religious and … Read more