SENIA PASˇETA Cambridge University Press £60 ISBN 9781107047747 Much work has been done on nationalist women in the early twentieth century. Beginning in 1922 with Helena Concannon’s Daughters of Banba, this is a much-tilled field that has attracted scholars from Ireland, Britain, France, Australia, Finland, the United States and New Zealand. Maire O’Neill, with biographies … Read more
DERMOT MELEADY Merrion £26.50 ISBN 9781908928313 REVIEWED BY PATRICK MAUME Jessica Cunningham’s 2012 Hugh Lane Gallery lecture on the visual culture of Home Rule displayed three contemporary images of John Redmond. The second and most prominent, dating from his post-1900 leadership of the Irish Party, is familiar in standard narratives of twentieth-century Irish history: a … Read more
Robert Erskine Childers wrote these words in the darkness of his damp prison cell less than an hour before his execution for unlawfully possessing a firearm (ironically given to him by Michael Collins) during the Civil War. It was then, and has since, been speculated that he had been an agent of the Crown and … Read more
The 2014 Kenmare Chronicle: your town, your community, your history. Irish heart, English blood: the making of Youghal (History Press Ireland, ?18 pb, 224pp, ISBN 9781845888220). Medieval and monastic Derry: sixth century to 1600 (Four Courts Press, ?24.95 hb, 176pp, ISBN 9781846823831). Thomas Clarke (O’Brien Press, ?12.99 pb, 272pp, ISBN 9781847172617). Seán MacDiarmada (O’Brien Press, … Read more
When Lord Frederick Cavendish was killed by the Invincibles in the Phoenix Park in May 1882, nothing like it had happened in British political life since Prime Minister Spencer Percival was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. Percival is the only British prime minister to have been assassinated, and … Read more