Reviewed by Joe Cully Jackie Uí Chionna, He was Galway: Máirtín Mór McDonogh, 1860–1934 (Open Air/Four Courts Press, €19.95 pb, 304pp, ISBN 9781846826252). Mick Moloney, Across the western ocean: songs of leaving and arriving (Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, €17.95 pb including CD, 56pp, ISBN 9780997837438). Angela Bourke, Voices underfoot: memory, forgetting, and oral verbal … Read more
Sir,—Eoin Gill’s thought-provoking article (HI 24.5, Sept./Oct. 2016, Platform) asks: ‘Has science also been airbrushed out of Irish history?’. A similar concern was part of the decision by the minister for finance and the Central Bank to issue a series of silver proof coins celebrating ‘Irish Science and Invention’. Coins celebrating Ernest Walton (2016) and … Read more
Sir,—Though I question the oft-stated accusation that Arthur Griffith was anti-Semitic, D.R. O’Connor Lysaght appears initially almost magnanimous in his response to Colum Kenny’s letter (HI 24.6, Nov./Dec. 2016) on Arthur Griffith and anti-Semitism by saying that ‘it is possible, certainly, to accept that Griffith’s anti-Semitism diminished as he grew older’ (HI 25.1, Jan./Feb. 2017). … Read more
Making sense of the history of psychiatry in Ireland By Brendan Kelly The history of psychiatry is a history of therapeutic enthusiasm, with all of the triumph and tragedy, hubris and humility that such enthusiasm brings. In Ireland this history is dominated by the vast network of public asylums that commenced in earnest with the … Read more
Ulster’s forgotten Fenians, 1858–1867 By Kerron Ó Luain On the surface, the 1850s were barren years for those with Irish nationalist ideals. The Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, Fenian James Mullins wrote in later years that national sentiment ‘in those days, the fifties … was almost extinct in Ireland’. In Ulster, the Ribbon secret societies kept alive … Read more