ANU Productions Tenement Museum, 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1 By John Gibney Hentown is the latest in ANU Productions’ongoing series of location-specific dramas that endeavour to explore murky and uncomfortable aspects of modern Irish history and, more recently, aspects of the ‘Decade of Centenaries’.Hentown moves away from the period 1913–23 but returns ANU to the … Read more
Rathdowney, Co. Laois www.donaghmoremuseum.ie By Tony Canavan Situated between the M7 and M8, near the town of Rathdowney, the Donaghmore Workhouse and Agricultural Museum is worth leaving the motorway for if you want to break your journey. This complex of buildings has survived almost intact since the mid-nineteenth century despite undergoing a number of changes … Read more
By Joe Culley Clair McDonald, The eighteenth-century landscape of Stradbally Hall, Co. Laois (Four Courts Press, €8.95 pb, 70pp, ISBN 9781846826467) Terence Dooley, Castle Hyde: the changing fortunes of an Irish country house (Four Courts Press,€8.95 pb, 64pp, ISBN 9781846826436) Susan Marie Martin, The shawlies: Cork’s women street traders and the ‘merchant city’, 1901–50 (Four … Read more
JOHN CROWLEY, DONAL Ó DRISCEOIL and MIKE MURPHY (eds), and JOHN BORGONOVO (assoc. ed.) Cork University Press €59 ISBN 9781782051176 Reviewed by Matthew Stout We each, in our own way, commemorated the centenary of the Easter Rising last year. Because of family connections, Easter Monday morning found this reviewer outside the town of Ashbourne at … Read more
SUSAN GALAVAN Routledge £95 ISBN 9781472471727 Reviewed by Ellen Rowley Ellen Rowley lectures in the School of Architecture, University College Dublin. Dublin’s bourgeoishomes by architect-turned-historian Susan Galavan manages to bring something new and important to the already packed bookshelves on Dublin history. Because architecture, and specifically the more everyday architecture of housing, is the language … Read more