By Joseph E.A. Connell Éamon de Valera commanded the Boland’s Mills garrison during the 1916 Rising. After the surrender he was court-martialled and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. In prison, de Valera began to show his leadership qualities. On 7 June 1917, Major Willie Redmond, MP for East Clare, was killed in … Read more
DAVID ARMITAGE Yale University Press £18.99 ISBN 9780300149821 Reviewed by: Eoin Dillon An air of self-congratulation wafted off the panjandrums as they passed judgement on the commemorative events of 1916. ‘That went well’, they concluded: no outbreaks of civil disturbance, no attacks on state power, not even a discernible spike in support for advanced nationalism. … Read more
VALERIE JONES Ashfield Press €25 ISBN 9780995672208 Reviewed by: Sinéad McCoole This book gives the reader much more than the subtitle suggests—the breadth of references span over 400 years, from a description of the alphabet and catechism in the Irish language in 1571 to references to the Irish Guild of the Church (Cumann Gaelach na … Read more
VINCENT MORLEY Cork University Press €39 ISBN 9781782052081 Reviewed by: Jim Smyth This book is arranged in an unconventional way: eight thematic chapters, in proximate chronological sequence, on ‘kingdom’, ‘faith’, ‘memory’, ‘war’, ‘patriots’, ‘land’, ‘rebellion’ and ‘union’, are each prefaced by Irish-language poems, ranging from three to eight pages in length, with facing translations into … Read more
PETER CROOKS and SEÁN DUFFY (eds) Four Courts Press €26.95 ISBN 97801846825712 Reviewed by: Eamon Darcy By the nineteenth century the Geraldines, despite being among the original ‘conquistadors’ of Ireland in the twelfth century, represented ‘the essence of all things Gaelic … and the struggle for freedom from English rule’. This enduring perception is a … Read more