Book Reviews

FOOD RIOTING IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: the moral economy and the Irish crowd

By Eoin Dillon JAMES KELLY, Four Courts Press, €45, ISBN 9791846826399 Eoin Dillin is a scholar of twentieth-century African history. An extravagant generalisation: predominantly agrarian societies share some basic characteristics. Life is dependent on the vagaries of immediate food production and storage; the technology involved is basic and stable, knowledge accrued is experientially based, and … Read more

HANNA SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON: suffragette and Sinn Féiner

MARGARET WARD (ed.) UCD Press €35/£30 ISBN 9781910820148 Reviewed by Patrick Maum This valuable book is a picture of an activist in her own words. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was essentially a rationalist (she loved books and disliked music), a believer in the ability of reason to bring about social improvement, whose personality had been shaped … Read more

Alfie: the life and times of Alfie Byrne

TREVOR WHITE Penguin Ireland €17.99 ISBN 9781844884247 Reviewed by Frank MacGabhann Frank MacGabhann is a lawyer and commentator working in Dublin and Barcelona. In 1911 Alfred Byrne (otherwise known to Dubliners as ‘Alfie’), a diminutive publican and former bicycle mechanic with little education, was elected to Dublin Corporation (not Dublin City Council, as the author … Read more

The Belfast Jacobin: Samuel Neilsonand the United Irishmen

KENNETH L. DAWSON Irish Academic Press €22.99 ISBN 9781911024750 Reviewed by Sylvie Kleinman Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin. Firmly admired by his fellow United Irishmen, Samuel Neilson (1762–1802) did not attain martial glory nor die a sacrificial death in 1798. With hisreputation tarnishedby accusations of reckless … Read more

The Civil Warin Dublin: the fight for the Irishcapital, 1922–24

JOHN DORNEY Merrion €19.99 ISBN 9781785370892 Reviewed by John Gibney John Gibney is Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 100 Project co-ordinator with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy project. One of the great set pieces of the Irish revolution is the outbreak of the Civil War in Dublin in June 1922—the … Read more