BBC2, RTÉ2, 2013–17 By Brian Hanley The BBC’s drama Peaky Blinders, a fifth series of which is planned for next year, has had a major popular impact since it was first broadcast in 2013. Set in the years after the Great War, and based loosely on a nineteenth-century Birmingham gang of the same name, it … Read more
Fasnet Films, directed by Lance Daly By Emily Mark-FitzGerald The much-anticipated Black ’47 has arrived on Irish screens, and it would seem that revenge for Skibbereen has been achieved at last. A visually stunning film set in Famine-ravaged Connemara in the titular year, Black ’47 blends the mythic narrative of the Western genre with a … Read more
Coach House, Dublin Castle, www.artandthegreathunger.org Until the end of June 2018 By Tony Canavan ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger’ is the world’s largest collection of art relating to the Great Famine. Its permanent home is in Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. (Readers may remember that it featured in a previous … Read more
By Joe Culley In We bled together: Michael Collins, the Squad and the Dublin Brigade, Dominic Price collates much familiar material and, importantly, mines new sources to tell the story of Collins and his ‘Squad’ from before the War of Independence right through to the Civil War and beyond. This might be called a popular … Read more
MICHAEL RYAN Mercier Press €17.99 ISBN 9781781175187 Reviewed by Fergus Whelan Much has been written about the IRA in the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Historians, journalists and participants have published studies on the role of the Provisional IRA in our more recent ‘troubles’. Not nearly as much attention, however, has been … Read more