A Gansee production, directed by Kevin Brannigan and Graham Seely By Brian Hanley By any standards Seán Garland has led an interesting life. Raised in the tenements of north inner city Dublin, by his early twenties he was already an iconic figure among Irish republicans. Joining the IRA in 1953, he shortly afterwards enlisted in … Read more
Croke Park crokepark.ie/gaa-museum-tours/gaa-museum By Tony Canavan This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Gaelic Athletic Association Museum in Croke Park. The entrance to the museum in the Cusack Stand is impressive, as you have to pass a statue of Michael Cusack himself. If you did not already know, the museum soon … Read more
By Joe Culley At the height of the Famine, an English Quaker and philanthropist, James Hack Tuke, visited Connemara to assist the stricken populace and witnessed its full horrors. So when similar conditions threatened the region 30 years later, Tuke again mobilised his resources to help avert a catastrophe. His story is told in Gerard … Read more
JONATHAN EVERSHED Notre Dame Press £43 ISBN 9780268103859 Reviewed by Brian Hanley Brian Hanley is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. In contemporary Ireland, many see commemoration of the Great War as aiding reconciliation, hoping that the ‘shared human costs’ of the conflict might ‘transcend local Irish political sectarian differences’. As Jonathan Evershed … Read more
RICHARD GRAYSON Cambridge University Press £20 ISBN 9781107029255 Reviewed by John Gibney John Gibney is DFAT100 Project Co-ordinator with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy project. Richard Grayson’s Dublin’s great wars is an exploration of how Dubliners (from both city and county) participated in conflict during the revolutionary era. That means, in … Read more