By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls The decade of centenaries trundles on. We have entered the final third, the violence ramps up and a bitter conclusion in vicious civil war comes faintly into view. Of course, we are immersed in our own historic, heart-breaking social upheaval right now. Many of us have cried in the last few … Read more
THOMAS LEAHY Cambridge University Press £18.99 pb 9781108767033 Reviewed by Patrick Mulroe Patrick Mulroe is the author of Bombs, bullets and the border. Policing Ireland’s frontier: Irish security policy, 1969–1978 (Irish Academic Press, 2017). In The intelligence war against the IRA, Cardiff University politics lecturer Thomas Leahy deals with some of the big questions related … Read more
COLIN BARR Cambridge University Press £75 ISBN 9781107040922 Reviewed by Oliver P. Rafferty SJ Oliver P. Rafferty SJ is professor of modern Irish and ecclesiastical history at Boston College. Colin Barr sets out to tell the story of the dominance of the Irish Catholic Church in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, and what … Read more
LOUISE NUGENTColumba Books€26.99ISBN 9781782183723 Reviewed by Meredith Cutrer Meredith Cutrer is a Ph.D student in University College Dublin’s School of History. One need not have spent much time studying medieval Ireland to appreciate that the Irish landscape is imbued with the sacred. As the number of holy sites attest, religion has long been a powerful … Read more
DARREN McGETTIGAN Four Courts Press €24.95 ISBN 9781846828362 Reviewed by Seán Duffy Seán Duffy is Professor of Medieval Irish and Insular History at Trinity College, Dublin. Readers will know that there are four provinces in Ireland—Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht. Many will also know that the Irish for ‘province’ is cúige—hence we say Cúige Uladh, … Read more