DON O’LEARY Eryn Press €18.99 ISBN 9781788461641 Reviewed by Peter Boylan Peter Boylan is a former Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin. Don O’Leary examines a range of contentious issues, from contraception and abortion to human embryonic stem cell research and assisted suicide, which have been, and continue to be, controversial. The focus … Read more
BARRY KENNERK (ed.) Ashbourne Historical Society €20 ISBN 9781527254633 Reviewed by Stephen Doyle Stephen Doyle is a history graduate of University College Dublin. In his hilariously tongue-in-cheek 1967 article, ‘How Not to Write Local History’, H.P.R. Finberg notes two main problems: first, the tendency among ‘accomplished bunglers’ to eschew referencing and, second, their disastrous foreshortening … Read more
GILLIAN O’BRIEN Doubleday €16.99 ISBN 9781781620502 Reviewed by John Gibney John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. Gillian O’Brien’s new book could be described as a travelogue of Ireland’s ‘dark tourism’—those sites associated with the titular famine, death and rebellion, explored here by the author with … Read more
ALEXANDER O’HARA Oxford University Press €62.65 ISBN 9780190858001 Reviewed by Meredith Cutrer Meredith Cutrer is a Ph.D student in University College Dublin’s School of History. Whether one loves him or hates him, few will disagree that the Irish monk Columbanus was remarkable. At once an unyielding ascetic, a provocative firebrand, an indefatigable monastic founder, an … Read more
MARIA LUDDY and MARY O’DOWD Cambridge University Press £74.99 ISBN 9781108731904 Reviewed by Mary Kenny It was said that a traditional Irish marriage proposal was ‘Would you like to be buried with my people?’, which was thought both comical and macabre. If ever such a proposal was made, however, it did underline quite shrewdly the … Read more