By Penny McGovern For this winter issue we present a couple of cheery Christmas crackers from the IFI Archive Player. See festive crowds gathering in 1960s Dublin city centre and South Wall to cheer as brave swimmers take a chilly dip and Santa water-skis up the Liffey. DUBLIN CHRISTMAS LIGHTS Gael Linn / 1962 / … Read more
By Joseph E.A. Connell Jr Éamon de Valera issued his famous ‘Legion of the Rearguard’ statement to anti-Treaty fighters on 24 May 1923: ‘Soldiers of the Republic. Legion of the Rearguard: The Republic can no longer be defended successfully by your arms. Further sacrifice of life would now be in vain and the continuance of … Read more
ALLYSON McCABE University of Texas Press $24.95 ISBN 9781477325704 Reviewed by Éamon Ó Caoineachan Éamon Ó Caoineachan is a freelance writer and poet at the University of St Thomas, Houston, Texas. ‘She didn’t just want to sing. She needed to scream’, writes music journalist Allyson McCabe in this biography, published in May, just two months … Read more
THE BATTLE TO CONTROL FEMALE FERTILITY IN MODERN IRELAND MARY E. DALY Cambridge University Press £25.99 ISBN 9781009314879 CONTRACEPTION AND MODERN IRELAND: A SOCIAL HISTORY, c. 1922–92 LAURA KELLY Cambridge University Press £22.99 ISBN 9781108839105 Reviewed by Mary Kenny Mary Kenny is the author of The way we were: Catholic Ireland since 1922 (Veritas, 2022). … Read more
PAUL O’BRIEN Cork University Press €49 ISBN 9781782053415 Reviewed by Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel is the author of Bernard Shaw, Seán O’Casey, and the dead James Connolly (Palgrave, 2021). As the centennial years of Seán O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy plays, The Shadow of the Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and … Read more