By Ray O’Connor Savings banks were financial institutions that promoted moral improvement among the lower social orders by advocating a strong work ethic, sobriety and thrift. They encouraged the poor to make financial provision for infirmity, illness and old age by offering a financial service that provided a safe place to deposit any savings. Savings … Read more
By Edel Bhreathnach One of my earliest memories is of going with my parents to the parish church in Killester, which was dedicated to St Brigit. It held a relic of St Brigit, reputedly part of her skull, which was brought there from Lisbon in 1929 for the church’s consecration. It was enshrined in a … Read more
MICHAEL MARY MURPHY and JIM ROGERS Equinox Publishing £70 ISBN 9781781797808 REVIEWED BY Donal Fallon Donal Fallon is the presenter of the ‘Three Castles Burning’ podcast. It may terrify some readers to read that the LPs that defined their teenage years are now being mulled over by historians and sociologists. In recent years, studies like … Read more
FRANK BARRY Oxford University Press £70 ISBN 9780198878230 REVIEWED BY Colm Keena Colm Keena is a journalist with the Irish Times. A late friend of mine who attended a Church of Ireland school used to tell of going for a job interview with Guardian Royal Exchange in Dublin in the late 1960s and not giving … Read more
DARRAGH GANNON Cambridge University Press €98 ISBN 9781009158299 REVIEWED BY Charles Townshend Charles Townshend is Professor Emeritus of International History at Keele University. The Irish in twentieth-century Britain have attracted plenty of attention from historians and are now being subjected to ever-closer scrutiny; in recent years a series of studies have appeared—foremost amongst them, perhaps, Mo … Read more