EOIN O’MALLEY Eriu €23.99 ISBN 9871804442685 REVIEWED BY Brian Girvin Brian Girvin is Honorary Professor of Contemporary Politics at the University of Glasgow. Charles J. Haughey and Garret FitzGerald dominated Irish politics for nearly a decade during what was an especially turbulent time. Ireland was the ‘sick man’ of Europe for much of this period, … Read more
DAVID MCCULLAGH Gill Books €26.99 ISBN 9781804581469 REVIEWED BY John Gibney John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy programme. On 19 December 1921, during the acrimonious Dáil debates that followed the signing of the ‘articles of agreement’ that became the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Michael Collins gave the best-known … Read more
SAMUEL G. BECKTON Peter Lang £30 ISBN 9781803749891 REVIEWED BY Ivan Gibbons Ivan Gibbons is a former Director of Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. This book is a fantastic read—in the original sense of the word. In the tradition of counterfactual or alternative history, it is a fantasy asking a fundamental conjectural question. … Read more
JAMES QUINN UCD Press €30 ISBN 9781068502347 REVIEWED BY Timothy Murtagh Timothy Murtagh is a Research Fellow with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin. The literature on the 1798 rebellion is unusually crowded for an event that remains, for many readers, oddly elusive. Its narrative complexity, geographical fragmentation and moral ambiguity have … Read more
By Daragh Fitzgerald An American visitor to our shores recently asked me whether Catherine Connolly was Ireland’s first female president and was delightfully surprised to hear that three of our last four presidents have been women. While we still have a lot to do regarding the position of women in Irish society, that we have … Read more