At the start of every academic year the university lecturer is faced with the task of recommending certain books to the new, eager crop of students taking his or her subject. Of equal importance, and frequently undertaken with even more enthusiasm, is the task of warning students off certain other books regarded as flawed, tainted, … Read more
Both these books were commissioned and, like the newspapers they serve to commemorate, they are different in orientation. The one dedicated to The Irish News is a collection of twenty-six articles by academics, journalists and writers to honour its centenary in 1991, to pay tribute to the skill, courage and objectivity of its journalists during … Read more
This is a thought provoking study. Sean Farren provides us not only with an insight into developments in the schools in both Northern Ireland and the Free State/Republic of Ireland, but shows the extent to which the schools were used by political and church powers to cultivate a particular, one-dimensional type of nationality, culture and … Read more
The name of Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920), the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison during the War of Independence, is familiar not only in Ireland but in countries where anti-colonial movements praised his example. Despite his fame, and the continuing resonance of the hunger strike in Irish political culture, there … Read more
In 1978 David Seth Jones completed his PhD, ‘Agrarian capitalism and rural social development in Ireland’, at Queen’s University, Belfast. Since then every serious scholar of modern Ireland has been in his debt. At times a slightly dry work—partly because so much of the evidence is drawn from official enquiries and reports—Jones’ thesis, nonetheless, stated … Read more