Through Irish Eyes is distinct from O’Farrell’s earlier works in that it is not a conventional academic type history in the written sense, rather it is a collection of photographs, posters and cartoons whose intention it is to both at once celebrate and give some insight into an earlier culture of ‘Irishness’ in an adopted … Read more
Coleridge and Matthew Arnold defended the Church of England on the grounds that its clergy spread civilisation among their flocks. Canon P.A. Sheehan of Doneraile (1852-1913) hoped the Catholic clergy might perform the same role in Ireland. Since the early 1970s critics and social historians have used his novels and those of his less well-known … Read more
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘miasma’ as ‘infectious or noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous particles or germs floating in and polluting the atmosphere’. Before the later nineteenth-century scientific discoveries of Pasteur, Lister and Koch established the germ origin of infection, many medical practitioners believed that the environment was responsible for the … Read more
The British empire balks large in Irish history and the Irish experience but is one of such ambivalence that it rarely gets examined in a thoughtful and systematic fashion. The ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series has provided Keith Jeffrey with an opportunity to start filling in this gaping hole. His introduction, nuanced around whether Ireland’s role … Read more
The 1790s have emerged, over the past fifteen years or so, as the focus of some of the most vigorous and challenging writing currently forthcoming from Irish historians. In that explosion of debate and reinterpretation, Kevin Whelan is recognised as a central figure. The appearance of The Tree of Liberty will thus attract wide and … Read more