I read this book full on the heels of journalist Susan McKay’s Northern Protestants: an Unsettled People, and just as avidly. Both books emanate from troubled hearts asking the question—what was this thirty-years war in Northern Ireland all about? Susan McKay’s book belongs to the present and is the testimony of Protestants from various parts … Read more
Stephen Howe calls his Ireland and the Empire ‘a discourse about discourses’. It is actually a cut-and-paste polemic against nationalist historiography, post-colonial discourses, interdisciplinary literary criticism, Field Day, and Edward Said. Howe doesn’t like the comparisons the Irish make between themselves and others. Managerial rather than discursive, the book strings together obiter dicta, ceremonial academic … Read more
On 28 June 1914, Sir Roger Casement delivered an oration beside Shane O’Neill’s stone, above Cushendun, deep in the Glens of Antrim. It brought to an end six months of recruiting of Irish Volunteers and proved to be his last public address in Ireland. The following day he travelled to Glasgow and from there by … Read more
While the history of death and burial has over recent years become well established in Europe, it has, for many reasons, made little impact on Irish historiography. This is unfortunate for, as Susan Fry points out in the preface, many aspects of social, cultural and religious life in the past may be illuminated through study … Read more
Forty-five million people in the United States of America claim some degree of Irish heritage. Yet Irish America is often little understood on this side of the Atlantic. Too often Irish Americans are stereotyped as either romantics, nostalgic about a country they have never seen, or as uniformly racist, prone to supporting causes they do … Read more