PATRICK W. HAYES Boydell and Brewer £90 ISBN 9781783277063 REVIEWED BY Simon Egan Simon Egan is a lecturer in Medieval Irish History at Queen’s University, Belfast. Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the environmental history of pre-modern Ireland. This very welcome study by Patrick Hayes adds to this growing body of research. The … Read more
By Joseph E.A. Connell Jr On 4 November 1922, Ernie O’Malley was captured after a shoot-out with National Army soldiers at the family home of Nell O’Rahilly Humphries, 36 Ailesbury Road, which had been his headquarters for six weeks. Severely affected by his wounds—he was hit over nine times—O’Malley was transferred from Portobello military hospital … Read more
By Donal Fallon As far as Irish civic museum spaces go, Galway’s is particularly busy. Active within the cultural life of a city more synonymous with the arts and heritage than any other on the island, its exhibitions in 2023 included the wonderfully titled The West is Awake (from one West Coast to Another), exploring … Read more
PAUL O’BRIEN Cork University Press €49 ISBN 9781782053415 Reviewed by Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel is the author of Bernard Shaw, Seán O’Casey, and the dead James Connolly (Palgrave, 2021). As the centennial years of Seán O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy plays, The Shadow of the Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and … Read more
By Charles Lysaght The Kildare Street Club was well described by nationalist leader John Dillon as ‘the sacred ark of the covenant of Toryism; of the most benighted Toryism in Ireland’. Its members were drawn from the landed aristocracy and gentry, as well as from judges and leading figures in the pre-independence administration. Although the … Read more