By Hiram Morgan The west coast of Ireland in the Elizabethan period was a place of refuge for English explorers, colonisers and privateers in distress after Atlantic voyages. Aiming to return to home ports in south-west England, they had instead to call into Kerry or Cork to resupply, repair or seek onward shipping. The locals … Read more
DAVID BURKE Mercier Press £14.99 ISBN 9781781177983 Reviewed by Ian S. Wood Ian S. Wood is co-author (with Andrew Sanders) of Times of Troubles: Britain’s war in Northern Ireland (2012) and Crimes of loyalty: a history of the UDA (2006). David Burke, on the opening page of his new book on British operations in the … Read more
MICHAEL B. BARRY Andalus Press €15.99 ISBN 9780993355486 Reviewed by Maurice Walsh Maurice Walsh is the author of Bitter freedom: Ireland in a revolutionary world 1918–1923 (Faber & Faber, 2015). The Irish War of Independence coincided with the birth of the age of propaganda. The American journalist Walter Lippmann—who had done his bit to … Read more
By Lasara Lynch Fionán Lynch was born on 17 March 1889 in Waterville, Co. Kerry. Irish was his first language and he attended Rockwell College and Blackrock College. He planned to study medicine, but his father died suddenly and instead he went to teach Irish in a school in Swansea, Wales, where he founded a … Read more
By Anne Casey On 16 December 1848, fifteen-year-old Catherine McNeill from Roscommon was one of 234 girls to board the Digby, the fifth ship of the Earl Grey scheme to ferry its live cargo of Irish orphan girls to Australia at the height of the Irish Great Hunger. Departing one of Ireland’s worst-hit counties—which … Read more