Letter from America On the last Sunday in February, I attended Mass at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia. I was visiting that city to attend the 2025 national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. The cathedral is sumptuously decorated, and inevitably that distracted me from my prayers. Among…
Caricature and the Irish: Satirical prints from the Library of Trinity College Dublin, c.1780 –1830, by Nicholas K. Robinson (Four Courts Press, €40.00 / £35.00) Felix M. Larkin E.B. White, the noted children’s author, for decades a literary stalwart of the New Yorker, that great home for cartoonists of all kinds over the last…
John Redmond and Irish Parliamentary Traditions edited by Martin O’Donoghue and Emer Purcell (UCD Press, €30 / £24.90) This volume includes seven papers delivered at a symposium to honour John Redmond held in March 2018 as part of the Decade of Centenaries commemorations. To these two further papers have been added for publication. The aim of…
Walled in by Hate: Kevin O’Higgins,His Friends and Enemies, Arthur Mathews (Merrion Press, €19.99). The tragedy of the Irish Civil War and its legacy of hatred loom large in this new biography of Kevin O’Higgins by Arthur Mathews. Data on the Civil War fatalities recently published by a team of researchers in UCC highlights the…
Gerald Boland: A Life by Stephen Kelly (Eastwood Books / Wordwell, €20.00 / £18.99) Enoch Powell famously wrote that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure”. The career of Gerald Boland was no exception. A senior figure in the Fianna Fáil party from its foundation in…
Democracy in today’s world: can it survive? Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power by Erica Benner (Allan Lane, £25.00 / €29.50) This short book by political philosopher Erica Benner is a timely meditation on the nature of democracy, both ancient and modern. It is timely because democratic values are under threat everywhere today,…
Every March since 1991 has been designated Irish-American Heritage Month in the United States. President Biden has continued the practice again this year, and a proclamation to this effect was signed by him on February 29th. America has not always been so sympathetic towards Irish immigrants and their descendants, as this book illustrates. Written…
Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my Home Place, Martin Doyle (Merrion Press, £24.99). Martin Doyle tells us in the introduction to this book that the Linen Triangle “stretched from Lisburn across the southern shore of Lough Neagh to Dungannon in Co. Tyrone and south to Newry, the heartland of a trade that was both agricultural…
In the days after Christmas 1877, the Freeman’s Journal published a series of five articles that are generally acknowledged as the earliest piece of investigative journalism in Ireland.
Penelope Unbound, by Mary Morrissy (Banshee Press, €15.00) When James Joyce and Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste in 1904, Joyce left his inamorata sitting outside the railway station with their meagre luggage while he went into the city to find accommodation for them. In the city centre he intervened in a quarrel between some…