Peter Costello
J. Anthony Gaughan
As a keen follower of Gaelic games, I found Eamonn Sweeney’s The Last Ditch: How One GAA Championship Gave a Sports Writer Back his Life the most interesting book of the year.
In the first two chapters Eamonn reveals the challenges – phobias – which he has to overcome in plying his trade. In the rest of the book in a way no other writer has done he captures the ambience, culture and traditions which enshrine Gaelic games. He attended Gaelic football and hurling matches across Ireland during the All-Ireland Championships of 2024. He describes the ‘build-up’ and aftermath of matches, the fans of the various teams and the exchanges he had with them.
Sweeney is greatly impressed by the football skills of David Clifford and claims that he already enjoys the legendary aura that surrounded Cork’s Christy Ring and Kerry’s Mick O’Connell. He also comments on managers and refers to the unsurpassed success of Brian Cody as Kilkenny’s hurling manager.
Sweeney welcomes the new rules introduced into football by Jim Gavin and his committee. He also welcomes the remarkable upsurge and interest in the GAA women’s games of Camogie and Ladies’ Gaelic football and he congratulates the GAA for their practical concern for players struggling with addictions and mental health difficulties.
Mary Kenny
Iwas deeply affected by Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (Persephone Press, £15.00) – the story of a jolly, high-spirited, normal Bavarian family in the 1930s, and how the rise of the Nazi party gradually comes to dominate their lives.
At first, life improves – the sons get jobs and opportunities. Then the daughter’s Catholic-raised boyfriend is discovered to have Jewish ancestry, and the shadows begin to fall…Written in 1934, Persephone books re-issued this moving novel this year.
Since I wrote a couple of books seeking to explain why Catholic Christianity had been an essential foundation to Irish identity, I was drawn to a parallel theme in Bijan Onrani’s God is an Englishman – Christianity and the Creation of England (Swift Press, £25.00 / €35.00)
This Anglo-Persian author is a real scholar and impressively establishes how every aspect of English (and then British) culture starts with St Augustine’s arrival in 597. Law, education, governance, art, music, literature all flow from that event – and St Bede is also a key figure.
Joe Carroll
Although John Montague was a decade older than Seamus Heaney, his poetic career often seemed to lie in the shadow of the future Nobel prize winner, even though Montague was convinced that he had a formative influence on the early work of his fellow Ulster poet.
As Montague struggled at first to have his work published, he could only envy later the young Heaney’s apparently effortless rise in the British as well as Irish poetic worlds.
While Montague struggled for acknowledgement by his peers, Heaney seemed to pick up awards on an annual basis. Although they became friends, Montague was disappointed that his influence through his early poems set in the Ulster countryside was not publicly accepted.
It was cruel for Montague to have the launch of his Collected Poems in 1995 to be overshadowed within hours by the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Heaney. But he was grateful for Heaney’s public acknowledgement of the older poet’s early inspiration.
Adrian Frazier’s biography is a marvellous work of research on every facet of Montague’s life and work, including his turbulent married life with three spouses. He also highlights how the poet had to cope with a humiliating stutter, which could spoil his public readings.
The biographer describes how Montague’s Ulster nationalism, nourished by his deep knowledge of history, folklore and the Irish language, was further fanned by the breaking out of the “Troubles” in 1969. He even read one of his poems outside Armagh jail while Bernadette Devlin was serving time there.
Also much appreciated by Montague was his appointment, soon after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, in effect the Poet Laureate. This biography will add to his poetic reputation. He died in 2016 in France, a country he loved and which had given him one of its highest awards.
Frank Litton
Pierre Manent, the French political philosopher makes a strong case in Challenging modern atheism and indifference, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defence of the Christian Proposition (University of Notre Dame Press), that Pascal’s reflections on faith and belief are particularly relevant at this time.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a brilliant mathematician and physicist, contributed the new science that displaced the classic or medieval worldview. Far from sharing its secularism, he was appalled by it. In November 1654, he had an intense experience of a loving God, a reality that so many of his contemporaries could not grasp. How could they be brought to recognise it? Pascal understood that the answer could not be found in either philosophy or science.
Pascal died, his apologia unfinished. He left us with a collection of observations, his famous Pensees.
Manent gives us a lucid account of Pascal’s vision of the paradoxes of the human condition, where the highest possibilities of love and understanding are confounded by the miseries, many self-inflicted, of life. We are shown how Christianity illuminates the perplexities of our existence with the promise of salvation.
Thomas McCarthy
The book that has given me the greatest pleasure this year is Colm Tóibín’s masterful Ship in Full Sail (Gallery Books, €16.95). It is more than mere essays, it is a work of Belles Lettres.
While he was ‘Irish Laureate for Fiction’ Tóibín wrote an essay a month for three years. Here they are, wise, insightful, provocative, learned. Fr O’Sullivan SJ, Paul Funge, Tim Robinson, Eileen Gray, Thomas Kilroy, George Clancy and Cathal Brugha, all parade across these pages.
And places, Enniscorthy, San Francisco, Barcelona, come to life with ravishing strength.
Tóibín inserts high doses of the most astonishing insights, such as this seemingly casual remark upon Borges in the Shelbourne: ‘He marvelled at the idea that Shakespeare wrote ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ rather than ‘made of’. Such a pearl dropped into 2025, a book of exact moments.
Patricia Rumsey
Of all the many works on medieval Irish monasticism, this is probably the most comprehensive and one of the best possible introductions. The ‘Golden Age’ of monastic life in Ireland is reckoned to have flourished during the sixth and seventh centuries and to have centred around such well-known figures as Columbanus of Bobbio and Columba of Iona.
The author concentrates her work on primary sources, many of them in Irish and also devotes welcome attention to the women monastics of that era”
This major work of Edel Bhreathnach, Monasticism in Ireland AD 900 – 1250 (Dublin: Four Courts Press) moves the study onward into a lesser-known period where monastic life in Ireland was developing distinguishing attributes of its own while still remaining faithful to fundamental monastic principles as they were lived out in practice in a specifically Irish environment. The author concentrates her work on primary sources, many of them in Irish and also devotes welcome attention to the women monastics of that era.
This is primarily a book for the serious reader, but has much that will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more of Irish monastic history and the individuals who lived it out during those centuries. Warmly and enthusiastically recommended!
Thomas O’Loughlin
Fake news is not new, nor is its first cousin: historical amnesia – wilfully forgetting those parts of our past that seem ‘not to fit.’ One cannot imagine Donald Trump being a great devotee of critical historical writing: it’s easier just to make up a past that suits!
Therefore, in a time like ours, Cormac Ó Grada’s The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars (Princeton University Press) is a ‘must read’ when historical amnesia – Trump, Putin, Orban, Farage, et al. – is once more an accepted part of public discourse.
Ó Grada, a UCD professor, does the hard work of looking at the real cost of bellicose nationalism: the civilian casualty numbers. This critical engagement with the facts of the past, not the rosy warm romance of jingoism, is why we need historians; and Ó Grada is a master.
This was not pleasant reading, but it is a sobering piece of research and a sure antidote in 2025 to some of the pronouncements passed out as ‘facts.’ I cannot see the price of this hardback on the back cover – but it has been worth every cent.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice
Among the books of the year is surely the magnificent The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Faber), not just a book but an event, a monument to the master.
One of the editors of the Heaney book is the poet Bernard O’Donoghue, himself a master.
His new book, The Anchorage, also from Faber, is a tour de force from beginning to end. It takes off from the perfect point of departure, his native place, Cullen in Co. Cork where he finds magic in the mundane.
A poet of great empathy and compassion, in poems with an edge “as keen as a new haircut”, he has built “a house into which the rain can’t pour/a refuge where no spear-point’s feared”. Like the maker in his eponymous poem he has “worked/ to leave the world better than he found it”. A memorable, powerful collection.
Aubrey Malone
Most poignant book of the year: A tie between Jennifer Connolly’s Deadly Silence and Sarah Corbett Lynch’s A Time for Truth (both Hachette Ireland, £13.05 and £14.19).
Sarah’s father Jason, was brutally murdered in 2016. Jennifer lost her sister and three nephews in an equally traumatic murder/suicide. Both authors focus on the many unanswered questions following these tragedies, and in Sarah’s case, a gross miscarriage of justice.
Best Historical Record: Dr Caroline West’s Wrong Women (Eriu, £10.99) was a grim portrayal of Dublin’s lurid red light district, “Monto,” which Frank Duff was instrumental in closing down in 1925.
Best Oral History: Irish Nurses in the NHS (Four Courts Press, £16.39). A fascinating collection of 45 interviews conducted with Irish nurses trained in England in the 1950s and 60s.
Best Novel: Caragh Maxwell’s Sugartown (Oneworld, £10.79). Almost every page in this coruscating account of rural Ireland is like a poem.
Ian d’Alton
My Book of the Year is Lin Rose Clark, Swift Blaze of Fire – Olympian, Cleric, Brigadista: the Enigmatic Life of Robert Hilliard (Lilliput Press, 2025). This book clutches the heartstrings as it chronicles a compressed, short, disordered life, and a man who had the capacity to hurt those he most loved.
This book is about an individual life; but much more it interrogates those universal human passions that inform all our little lives”
Robert Hilliard of Tralee came from the Protestant ‘shopkeeperate’ of southern Ireland. A college boxer, he fought for the Irish Free State at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. But he made a disastrous marriage, gambled and drank, eventually becoming a Church of Ireland priest.
Finally, he went off to Spain to fight against Franco, killed there in 1937. A deeply moving conclusion has Clark’s mother, Hilliard’s daughter, lifted from a lifetime’s burden of guilt and disappointment after the discovery of an old postcard from Spain.
This book is about an individual life; but much more it interrogates those universal human passions that inform all our little lives. Long or short, high or wide, we are on essentially the same journey as Robert Hilliard.
Charles Lysaght
My Book of the Year is Military Maverick (Pen and Sword Books, €29,20), edited by Lavinia Greacen. It was short-listed for the Templer Prize, the equivalent for military historians of the Booker.
It contains the war diary and letters of Cavan-man Eric Dorman-Smith, known as “Chink”, who was chief of staff and strategic adviser to General Claude Auchinleck when, in July 1942, they stopped in his tracks Germany’s ace general Erwin Rommel, who had been sweeping all before him advancing into Egypt.
This was not enough for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wanted an immediate counter-offensive and had Dorman Smith sacked. Embittered by his demotion, he retired to Ireland, Gaelesised his name to Dorman O’Gowan and campaigned against Partition.
His diaries and letters contain perceptive observations on important historical events and actors. The book also contains Chink’s correspondence with his close friend Ernest Hemmingway, who idolised him and used him as a model for several characters