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…
Sean O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy – The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) – was the first effort at demythologising the Irish revolution in the public sphere. As Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, these plays “are not revolutionary, and are even counter-revolutionary in their implications and…
France on trial: The case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson (Allan Lane, £25.00/€29.50) Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during World War II, was put on trial for treason at the end of the war in 1945. It was essentially a show trial, ordered by the provisional government newly installed…
Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell, by Paul Bew (Oxford University Press, £25.00/ €29.50) The great Irish constitutional nationalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, with its twin aims of land reform and Home Rule, has been largely disregarded and uncelebrated in the Ireland that emerged from the 1916…
Trieste Joyce School 2023 James Joyce lived in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, albeit with one interval of nine months spent in Rome in 1906-7. He moved to neutral Switzerland because of the First World War in 1915, but returned briefly to Trieste in 1919 before going to Paris where he would remain for almost…
The first great charity of this town: Belfast Charitable Society and its role in the developing city edited by Olwen Purdue (Irish Academic Press, €29.95/£24.99) The Belfast Charitable Society was established in 1752 for the purpose of raising funds to build a poorhouse and hospital for the poor of Belfast. The result was the building…
The recent attack on Salman Rushdie, like the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, raises fundamental questions about the limits of free speech. There are no easy answers. Those of us who live in liberal democracies are predictably appalled by the very idea of restrictions, formal or otherwise, on our freedom of speech.…
