Searching for their future: the Ulster Unionists

A People under Siege: the Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond, by Aaron Edwards (Merrion Press, €19.99) A touchy defensiveness, if not downright paranoia, has often seemed to be the defining character of Ulster Unionism since it first began to emerge as a distinct political phenomenon in the 19th Century. Aaron…

An Irish culture flamed upon the night

Left without a handkerchief, by Robert O’Byrne (Lilliput Press, €18.00/£16.00) The title of this erudite, elegant and elegiac book from ‘The Irish Aesthete’ blog writer Robert O’Byrne captures the essential “grand tragedy” that befell the Irish gentry in their “twilight”, to quote Mark Bence-Jones. Here O’Byrne takes advantage of a tight focus and a circumscribed…

An ‘act of war’ clouded by controversy

Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush by Eve Morrison (Irish Academic Press, €19.95/£16.95) Here in Ireland, we had a very economical revolution, with possibly no more than about 5,000 fatalities in the period from 1919 to 1923. By contrast Finland’s contemporaneous civil war, an outcrop of the Russian Revolution, a struggle between right…

A culture flaming on the midnight sky

Burning the Big House: The story of the Irish country house in a time of war and revolution, by Terence Dooley (Yale University Press, £25.00/€30.00) The Anglo-Irish descendancy from the mid-19th century is the stuff of grand tragedy. Everywhere there are echoes of the elegiac. The men and women of the caste were relatively wealthy,…

Oh for the safety of a desert island!

In this series, some literary collaborators will be giving suggestions for lockdown reading, books of all kinds to amuse and raise our spirits. This week: Ian d’Alton writes about The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)   For adults, children’s books often open a window onto a…

From Clonbur to Allantown: a Gaelic colony in rural Co. Meath

The Lost Gaeltacht: the Land Commission Migration – Clonbur, County Galway to Allenstown, County Meath by Martin O’Halloran (Homefarm Publishing, €29.00. Available online from Mayo Books) Ian
 d’Alton On March 29, 1940, two buses left Clonbur village, sandwiched between Loughs Mask and Corrib, Co. Galway. They carried 24 apprehensive families to a hopeful new life in…