Ireland Through Birds: Journeys in search of a wild nation by Conor W. O’Brien (Merrion Press, €16.95) Christopher
 Moriarty   Like many, perhaps the majority of, birdwatchers, Conor W. O’Brien became addicted to the hobby in childhood. He shares his joy in encounters with birds and the wild environment in general in this remarkable book.…

Ireland: A voice among the nations by John Gibney, Michael Kennedy & Kate O’Malley (Royal Irish Academy, €30.00) Joe
 Carroll Ireland’s foreign policy over the past 100 years may seem secondary to how the country has evolved politically, economically and culturally, but this book shows how closely they are intertwined. This is “an official history…

101 Reasons why Cork is Better than Dublin by Jim Fitzpatrick (Mercier Press, €6.99 / £5.99) Dubliners will need a lot of persuading that there is any substance in Jim Fitzpatrick’s notion that Cork is a better place: if it is why are so many Corkonians in Dublin? The rivalries of the two cities are…

The Village of Bernadette: The Irish Connections – Lourdes Stories, Miracles & Cures by Colm Keane & Una O’Hagan (Capel Island, €14.99) Lourdes has long been a premier destination of Irish pilgrims. It has answered to something in the Irish psyche. This is the theme that the husband and wife writing team of Colm Keane…

The Murder of Dr Muldoon by Ken Boyle & Tim Desmond (Mercier Press, €12.99) Dr Patrick Muldoon was a GP in Mohill, Co Leitrim. On March 18, 1923 he attended his weekly Sunday-night card game at the parochial house with his friends Canon Michael Masterson and Edward Geelan, clerk of the District Council. On his…

It Has to be Said by Brian D’Arcy (Sliabh Bán Productions, €24.00/£22.00) Next month, Fr Brian D’Arcy will celebrate a half century in the priesthood. This book is a second tranche of his life story, at the beginning of which he thanks his Passionist brethren for all their understanding since he entered their order in…

View Ireland: Collecting Photography Curated by Anne Hodge, Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Sarah McAuliffe, Curatorial Fellow, NGI Hugh Lane Room, NGI, Merrion Square West, Dublin 2, runs to 2 February 2020 The first image that meets the eye of the visitor to this select show of Irish photographs is one of Evelyn Hofer’s…

The Kirwan Murder Case, 1852: a glimpse of the Irish Protestant middle class in the mid-nineteenth century By Suzanne Leeson (Maynooth Studies in Local History/Four Courts Press, Dublin, €9.95) Ian
d’Alton The Maynooth Studies in Local History is a prodigious series of scholarly works (this is number 141) focusing on the local as illuminating wider themes.…

Mainly about Books In the winter of 1897 two English explorers found in the municipal rubbish heaps of an ancient city called Oxyrhynchus (120 miles south of Cairo) a fragment of a papyrus, dating from the 2nd or 3rd Century. The text written on it was one hitherto unknown. The single leaf contained parts of…

Murder on the Missions. A True Story by Jean Harrington (Mercier Press, €14.99) Garrett
 Sheehan   It was the murder of Fr Rufus Halley at Malabang in the province of Lanao del Sur on August 28, 2001 that led to this unputdownable account of the lives and work of Columban Missionaries in the Philippines during…