Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 324
History’s Daughter: A Memoir of the Only Child of Terence MacSwiney by Maire MacSwiney Brugha
Hardback; 28.00 Euro / 34.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 320 pages, with black-and-white photos throughout
Maire MacSwiney Brugha is the only child of Terence MacSwiney, one of the greatest figures in Ireland's history, who died after seventy-three days on hunger strike in Brixton Prison on 25 October 1920. His death became worldwide news. After her father's death, Maire was taken by her mother to live on the continent. For nine years she lived away from Ireland, mostly in Germany and occasionally in Paris. She grew up effectively as a German child, speaking the language and attending school at a time when her adopted country would shortly descend into chaos. In the early thirties, when she was still in her early teens, Maire made a dramatic escape with her aunt, Maire MacSwiney, home to Ireland, against her mother's wishes. This led to a court case claiming Maire had been kidnapped but this claim was strongly refuted and Maire remained with her aunt in Cork. In 1945, she married Ruairi Brugha, the son of another famous republican, Cathal Brugha, thus uniting two of Ireland's most prominent and revered nationalist families.
Young Tigers and Mongrel Foxes: A Life in Politics by Paddy Harte
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 350 pages, with an 8-page black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
Much more than another political memoir, this is an honest, no-punches-pulled account of Irish politics by a man who served as a Dail Deputy for thirty-six years, including a revealing appraisal of the personalities and leadership of James Dillon, Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald, Alan Dukes and John Bruton. With a constituency adjoining the Border, Paddy Harte had a particular understanding of the Northern situation and the book discloses his pioneering attempts to create dialogue between activists and politicians on all sides of the divide at a time when such contact was unheard of.
The Encyclopedia of Dublin: Revised and Expanded by Douglas Bennett
Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 336 pages
In the 12 years since first publication of Douglas Bennett's Encyclopaedia of Dublin, the city it described has changed beyond recognition. This new edition reflects those changes. In addition to re-writing most existing entries, he has included over eighty new ones. Among the new entries are articles on the Digital Hub, The Dublin Docklands Development Authority, the Port Tunnel, the new signage system for orbital routes, the Ringsend Sewage Treatment Works, the Spire, and Standfast Dick. The Encyclopaedia of Dublin is the standard reference work on the city. This new edition will consolidate Douglas Bennett's reputation as the outstanding contemporary chronicler of the Irish capital.
Dublin Review Number 20 Autumn 2005 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 7.50 Euro / 10.50 USD / 5.00 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
This issue contains: Why we need another Collins biography: How did he get it? How did he use it? by Peter Hart. Foreign Laughter: Translating the Hungarians by George Szirtes. Irish Citizenship: Shifting Boundaries by Belinda McKeon. Breakfast in Hiroshima (from The Third Party) by Glenn Patterson. Land Clearance: Landscape and memoir in the Sudentenlands by Justin Quinn. The Strangeness of Elizabeth Bowen by George O’Brien. Stories: Monkey Island by Lisa Steppe, The Retreat from Moscow by Philip O Ceallaigh.
Confessions of a Pagan Nun by Kate Horsley
Paperback; 12.00 Euro / 15.00 USD / 9.00 UK; 190 pages
Cloistered in a stone cell at the monastery of St. Brigid, a sixth-century Irish nun secretly records the memories of her Pagan youth, interrupting her assigned task of transcribing Augustine and Patrick. She also writes of her fiercely independent mother, whose skill with healing plants and inner strength she inherited. She writes of her druid teacher, the brusque but magnetic Giannon, who first introduced her to the mysteries of written language. But disturbing events at the cloister keep intervening. As the monastery is rent by vague and fantastic accusations, Gwynneve’s words become the one force that can save her from annihilation.
The Changeling by Kate Horsely
Large Format Paperback; 16.00 Euro / 20.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 340 pages
Here, the author of the acclaimed Confessions of a Pagan Nun takes us to fourteenth-century Ireland for a strange and luminous tale of the elusive nature of identity and of triumph in adversity. The Changeling of Finnistuath is the story of Grey, a peasant girl who is raised as a boy, and who, until adolescence, never doubts herself to be male. The revelation of her womanhood marks the beginning of her journey–including son, whore, warrior, and mother–each of which brings its own special wisdom, but none of which, she discovers, can ultimately define her. In the course of her adventurous life, Grey deals with all the challenges of her tumultuous age–from political oppression to corrupt Church hierarchy to the horrors of the Black Death–ultimately finding peace and a kind of redemption by embracing the beautifully impermanent quality of identity that her unusual life has enabled her to understand.
Colors: Ireland from Bombs to Boom by Henry McDonald
Paperback; 12.00 Euro / 15.00 USD / 8.00 UK; 256 pages [Add To Basket]
Henry McDonald's childhood and teenage years were dominated by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Growing up in the Markets - a working-class Catholic district of central Belfast - he witnessed IRA men and British soldiers being shot down outside his door. His home was smashed up by the British troops on Internment Day in 1971, then bombed by loyalist terrorists four years later. But despite being caught up in the maelstrom of incipient civil war, McDonald managed to escape his background. He became a punk rocker in 1977 and, a year later, joined a group of young soccer hooligans who followed Irish League side Cliftonville. Colours, however, is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicentre of political and sectarian conflict. McDonald time-travels in two directions: first, back to the dark days of Ulster's violent past; second, into the twenty-first century, using some of the key incidents of his boyhood and youth to compare the Ireland of the past with the Ireland of today. It is a journey that takes him from the GPO in Dublin, a revered site in the history of Irish republicanism where the 1916 Easter Rising was launched, to the sex shops and swinging parties of postmodern hedonistic Dublin. Filled with football thugs, terrorists, paedophile priests, abuse survivors, drug dealers, comic writers and modern-day martyrs, Colours exposes Ireland in all its complexity and diversity, as seen through the eyes of someone who has experienced first-hand an island and a nation undergoing revolutionary changes.
Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for Son Long? by Tom Garvin
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 340 pages [Add To Basket]
Between the years of the mid thirties through to 1960, independent Ireland suffered from economic stagnation, and also went through a period of intense cultural and psychological repression. While external circumstances account for much of the stagnation - especially the depression of the thirties and the Second World War - "Preventing the Future" argues that the situation was aggravated by internal circumstances. The key domestic factor was the failure to extend higher and technical education and training to larger sections of the population. This derived from political stalemates in a small country which derived in turn from the power of the Catholic Church, the strength of the small-farm community, the ideological wish to preserve an older society and, later, gerontocratic tendencies in the political elites and in society as a whole. While economic growth did accelerate after 1960, the political stand-off over mass education resulted in large numbers of young people being denied preparation for life in the modern world and, arguably, denied Ireland a sufficient supply of trained labour and educated citizens. Ireland's Celtic Tiger of the nineties was in great part driven by a new and highly educated and technically trained workforce. The political stalemates of the forties and fifties delayed the initial, incomplete take-off until the sixties and resulted in the Tiger arriving nearly a generation later than it might have.
1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy by Tom Garvin
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 244 pages [Add To Basket]
This book examines the birth of the Irish state and sets it in its European historical context. The process of democratic nation-making reached full fruition while a vicious civil war was raging, ostensibly fought over points of political principle but actually deciding whether Ireland was to be ruled by popular majority will or by a virtuous but unaccountable minority. Garvin argues that militant republicanism always lacked popular, democratic legitimacy. The mainstream Irish nationalist tradition was moderate and realistic, and it was this nation-building tradition that triumphed in 1922. The stability and good order of the Irish state owes much to this victory. In particular, because the democratic impulse in Irish life overcame the cult of the virtuous minority, Ireland did not go the way of so many other newly emerging European states. There were to be no military dictators or fascist interludes; instead, there evolved a stable democracy, which eventually came to include most of those defeated in 1922. 'Tom Garvin ...delivers in full measure those qualities which those who know his earlier work will be looking for: new source material, a nose for the big issue, jugular-graspin Since there are half a dozen of these to every page, even a big sample could hardly do justice to the impact of his writing.' Charles Townshend , "Irish Political Studies".
The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics by Tom Garvin
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 262 pages [Add To Basket]
This classic work studies the growth of nationalism in Ireland from the middle of the eighteenth century to modern times. It traces the continuity of tradition from earlier organisations, such as the United Irishmen and the agrarian Ribbonmen of the eighteenth century, through the followers of Daniel O'Connell, the Fenians and the Land League in the nineteenth century to the Irish political parties of today.
The dual nature of Irish nationalism is shown in sharp focus. Despite the secular and liberal leanings of many Irish leaders and theoreticians, their followers were frequently sectarian and conservative in social outlook. This book demonstrates how this dual legacy has influenced the politics of modern Ireland.
Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928 by Tom Garvin
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 200 pages [Add To Basket]
The present-day Republic of Ireland was created by a revolutionary élite which developed between 1858 and 1914. This book analyses the social origins of the revolutionary politicians who became the rulers of Ireland after 1922 and examines their political preconceptions, ideologies and prejudices. Tom Garvin argues that in many cases they were not only influenced by old agrarian grievances or memories of the Famine, but also, and more immediately, by the contemporary Catholic abhorrence of the Protestant and secular world symbolised by London, England and, to some extent, America.
Drawing on the evidence of private letters and diaries as well as the popular nationalist journalism of the period, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland makes a hugely original contribution to Irish historiography. It reconstructs the private thoughts behind the public faces of the emergent leadership of independent Ireland, and also puts that leadership in comparative international perspective.
This book, a classic of its type, now appears for the first time in paperback. It demonstrates all of Tom Garvin's intellectual and interpretative daring, his willingness to address major political and historical issues in a wholly original and thought-provoking way and his search for historical trails ignored by others.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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