Eamon Delaney

Life
Son of the sculptor Edward Delaney; joined the Irish Dept. of Foreign Affairs [diplomatic corp]; Casting of Mr O’Shaughnessy (London: Bloomsbury 1995), 368pp.; issued An Accidental Diplomat (2001); The Curse of Reason (2012), a study of the Irish famine involving four very different persons - Trevelyan, Mitchel, Elizabeth Smith and Archbishop John McHale.

 

Works
Fiction
  • Casting of Mr O’Shaughnessy (London: Bloomsbury 1995), 368pp., and Do. [rep. edn.] (Dublin: New Island Books 2002), [500pp.]
Autobiography

An Accidental Diplomat: My Years in the Irish Foreign Service 1987-1995 (New Island Books 2001), 408, ill. [8pp. b&w photos]
History
The Curse of Reason: The Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2012).
Miscellaneous
  • review of Frank Ronan, Home (Sceptre/Lir 2002), in Sunday Independent (7 April 2002), Living, p.20;
  • review of Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated (Hamish Hamilton), in The Irish Times/Weekend (6 July 2002).
  • See also ‘The Sculpting of Modern Ireland’, in The Irish Times [Sat.] (19 Dec. 2010), Weekend, p.8 [feature-article: ‘the art and literary worlds of Dublin, as seen through the prism of the life of the late sculptor Edward Delaney ... his son Eamon Delaney writes about exploring his father’s life for his book Breaking the Mould’],

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Criticism
Marianne Hartigan, interview with Eamon Delaney, Books Ireland (May 1995), pp.113-14; John Dunne, ‘Sacred Cows’, review of The Casting Mr O’Shaughnessy (1995) [inter al.], in Books Ireland (Sept. 1995), p.217 [infra]; Rüdiger Imhof, review of The Casting of Mr Shaughnessy (1995), 363pp., in Linen Hall Review (Winter 1995-96) [q.p.].

 

Commentary
John Dunne, ‘Sacred Cows’, review of novels including The Casting of Mr O’Shaughnessy in Books Ireland (Sept. 1995), p.217, raising of statue to eponymous Republican Nobel Prize winner; [chip]-on-the-shoulder sculptor Robert Wycherley, and a penis called Dev., &c.

Christophe Gillisen, ‘Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the historiography of the Great Famine’, in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XIX:2 (2014)´: ‘Enda Delaney, he has also proposed an innovative book, The Curse of Reason, in which the lives of four actors of the Famine are intertwined, thus offering a multifaceted view of the event: in addition to many secondary sources, he builds on the contemporary writings of Trevelyan, Mitchel, Elizabeth Smith – the wife of a Protestant landlord, who held a detailed diary – and John McHale, the combative nationalist Archbishop of Tuam, to depict Ireland in all of its complexity during the Famine.’ (‘Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the historiography of the Great Famine’, in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XIX:2 [Irish Famine Iss.] (2014), pp.195-212 - available online.)

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