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Read Ireland Book Reviews, June 2002
The Kick: A Memoir by Richard Murphy
In this memoir, the Irish poet, drawing
on five decades of private notebooks, has created a unique memoir of his
life and times. Written with the personality of a diary and full of self-disparaging
wit, his memoir takes the reader from a decayed Protestant ‘Big House’
in the west of Ireland to the colonial island of Ceylon, where, in the
1930s, his father was the last British Mayor of Colombo. Murphy writes
about delicate personal issues, including his own ambivalent sexuality,
as he chronicles the making and unmaking of a writer. He includes amusing
and moving accounts of his meetings and friendships with many prominent
writers and actors from the literary milieux of London, Dublin and New
York, including Harold Nicholson, J.R. Acherley, Patrick Kavanagh, W.H.
Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O’Brien, James Dickey,
Kenneth Tynan, Robert Shaw, Mary Ure, Peter O’Toole, John McGahern, Sylvia
Plath and Ted Hughes. The book evokes people and desolate places on the
west coast and islands of Ireland. With critical irony, enduring affection,
and often with sadness, Murphy describes his experience at boarding school
and at Oxford, where he studies under C.S. Lewis. Also included are disturbing
memories of discrimination against Irish ‘tinkers’ and of mass murder
in Sri Lanka, where he returned fifty years after leaving the island as
a child. In memorable prose, this book records a strangely eventful life.
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Artemis Fowl: The Arctic
Incident by Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl is back! Someone has been
supplying Class-A illegal human power sources to goblins. Captain Holly
Short of the LEPrecon Unit is sure that the person responsible is her
arch-enemy, thirteen-year-old Artemis Fowl. But is he? Artemis has his
own problems to deal with: his father is being held to ransom and only
a mirable will save him. Maybe this time a brilliant plan just won’t be
enough. Maybe this time Artemis will need help
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Artemis Fowl (the first
book) by Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl is the book that caused a
sensation months before it was even published. This exciting, original
novel has captured the imagination of film companies, publishers, the
press and readers all over the world. Twelve year-old Artemis Fowl is
a brilliant criminal mastermind. But even Artemis doesn’t know what he’s
taken on when he kidnaps a fairy, Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon
Unit. These are the fairies of bedtime stories. These fairies are armed
and they’re dangerous. Artemis thinks he’s got them just where he wants
them, but then they stop playing by the rules a brilliantly realized parallel
world, this book has redefined the fairytale and done Harry Potter one
better!
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The Dublin Review Number
7 Summer 2002 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This issue of the Dublin Review contains
the following: ‘An Alienated Isle’ : Colm Toibin on Henry James and Ireland;
McGuinness and the Boys by Adrian Frazier; Anne Enright: Pages from a
New Novel; Michael Longley: ‘Seven War Poems’; ‘Pick, pack, pock, puck’:
Tom Paulin on Joyce’s noises; James Ryan: A moor in Co. Laois; Conchita
of the Pryenees by Bernard Loughlin; A story by Emma Donoghue; Dublin’s
‘new’ Rembrandt by John Ihle.
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The Dublin Review Number
6 Spring 2002 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This issue of the Dublin Review contains
the following: The Making of St. Thherese of Lisieux by Ann Marie Hourihane;
Ciaran Carson on the iconography of the Troubles; ‘Kavanagh’s Threat’
by Harry Clifton; ‘Seven Years in the Brothers’ by Tom Dunne; Harry Browne
on the Bloody Sunday films; David Wheatley: What is a poet-critic?; J.C.C.
Mays on the power of Trevor Joyce; A story by Douglas Martin.
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Dublin Review Number
5 Winter 2001-2 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This issue contains: Patrick McGrath:’Letter
from Ground Zero’; True Places and National Fables by George Szirtes;
Sebastian Barry: Pages from a new novel; ‘Three Notes on the Elgin Marbles’
by Tim Robinson; Diarmaid Ferriter on state funerals; ‘The Romance of
E-mail’ by Molly McCloskey; Andrew McNeillie: ‘Virginia Woolf’s America’;
The IRA on the Silver Screen by Richard English; Vona Groarke on Picking
Stones and Becoming a Poet; Alan Gilsenan on Tom Murphy.
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Dublin Review: Number
Four, Autumn 2001 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This new number of the Dublin Review features:
Pages from ‘Shroud’, a novel in progress by John Banville; ‘This Is What
Libraries Are For’ by Ciaran Carson; ‘Adventures With Old Things’ by Angela
Bourke; ‘ Bracken at Sedbergh’ by Tom Paulin; George O’Brien on exile;
Catriona O’Reilly on Ciaran Carson’s prose; Denis Sampson on not writing
the Cruiser’s biography; Poems by Robin Robertson; and Fiction by Judy
Kravis and Sean O’Reilly.
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Dublin Review: Number
Three, Summer 2001 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This issue contains: The View from a Writer’s
Desk by Paul Muldoon; Tiger sex by Ruth Padel; Harry Clifton on Denis
Donoghue, T.S. Eliot and God; ‘Edna Longley’s Map’ by Peter Sirr; ‘Open
Letter to the Irish Tourist Board’ by Adrian Frazier; George Szirtes:
‘The Apocalpyses’; Postcards from Cape Neurotic by Molly McCloskey; Conor
O’Callaghan gets stuck in Departures; and Fiction by Elaine Garvey and
Tom Mac Intyre.
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Dublin Review: Number
Two, Spring 2001 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This issue contains: ‘The National and
the Normal’ by Roy Foster; Six prose poems by Seamus Heaney; ‘House for
Sale’ a story by Colm Toibin; Aidan Dunne: ‘Shifting Ground at the IMMA’;
With the Chetniks in Montenegro by Dervla Murphy; Rachel Hadas: ‘Dead
Wood, Green Wood’; Declan Kiberd on Oscar Wilde’s letters; David Wheatley
on Kiberd’s ‘Irish Classics’; and Richard Murphy’s sea-haunted imagination
by Terence Brown.
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Dublin Review: Number
One, Winter 2000-1 Edited by Brendan Barrington
This inaugural issue contains: Bacon’s
Arrow by Colm Toibin; ‘A destitute and undesirable alien’: The Artaud
File; Anne Enright: Birth in Dublin; Tim Robinson; Death in Malaya; Medbh
McGuckian: ‘Half a Full Moon’; ‘Members’ from a new play by Terry Eagleton;
Ruth Padel: ‘Butterfly Landing on a Painting by Bridget Riley’; Hugh Haughton
on Banville; David Wheatley on Hazlitt and Haverty; and Poems by Peter
Fallon, Vona Groarke and Tom Mac Intyre.
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Explaining Irish Democracy
by Bill Kissane
This book is a systematic account of why
Ireland remained a democracy after revolution and independence. The author
breaks new ground in analysing the Irish case from a comparative international
perspective and by discussing it in terms of the classic works of democratic
theory. Each chapter tests the explanatory power of a particular approach,
and the result is a compelling mixture of political history, sociology
and political science. Taking issue with many conventional assumptions,
the author questions whether Irish democracy after 1921 was really a surprise,
by relating the outcome to the level of socio-economic development, the
process of land reform, and the emergence of a strong civil society under
the Union. On the other hand, things did not go according to plan in 1922,
and two chapters are devoted to the origins and nature of the civil war.
The remaining chapters are concerned with analysing how democracy was
rebuilt after the civil war; the author questions whether that achievement
was entirely the work of the pro-treatyites. Indeed, by focusing on the
continued divisiveness of the Treaty issue, the nature of constitutional
republicanism, and the significance of the 1937 constitution, Kissane
argues that Irish democracy was not really consolidated until the late
1930s, and that that achievement was largely the work of Eamon de Valera.
Based on extensive archival research, this book is a powerfully argued
work of comparative political science and Irish history.
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Wilde’s Lough Corrib
by Sir William Wilde
Sir William Wilde wrote this book on his
beloved Lough Corrib at his home in Moytura, Cong, in 1867, when it was
originally published. A writer and archaeologist of note, he published
various books and documentaries at the time and catalogued the collection
of the Royal Irish Academy Museum. This ‘documentary’ of the archaeology,
antiquities and folklore of Lough Corrib is the accepted ‘Jewel in the
Crown’ of the region. Beautifully illustrated with seventy-four woodcut
engravings depicting the many old Castles, Abbeys, Forts, Cairns, etc
- so prolific in the area - and it with doubt a gem. Posterity owes a
lot the Wilde. Now, after one hundred and thirty-five years, the book
is reprinted in Wilde’s original text.
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The Lost Soul’s Reunion
by Suzanne Power
On a hill overlooking the grey sea, in
a house filled with the past, a woman gathers her ghosts for one night
to hear their story retold. This is Sive Moriarty’s tale, beginning with
her grandmother’s ill-fated marriage. Moving, mysterious and gracefully
written, this book is a strange and beautiful tale of love between mothers
and daughters, between men and women, and between individuals and the
land they lived on. From the grotesque bustle of sixties London to the
magical landscapes of coastal Ireland, it is a story that paints, most
beautifully of all, the landscape of the human heart.
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The Stuart Kingdoms
in the 17th Century edited by Allan MacInnes and Jane Ohlmeyer
The ‘British Problem’ has come to dominate
the historiographical agenda of the Stuart kingdoms in the seventeenth
century. This volume aims to challenge traditional interpretations and
to offer constructive suggestions about how the ‘New British Histories’
might be fruitfully reappraised and situated in wider geographical, methodological
and cultural contexts. By asking pertinent ‘awkward’ questions, the book
explores the relations within, between and beyond the Stuart kingdoms
and accentuates the positive aspects of ‘awkwardness’. These essays offer
fresh and exciting research, often by younger scholars, and innovative
insights from regional, national, and international perspectives. This
collection invites readers to view the Stuart kingdoms from a holistic
standpoint and to pay due attention to Scotland and Ireland as well as
their awkward neighbour, England, with losing sight of the wider European
and global pictures.
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Irish Verse: An Anthology
edited by Bob Blaisdell
Celebrated for their unique poetic sensibility
and wondrous way with words, the Irish have produced a rich heritage of
great poetry. This book attests to the Irish love and language, spanning
fourteen centuries of literary history and featuring works by more than
60 of the country’s most distinguished poets. This book is a comprehensive
selection of well-known Irish poets.
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A Buyer’s Guide to
Irish Art 2nd edition edited by Roberta Reeners
This book is a definitive record of over
7,000 paintings by 700 Irish artists that have gone to auction in Ireland
and the UK since May 1999. Listing every Irish artwork to go under the
hammer at all the major auction houses, the book presents all the information
that every art collector needs to know - including detailed price guides
and sales histories for each piece. It also includes a series of unique
editorial features that inform and captivate the established collector
and new art investor - from advice on how to buy art at auction to selecting
the Top Forty-Five Rising Stars of Irish art to watch out for. This book
is an essential reference for any interested in Irish Art.
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Buying a House in
Ireland by Tim McDonald
Over the last number of years it has become
extremely difficult for people to purchase property in Ireland: prices
have increased substantially and there can be intense competition between
purchasers vying for a property. This book advises on how to complete
the purchase of a property in Ireland. Covering topics from viewing and
bidding to the legal side of the property purchase, this is a very practical
guide to purchasing houses or apartments, be they new or second-hand,
urban or rural. It contains useful, up-to-date information for first-time
buyers as well as those who have already ‘been around the block’.
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A Voyage Round My
Life by Henry Boylan
Henry Boylan was born the son of a sea
captain in 1911. Prevented from going to sea by the Great Depression of
the 1930s, he joined the Civil Service, and was soon assigned as manager
of the fledgling Radio Eireann. His fluent Irish introduced him to the
vigorous and active world of the gaelgeoiri, far from the repressiveness
of the traditional image. As Director of Gaeltacht Services he helped
to build up thriving tweed and seaweed industries in the West of Ireland
and travelled the world selling Irish tweed, in the days when one went
by transatlantic liner and dressed for dinner. In the late 1950s he and
Gaeltarra Eireann were the victims of an extraordinary vendetta by a senior
politician. On his retirement from the Civil Service he embarked on his
second career as a writer. This is his autobiography.
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Famine by Liam O’Flaherty
First published in 1973, this book has
been variously defined as a masterpiece, a major achievement, and a classic
of Irish literature. During the Great Famine of the 1840s over three million
people lost their lives or were forced to flee the country. This novel
tells the story of three generations of the Kilmartin family as they fight
to survive. It is a story full of human tragedy, courage and passion.
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Enough Religion to
Make Us Hate: Reflections on Religion and Politics by Victor Griffin
The author of this book, born in county
Wicklow, talks of two major periods in his ministry in the Church of Ireland:
a twenty-two-year stint in the city of Derry and another twenty-year period
as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He has therefore had extensive
experience of the joys and sorrows, the positives and negatives of life
in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. He is very well placed to consider,
as he does in this book, a range of issues of concerns to Christians all
over Ireland: our legacy of intolerance and sectarianism, church-state
relations and the problems they have caused for both church and state,
Protestants in the Irish Free State, the harmful effects of Partition,
the Drumcree debacle and the failure of Christian leadership, and many
other matters viewed from the point of view of one who is convinced of
the need for a pluralist society both north and south. He considers the
ups and downs of the ecumenical movement, our notions of God and, finally,
the abortion referendum of 1983, in which he took a high-profile part,
and what the future may hold in light of the recent referendum.
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Traditional Roots:
Towards an Appropriate Relationship Between the Church of Ireland and
the Orange Order by Earl Storey
The scenes at Drumcree Parish Church in
Portadown over the last number of years have brought to the fore the question
of the relationship between the Orange Order and the Church of Ireland.
The question itself, not to mention any answer to it, is divisive within
the church, many of whose members are also members of the Orange Order
and see no difficulty in the present situation. Others, of course, have
a very different point of view. In this book, the author sets out the
background to the debate: the essence of the Orange Order, the essence
of the Church of Ireland, the Order and the Church today. Having set out
the analysis, he then moves into the complex areas of agreement and conflict
between the two, and points the way forward towards an appropriate relationship
between the Church of Ireland and the Orange Order.
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Racism and Antiracism
in Ireland by Robbie McVeigh and Ronit Lentin
This book is about the fundamental injustice
of racism and the dangers it represents for Irish society. It is the first
collection of writings by activists and academics to take seriously international
commitments to combat racism, most recently expressed in the World Conference
against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. In the 1990s, Irish racism
began to be theorised by social scientists in Ireland, particularly since
the arrival of increasing numbers of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.
The book situates racism in Ireland, and makes sends of how and why Irish
society has become racialized.
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Fighting Back: Women
and the Impact of Drug Abuse on Families and Communities by Jo Murphy-Lawless
Dublin’s inner city has had to live with
the social and economic damage inflicted by widespread heroin use since
the beginning of the 1980s. The introduction of heroin into a community
already experiencing high unemployment had a devastating effect on the
individuals and families living there. This book looks at the impact which
drug abuse has had on women, their families and communities. The book
focuses on women as mothers trying to cope with the problem as it affects
their children and extended family, as well as women as community organisers
trying to protect and improve their neighbourhoods. The book shows how
women have been energetic and creative actors in responding to these complex
problems at local level and how they have developed considerable expertise.
But it also argues that much more could be accomplished if their family
and community-building efforts were matched by a more robust response
from the state. The book provides an inspirational story of women taking
control of their lives, and challenges the government to develop much
better support structures for women, men, their families and communities
in the battle against drugs.
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Including All: Home,
School and Community United in Education by Concepta Conaty
Children’s experiences in the school system
have major repercussions for their life-chances. This book examines educational
disadvantage within the framework of socio-economic disadvantage and considers
its consequences for the child, the family and the community. It shows
how a multi-agency approach - a partnership between parents, schools and
community agencies - can ease the effects of disadvantage, foster links
of positive relationship, empower disadvantaged parents and begin to break
the cycle of poverty. This book provides the reader with the first authoritative
and comprehensive account of one of the most significant interventions
that has been made to tackle disadvantage - the Home/School/Community/Liaison
Scheme, which began as a pilot scheme in 1990. The author has been with
the project from the beginning and has played a major role in its implementation
and development. This book is a comprehensive evaluation by a highly qualified
practitioner-researcher, and of immense interest and value to all those
who care about the quality, inclusiveness and future of Irish education.
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The Great Hunger and
The Gallant John-Joe by Tom Mac Intyre
The Great Hunger, Tom Mac Intyre’s internationally
celebrated play of 1983, and ‘The Gallant John-Joe’, his more recent dramatic
work, shows Mac Intyre to be one of the most daringly and excitingly original
Irish writers working today. ‘The Great Hunger’ is Mac Intyre’s version
of Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem of the same name. It represents the life
and dreams of Patrick Maguire, Monaghan small farmer and potato-gatherer,
a man suffering from sexual and spiritual starvation. The play fuses image,
movement and language into a classic of contemporary Irish drama. ‘The
Gallant John-Joe’ is the soliloquy of John-Joe Concannon, a Cavan widower
grappling with physical and mental infirmity and trying unsuccessfully
to plumb the mysteries of his relationship with his troubled daughter.
His Lear-like cry, by turns tragic and uproariously funny, is both instantly
recognizable and marvellously strange, a creation only Mac Intyre could
have brought to the stage, and the page.
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Petrie Collection
of the Ancient Music of Ireland by George Petrie and edited by David Cooper
This book is a revised edition of the
classic work, featuring a new biographical essay on Petrie. Melodies are
returned to the form that Petrie originally notated them and are cross-referenced
with other major collections. First published in 1855, this book is widely
regarded as one of the most important nineteenth-century collections of
traditional Irish music. It contains nearly two hundred melodies collected
by Petrie as well as song texts in Irish and English and detailed notes
by Petrie about their sources.
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Brigit of Kildare
by Ann Egan
The author of this book lives in Clane,
Co. Kildare with her husband and four children; her second daughter illustrated
the book. In this book, they tell the story of Brigit of Kildare in prose
and poetry and drawing that bring to life with passion and imagination
one of the great women of early Christian Ireland.
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A Wild People by Hugh
Leonard
This author of this book is an award-winning
playwright and screenwriter, and was Literary Editor at the Abbey Theatre,
Dublin in 1976-77. This is his first novel. ‘She was too old for you,’
TJ Quill’s friend Liz says about his Italian mistress. ‘Not that old,’
TJ protests. ‘At least two thousand years,’ Liz says. ‘Two-thousand-year-old’
Josie might be untameable - a slippery madonna who presents a different
face to each beholder - but she’s often left standing by the rest of TJ’s
friends. Perhaps it is true that, as the Kerry poet Oozer Kenirons declares,
the Irish are only three generations away from the old bog road, the tenement
and back lane, and are busy re-inventing themselves. Certainly the cast
of this novel are forever surprising each other - and themselves. TJ’s
progress through a doomed friendship with ‘Thorn’ Thornton imbrangles
him in the staging of a Plautus satire, retitled ‘Lust’ and performed
at night on a hurricane-whipped bog, as well as the most traumatic awards
dinner of TJ’s chequered career. His affair with Josie drags him from
the clandestine dinners in Dublin to the high drama of a ransom mission
in Florence. His job as an archivist to great Western filmmaker Sean O’Fearna
involves him in nailbiting interactions with the fearsome Widow O’Fearna.
And throughout this novel there plays out the story of TJ’s foundering
marriage to the enigmatic but never-to-be-understood Greta: a marriage
that moves from couplehood in a cottage to uneasy truce in a Martello
tower, and reaches its crisis with a car’s night-time plunge into the
sea. This novel was our Fiction Book of the Month for May 2001.
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Forty-Seven Roses
by Peter Sheridan
With his trademark wit and honesty, the
author has written an enthralling account of his parents’ relationship,
from their first encounter over a poke game in a Dundalk canteen to their
final, happy days together in retirement. But all was not as straightforward
as it appeared, for when Peter’s father died suddenly, it became painfully
evident that an awkward situation needed to be resolved. Since the 1940s,
Peter’s father had maintained a relationship with another woman, Doris.
Their correspondence spanned five decades and Doris had long harboured
the secret hope that Peter’s father would one day be hers. Someone would
have to tell her about the death of her old friend This book, at turns
humorous and heartbreaking, is the unforgettable tale of a love that can
transcend even the overpowering odds. It’s the account of a marriage dogged
by a shadowy third partner, of fierce family pride and of how sometimes
the pain of grief can re-ignite the vital spark of love.
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Reinventing Ireland:
Culture, Society and the Global Economy edited by Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons
and Michael Cronin
Since the 1980s, the Irish economy has
experienced a period of unprecedented growth that has earned it the title
of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. This success has been interpreted by academic commentators
as marking a social and cultural transformation, what some have called
the reinvention of Ireland. The essays in this book challenge the largely
positive interpretation of Ireland’s changing social order. The authors
identify the ways in which culture and society have been made subservient
to the needs of the market in this neo-liberal Ireland. They draw on subversive
strands in Irish history and offer a broader and more robust understanding
of culture as a site of resistance to the dominant social order and as
a political means to fashion an alternative future.
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A Viceroy’s Vindication?:
Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland, 1556-78 edited by Ciaran
Brady
Three times Viceroy, Sir Henry Sidney
was a key figure in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. His account of
his public career in Ireland, written in the winter of 1582-3, is one
of the earliest political memoirs in literature. It is unique among early
memoirs in its size, richness or detail and apparent fidelity to the factual
record. Composed in plain prose and consciously shorn of decoration and
classical allusion, this narrative presents an individual with attitudes
and preoccupations at odds with those of the zealous advocate of military
conquest and religious oppression so often portrayed by historians. By
exploring its emphases, omissions and deviations from the recorded sequence
of events, the editor’s introduction reveals a surprisingly complex set
of Elizabethan perceptions and prejudices about Ireland.
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British Intelligence
in Ireland, 1920-21: The Final Reports edited by Peter Hart
The Irish revolution of 1920-1921 ended
in a military and political stalemate, resolved only through the mutual
compromise incorporated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Historians have long
accepted that the one conflict in which there was a clear winner was that
of Intelligence, where British ineptitude was painfully exposed by the
organizational genius of Michael Collins. This judgement is challenged
by the recent release of two confidential self-assessments prepared for
the army and the police in 1922. Though documenting many setbacks and
inefficiencies, the police report indicates a marked improvement in operations
superintended by that ‘wicked little white snake’, Sir Ormonde de l’Epee
Winter. His report, though self-serving and flawed, provides a uniquely
detailed and personal account of Intelligence from the inside. The editor’s
introduction assesses the purpose, reliability and significance of these
reports. Their publication is a significant contribution to the study
of Irish history.
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Ireland Standing Firm
and Eamon de Valera: A Memoir by Robert Brennan
‘Ireland Standing Firm’, first published
in 1958, is a frank and pungent account of Robert Brennan’s time as Irish
Minister in Washington immediately before and during the Second World
War. He gives a fascinating account of his efforts in defending Irish
neutrality and his meetings with leading American officials and politicians,
including Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the second memoir, also from the late
1950s, he describes his close association with Eamon de Valera from their
first meeting in prison in 1917 until de Valera’s retirement as Taoiseach
in 1959.
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Oscar and Bosie: A
Fatal Passion by Trevor Fisher
The love story of Oscar Wilde and Lord
Alfred Douglas surely ranks among the world’s greatest romantic tragedies.
After Wilde’s tragic bid to sue the Marquis of Queensberry for libel ended
in total humiliation, with his imprisonment, exile and early death in
Paris at the age of 46, the London literati split into bitterly opposed
camps. Some have believed that Bosie deserted a friend in need, others
that Wilde was the innocent victim of a long-running family feud between
an obsessed father and his pampered son. Fuelled by the surviving correspondence,
successive biographies and Bosie’s own polemical writing, the arguments
have merely intensified over the years. Of Wilde, however, the question
will always remain: Why did he bring about his own downfall? This book
is that fascinating and complex story.
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Robert the Bruce’s
Irish Wars: The Invasions of Ireland 1306-1329 by Sean Duffy
The history of the expeditions to Ireland
by King Robert of Scotland and his brother Edward, where Robert the Bruce
is traditionally said to have been inspired by the perserverence of a
spider to continue his fight for Scottish Independence. Much is known
about Robert the Bruce’s military campaigns for Scottish independence
in Scotland and England, but what about his expeditions to Ireland? In
the early summer of 1315 a fleet-load of Scots veterans of Bannockburn
put ashore on the coast of what is now County Antrim. The Anglo-Scottish
conflict had transferred itself to Irish soil. The expedition was led
by Edward Bruce, Robert the Bruce’s brother, and recently ratified as
heir-presumptive to the Scottish throne. By any standards, it was a major
undertaking, planned well in advance, to which a significant proportion
of Scotland’s hard-pressed resources were devoted. It amounted to a full-scale
invasion. What the Bruce brothers hope to achieve from their Irish venture
is hotly debated. Was it merely an attempt to open up a second front in
their war against the English? Was the aim to exploit Irish dissidence
to push Edward II into acknowledging Robert’s claim to Scotland? Or did
the Bruce’s actually envisage turning their invasion of Ireland into a
permanent conquest? This collection of essays by some of the leading authorities
on the subject attempts to answer these questions and tells the story
of the invasion itself and the battles that followed.
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Stream of Tongues
(Sruth Teangacha) by Gearoid Mac Lochlainn
As an uneasy peace settles on the North
of Ireland, a familiar complacency also returns to settle on the inhabitants
of the Republic with regards to the fate of its northern neighbour. This
bilingual poetry book will startle them abruptly from such complacency,
presenting them with the grim reality that can be life in Northern Ireland.
The poems in this book deal with the difficulties of existing within the
minority Gaelic language culture in the face of pervading English monoculture.
The poet explores the problems which he encounters in his search for an
effective artistic voice which will honour both the English and Irish
speakers within himself. This is powerful, emotive poetry, with translations
written by the poet in collaboration with other poets.
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Beyond by Michael
Foley
Sharp, funny and intelligent - this book
is a stylish novel about sexual escapism in 1960s Ireland. Fully intending
to have a meteoric career in the Big Smoke (Dublin), a newly-qualified
young accountant instead finds himself lured by Marie, ‘an intoxicating
cocktail of gaiety, mischief and sensuousness’, to a small Irish town.
Once there, he finds himself further bewitched by the lovely Helen and,
captivated by two such different but sexually fascinating women, he is
soon entangled. The time is the 1960s and sexual revolution is in the
air, with its promise of liberation from life-denying attitudes. But this
is Ireland, and freedom comes with a high price tag for even the most
daring adventurer.
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