Outside the glow: Protestants and Irishness in independent Ireland

Olivia Manning, the English-born and domiciled novelist, said that her Irish childhood produced ‘the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere’. While one of Heather K. Crawford’s Irish Protestant interviewees expresses […]

Britain, Ireland and the Second World War

In 1957 David Gray, the US wartime minister to Ireland, wrote publicly that Taoiseach Eamon de Valera ‘maintained a neutrality, which served only Hitler’s objectives’. Ian Wood quotes Gray’s comment […]

The Big Book: The year of disappearances: political killings in Cork 1921–1922

Gerard Murphy’s new book is the latest examination of the Protestant experience in revolutionary Cork. It offers an engaging narrative, often based on extensive research, that will open new doors […]

BOOKWORM

The press release for Donnacha Ó Beacháin’s pithily titled Destiny of the Soldiers: Fianna Fáil, Irish Republicanism and the IRA, 1926–1973 (Gill & Macmillan, 538pp, €29.99/£26.99, ISBN 9780717147632) claims that […]

Museum eye: Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival

One of the forgotten consequences of the partition of Ireland in 1920 is that a significant strand of nationalism was left isolated and ignored. In the South the official version […]