Read Ireland Book Reviews, September 2000

Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity by Diarmuid O Giollain
Folklore is variously subject matter and critical discourse, amateur enthusiasm and academic discipline, residential agrarian culture and popular urban culture of the present, as well as a resource for local historians and for committed nation-builders. As an introduction to folklore from an Irish perspective, his book plots the development of the notion of folklore and locates it historically, politically and socially. It examines the pivotal role folklore has played in identity formation but it also questions the usefulness of the concept today in an era of unprecedented cultural circulation.

A Dictionary of Anglo-Irish by Diarmuid O Muirithe
This important work is the result of a number of years of painstaking research into the ‘hidden life’ of English as spoken by the Irish. It fills a long-felt void in the study of both Irish and English, by providing the first extensive compilation of Hiberno-English words, their meanings and etymologies. The legendary eloquence of the Irish is here shown to be the product of not one, but two languages. This applies equally to the spoken word as to the great landmarks of Anglo-Irish literary achievement. Dr. O Muirithe has collected, from written and oral sources, the most comprehensive evidence to date of the influence of Gaelic on modern spoken English in Ireland.

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Christ Church Cathedral Dublin edited by Kenneth Milne
This important book is the first to trace the history of Ireland’s most significant cathedral church from its foundation in the eleventh century to the present day. Exploiting one of the most complete, though hitherto neglected, archives of any Irish institution from the middle ages onwards, this book provides a unique view of the development of the social and religious worlds of Dublin and Ireland generally. The role of Christ Church, or Holy Trinity, as the cathedral of the diocese of Dublin and the church of the Dublin Castle administration before 1922 makes it a centrally important institution for understanding the evolution of modern Irish society. It reveals the lives of those who were part of one community in the heart of the medieval and modern city and how they worked out their own salvation within the world in which they lived.

Surplus People: The Fitzwilliam Clearances 1847-1856 by Jim Rees
The Irish Famine was a catastrophe of immense proportions. The population of County Wicklow declined by over 27,000 people. Landlords were eager to dispose of ‘surplus’ tenantry and engaged in ‘assisted passages’ whereby tenants were given incentives to emigrate. The most important was Lord Fitzwilliam, whose 80,000 acre estate, Cooattin, was the largest in Wicklow. From 1847 to 1856, he removed 6,000 men, women and children and arranged passage to Canada. Most were destitute on arrival in Quebec and New Brunswick. This book examines the clearances and shows how some families fared in Canada. It also focuses on the infamous Grosse Ile near Quebec, and related in detail the fate of some families in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

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Tragedies of Kerry 1923-24 by Dorothy Macardle
Originally published in 1924, this tale of sorrow and glory is tense, restrained and true. It tells how men and women, boys and girls, fought for the freedom and honour of Ireland, and of how, despite almost incredible torture and brutality, they refused to admit defeat.

Kerry in Pictures by Michael Diggin
This book celebrates the singular beauty of Kerry and reflects the author’s ongoing love affair with his native county. Kerry differs from the rest of Ireland because of its unique combination of landscape, weather, scenery and people. It is a place of dramatic mountains, bogs, rivers, romantic lakes, graceful trees and rugged coastline. The widespread occurrence of water rivers, lakes, sea and rain provides a moisture-laden landscape with often dramatic lighting effects. This book takes the reader on a tour of the county in a series of mesmerising and atmospheric images. In addition to the scenery, flora and fauna, buildings and town, the warmth and relaxed lifestyle of Kerry comes alive in this collection. Over 100 stunning full colour photographs.

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A Nostalgic Look at Belfast Trolleybuses 1938-1968 by Mike Maybin
Belfast Corporation operated the largest trolleybus system in the United Kingdom outside London. Although the system lasted for 30 years, perhaps the ‘golden age’ was the 1950s. In 1953 over 200 trolleybuses carried 112 million passengers almost 8.5 million miles more than the trams and buses combined. This book captures the flavour of that period with over 200 photographs, of which very few have been published before. The city is covered route by route, starting with the city centre and working clockwise from Belmont in the east to Whitehouse in the north, with additional sections on the depots, tickets and preserved trolleybuses.

A Rebel Hand: Nicholas Delaney of 1798, From Ireland to Australia By Patricia and Frances Owen
Condemned to death for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Nicholas Delaney of County Wicklow was eventually transported to Australia, where his work as a New South Wales road-builder can be seen to this day. From rebellion and despair in Ireland to respectability, marriage and a lasting place in Australian history: this book is the tale of one young man caught up in the turbulence of attempted revolution. His life story, written by his direct descendants, echoes many Irish exiles’ experience, but is remarkable in its own right.

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A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
A masterpiece of Irish fiction, this book is arguably Ireland’s most famous living novelist tackling one of the most crucial periods in Irish history. Born in the Dublin slums of 1902, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he’s out robbing and begging, often cold and always hungry, but a prince of the streets. By Easter Monday 11916, he’s fourteen years old and already six-foot-two, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. A year later he’s ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and a killer. With his father’s wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a Republican legend on of Michael Collins’ boys, a cop killer, and an assassin on a stolen bike. This book has been hailed as the Irish equivalent of Grass’s The Tin Drum and Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night.

Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Poet and His Times by Ulick O’Connor
Oliver St. John Gogarty was called by Yeats ‘one of the greatest lyric poets of the age’. Asquith thought Gogarty the wittiest man in London. As Wilde had conquered London society with his brilliant wit, so too did Gogarty who was taught the art of conversation by Wilde’s tutor, Professor Mahaffy. Gogarty was also a surgeon, a senator, a playwright, a champion athlete and swimmer and author of a number of renowned books. He was also the irreverent and flamboyant drinking companion of James Joyce, providing the character of Buck Mulligan for Ulysses, the exuberant and mocking wit who delighted George Moore, and a friend and inspiration to the man who was high priest of the Irish literary renaissance, William Butler Yeats. From his boisterous student days, through the time of the Irish Civil War, and in all his years as a successful surgeon and unrivalled conversationalist, Gogarty embodied the life of Dublin during one of its richest and most turbulent periods. This classic biography is once again available!

Diary of a Teddy Boy: A Memoir of the Long Sixties by Mim Scala
The heady ferment of Sixties culture, wherever the action was, the author of this humorous and self-deprecating book was there. Riding high on a roller-coaster of flickering fame and fortune, he entertained Diana Dors, hosts gaming parties with Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, evades the wrath of the Kray twins, hires Dennis Hopper, cajoles Jean-Luc Godard into filming the Rolling Stones, signs Cat Stevens to Island Records, and minds Marianne Faithful through her stunning Broken English comeback. When his friend Brian Jones dies in 1969, Mim also senses the death of an era. Richly anecdotal, this book conveys like few other memoirs what it was like to experience the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century.

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From the Horse’s Mouth by Liz Kavanagh
For a quarter of a century, Liz Kavanagh has been delighting readers of the Irish Farmers’ Journal with her warm, down-to-earth accounts of farming life. This book is the third volume of her collected pieces, following the enormously popular Country Living and Home to Roost. From the joys of playing tooth fairy to her granddaughter and discovering a crop of summer mushrooms, to the pain of handing over the reins of the precious farm to her sons as she and Eoin grow older the events of the year are recounted with an honesty and warmth that will give great pleasure to readers, young and old.

Oliver Cromwell: An Illustrated History by Helen Litton
Oliver Cromwell spent less that ten months in Ireland, but the impact of his offensive has never been forgotten. For centuries his infamous reputation has been iron-cast in the Irish mind. The bitter memories of slaughter at the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, the scenes of transportation and transplantation immortalised in the cry ‘To Hell or Connaught!’ have been slow to fade. From Cromwell’s rise to prominence amidst the Puritan fervour of seventeenth-century England, through the two civil wars t here to the invasion, subjugation and mass settlement of Ireland, the author provides a fascinating and factual account of Cromwell’s Irish campaign. She also gives a concise overview of the complex political situation in Ireland prior to the Cromwellian invasion, from the Rising of 1641 to the formation of the Confederation of Kilkenny.

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Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by David Murray
Famed as the most beautiful undergraduate in Oxford of his day and remembered as the lover of Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie as he was always known, remains one of the most notorious figures in literary history. In this fascinating and passionate biography, the author explores fully , for the first time, the mass of contradictions that made up his life. A genius yet a failure through his tormented youth, Bosie’s deep and enduring friendship with Oscar Wilde continued throughout the trials and subsequent imprisonment of Wilde and on until his death in 1900. He became great friends with George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes and was associated with the Bloomsbury Group. His religious devotion increased as spiralling debts cut short his happiness. Soon battles with the remainder of the Wilde circle, his father-in-law, and indeed his libelling of Winston Churchill led to his own imprisonment, followed by a semi-reclusive state until his death in 1945. The author ! of! thi s biography has secured the release of a Home Office file which was to be sealed until 2043 which holds the key to Bosie’s state of mind while in prison and the only original workings of some of his best poetry. With the significant new material and fresh insights, the author portrays Bosie as an important poet whose tragedy extended far beyond his lover’s death.

The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 by John McCourt
This book is based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused sources and informed by the author’s intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste. It is possibly the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann, and re-creates this fertile period in Joyce’s life with an extraordinary richness of detail and depth of understanding. In Trieste, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, turned Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and began Ulysses. Echoes and influences of Trieste are rife throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Though Trieste had become a sleepy backwater by the time Ellmann visited there in the 1950s, McCourt shows that in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the city was a teeming imperial port, intensely cosmopolitan and polyglot. There Joyce experienced the various cultures and central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. He knew many Jews, who collectively provided much of the material for the character of Leopold Bloom. He encountered continental socialism, Italian irredentism, Futurism and various other political and artistic movements whose subtle influences McCourt traces with literary grace and scholarly rigour. This book is a rare landmark in the crowded terrain of Joyce studies.

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Maire Bhui Ni Laoire: A Poet of Her People by Brian Brennan
Maire Bhui Ni Laoire was a popular nineteenth-century folk poet, born in 1774 near Inchigeelagh, County Cork, into the ‘Bhui’ branch of the O’Leary family that once held the local lands under the patronage of the MacCar thys. Other member of the clan include Art O’Leary, an outstanding folk hero of the Penal days, and the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Donnchadh Dail O’Laoire, who extolled the virtues of the MacCarthys. Maire Bhui was illiterate but her poems and songs still survive in the folklore of West Cork. This is her life story and a story of the times and place in which she lived.

The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Constance Markievicz by Anne Marreco
Constance Markievicz rebel countess to the Anglo-Irish Establishment, ‘Madame’ to the Dublin poor who loved her was one of the most vivid in the constellation of remarkable men and women who created Ireland’s political and literary renaissance in the early years of the twentieth century. Beautiful, admirable, aggravating Constance is chiefly known for her part in the Easter Rising of 1916, but how she came to be there is as strange a story as her role in it and what happened to her afterwards. Friend of Yeats, Sean O’Casey, AE, Maud Gonne, James Connolly and others, she knew everyone significant in the Ireland of her time and was at the forefront of events from the first. The author, with full access to family papers, has written a remarkable biography of an extraordinary women.

The Heart of the Atlantic: The Farthest South Expedition 1907-1909 by Ernest Shackleton
Frustrated by his experience on an expedition led by Captain Robert Scott, Irish-born Ernest Shackleton, in 1907, launched his own attempt to reach the South Pole. At the mercy of a hostile continent, it was to become the most extreme test of endurance imaginable. This book is his thrilling account of the expedition.

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