Read Ireland Book Reviews, August 1999

Tracing Your Irish Ancestors 2nd edition by John Grenham
This book is already well-established as the standard guide book for Irish genealogy. This revised and expanded edition reinforces the book’s position as the leading authority in its field. The principal changes made for this new edition are: The existing material has been updated and augmented by new sources that have emerged in recent years; a comprehensive listing of all known copies of Roman Catholic Records, covering dates, locations and formats, is included for the first time (This is one of the most important of all Irish genealogical sources.); there is less dependence on Dublin repositories; the new edition includes details of the Family History Centres of the Mormon Church, one of the world’s richest genealogical archives.

Step Together: Ireland’s Emergency Army 1939-46 as told by its Veterans by Donal MacCarron
Ireland adopted a neutrality policy during the Second World War which was locally known as ‘the Emergency’. At the outbreak of the war, Irish defence forces were in a poor state; hence the creation of the Emergency Army. This fully illustrated oral history is an anecdotal and often funny account of the time. Based on the author’s interviews with the men who served in ‘the Emergency’, giving immediate eyewitness accounts of recruitment, training and serving in the army. It includes the national ‘Call to Arms’, basic training, the equipment; ‘Shoots’ by Coast Artillery and in the Glen of Imaal; flying the planes; social events; the ‘down’ side; ‘major manoeuvres’ and parades and finally ‘Stand-down.’ Illustrated with rarely seen photographs.

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Stories from Tory Island by Dorothy Harrison Therman
The author discovered the then isolated Irish island of Tory in 1979 in an art gallery in Edinburgh, where she bought a painting by one of the Tory ‘primitive’ artists. This was the beginning of a long involvement with Tory and its people. She first visited the island itself in 1981 and she was visited Tory almost every year since then, staring for periods of two to three weeks in all seasons, including winter, and making firm friends with local people, mainly the older islanders. This book is a loving transcription of her tape-recordings of conversations with the islanders, in whom she discovered a wealth of stories, folklore and reminiscences. Here are stories featuring death and loss, wakes and ghosts, childbirth and midwives’ practices, cures and superstitions, pranks and poitin-making, poverty and migration, saints, fairies and a mysterious ‘elephant’ found on the shore. It is a very important contribution to the story of Irish folklore and the oral tradition.

A New Partnership in Education: From Consultation to Legislation in the Nineties by John Walshe
This is an impressively thorough and analytical book. It is also replete with incident and personalities, and with the subtle role of the media in education policy formation. In the nineties, dialogue in the Irish education system has been frenetic and painful at times. But it has gradually led to an extraordinary cohesion and partnership in the system. The book tracks the major consultations and confrontations of the nineties and it explores the personalities and policies of the protagonists ministers, officials, leaders of Church bodies and third-level institutions, representatives of teachers’ unions and parents’ organisations. All of the important consultation documents of the decade are here and the big issues are expertly set forth.

My Village My World by John M. Feehan
This book is a fascinating account of the live of ordinary people in the countryside half a century ago. It depicts a way of life that took thousands of years to evolve and mature and was destroyed in a single generation. Although the people of Feehan’s village were never famous and might now be described as ‘unskilled’, this world be a false description. They were all highly skilled, whether in making coffins, droving cattle or tending to horses. The world described with such vivacity in this lively memoir was not idyllic. There were sinners as well as saints, all ordinary mortals.

Healing Amid the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at Saint-Lo (1945-46) by Phyllis Gaffney
During the Normandy landings of June 1944, the German-occupied town of Saint-Lo, in the path of the invading armies, was bombed into rubble. Thousands died in the subsequent battle. When peace came the survivors struggled to rebuild their lives among the ruins. Help arrived from an unexpected source: neutral Ireland. The Irish Red Cross assembled an 100-bed hospital and shipped it to France. Fifty young Irish doctors, nurses and support staff gave of their best, giving hope as well as healing to the shattered town. Most had never been to France, although the storekeeper was a little-known Dublin man of letters, who had spent the war in France and was a member of the Resistance Samuel Beckett. The Irish got on so well with the local people that their eventual departure gave rise to a political scandal, with bitter recriminations against local doctors who campaigned to remove them. Drawing on original documents, interviews with eyewitnesses and archival research in France, Ireland and Scotland, this book is the vivid story of a pioneering adventure in overseas aid and postwar reconstruction.

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The Misfit Soldier: Edward Casey’s War Story, 1914-1918 edited by Joanna Bourke
Edward Casey, an underfed, under-sized and semi-literate Irish Cockney from Canning Town, was no war hero. Even so, his account of four years of war service with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers is a remarkable chronicle, revealing his personal and sexual insecurities, his remarkable experience of Irish unrest during periods of training and leave and his excitement as a military tourist in France, Salonica and Malta. The memoir was written in 1980, six decades after his departure for New Zealand, yet retains a strong Cockney accent. The editor has selected the chapters with the greatest interest for Irish readers, placing Casey’s story in the broader context of the Great War and its sometimes devastating psychological consequences.

A Policeman’s Ireland: Recollection of Samuel Waters, RIC edited by Stephen Ball
Samuel Waters followed his father and grandfather into the Irish Constabulary, rising from district inspector in 1866 to assistant inspector-general. His colourful and unembittered recollections encompass the Fenian rising, the Land War and the 1916 resurrection, after which he retired to Skerries. These memoirs illuminate the intelligence work of the RIC, as well as the social and sporting compensations of a policeman’s life in all four provinces. Water’s records unexpectedly friendly interactions between police and army in which he had to restrain a group of Fenian fans from beating up his military opponents. This editor’s introduction highlights the problems of policing in Ireland during a century and a half of turmoil.

Mondo Desperado by Patrick McCabe
Patrick McCabe’s prose is a brilliantly macabre as ever. You wouldn’t expect to find a mature woman of 28 years of age mixed up with a bunch of swingers in a small town like Barntrosna. But that’s exactly what happened, according to Larry Bunyan. And he should know, she was his wife. As for Declan Coyningham there wasn’t a holier boy in all of the village you couldn’t move in town without finding a bit of him in your patch or under a hedge. And what exactly did come over Noreen Tiernan that made her shriek to wake the dead as she left the main street of the village in a Morris Minor all decked in pink and blue? In scenes of disarming inventiveness from a farmer’s romance and his skin condition to one man’s culinary relationship with Bruce Lee this novel will make you howl with laughter from the first unnerving page to the last.

The Marching Season by Daniel Silva
Peace has broken out in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement promises an end to thirty years of violence. Until one afternoon Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein is the first to die. Shot by a gunman on the streets of Belfast. Simultaneously in Dublin a bomb leaves the National Library in ruins. And in London a suitcase packed with Semtex explodes and destroys the Underground at Heathrow Airport. The frightening realisation that a new Protestant terrorist group, the Ulster Volunteer Brigade, wants anything but peace and this by its actions the world will be forced to see Ulster from the Protestant perspective is the starting point for this mesmerising thriller. The book is a compelling mix of power, intrigue, politics and a touch of romance.

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By Shannon’s Way by Kathleen Sheehan O’Connor
A Dublin executive moves with his family to a wealthy part of Limerick, where they soon get to know their neighbours, owners of a large export business. The lives of the teenage children soon become entwined, but secrets from the past emerge to destroy their peace of mind secrets of a night during the war before an RAF pilot returned to duty as one of the ‘dam-busters.’ This novel of the Ireland in the 1960s is full of warmth and humour, heartbreak and tears by the author who has been lauded as the ‘new Maeve Binchy’!

The Marriage at Antibes: Stories by Carol Azadeh
These dazzling short fictions interrogate themes of home and exile, memory and yearning, childhood and ageing, and much else besides. Their scenes are laid in Ireland, France, Spain and North Africa at various moments in the century now ending, but at their core lie universal and timeless relationships man-woman, father-daughter, landlord-tenant scrupulously observed and piercingly understood. These stories of travel, unbelonging and otherness, related with the poised eye of a young Elizabeth Bowen, and with remarkable emotional power, announce a compelling voice in Irish fiction.

Revenge by K.T. McCaffrey
An uncompromising thriller relentlessly gripping. Susan Furlong, an attractive 30-year-old, is obsessed with the desire for revenge on the man who raped her 12 years ago. But J.P. Murray, a powerful businessman with influential friends in the ‘natural party of government,’ is not to be the only victim of Susan’s vengeance. Getting back the daughter she conceived as a result of the rape becomes her goal. All those who stand in her way, who try to silence her, to keep her story from the media from the highest echelons of church and state will suffer. Justice is not enough: Susan is hell-bent of revenge. Who can stop her? Emma Boylan, investigative journalist, a young woman who has the guts to go where the police and government investigations fear to tread. It is up to her to ask the right questions, to pursue the evaders.

Harmattan by Gaye Shortland
As the dust-laden harmattan wind sweeps over the southern Sahara, Ellen, an Irishwoman, searches for her lost lover and struggles to come to terms with a culture which is hovering on the verge of extinction.

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Penultimate and Other Stories by Aubrey Dillon-Malone
These seventeen rite of passage stories deal broadly with love, loss, violence, religion and the pained parabolas of romance. From the turmoil of adolescence through the reflectiveness of middle age, the author chronicles the fortunes of his characters with lyricism and bittersweet humour as the reader moves from closely-knit communities to the wider world outdoors. The quotidian mixes with the adventurous in a heady melange that encapsulates an emotional range of experience within so many telling vignettes.

Thin Air by Kate Thompson
To outsiders, the Keane family looks content enough. They live on the beautiful west coast of Ireland where Brigid cooks lunches in a local hotel and her husband, Gerard, produces beef and sport horses on the family farm. Their children seem to be turning out all right and, if their lives are not entirely happy, they are at least uneventful. Until one day when their eldest daughter’s horse returns home without her. Martina seems to have vanished into thin air and no one can explain why. Each member of the family, isolated in their confusion, deals with the crisis in their own separate way. Now that the fabric of normality has been breached, the family will have to come to terms with what they find beyond it. This is a remarkable novel with haunting descriptions of the magic and history of the Irish landscape, a lyrical study of how a family can survive and renew itself in the face of a painful breakdown.

Flipside by Tina Reilly
Meet Jan. She’s 25 and clueless, with no idea what to do about her life. She wears too much make-up and too little clothes, has a crummy typing job, no man and a deep dark secret that she only talks about when she’s had a few jars (drinks) on her. In fact, her life verges on the boring side of disastrous. Then out of the blue something happens that threatens to turn her life upside down. She soon realises that being a disastrous thrity-something is worth fighting for. Together with her slightly strange family, two flatmates, Al, a shy workmate and Dave, a newly acquired eco-warrior boyfriend, the battle begins

Maddy Goes to Hollywood by Maureen Martella
At thirty-three years of age Maddy O’Toole is stranded on Cold Comfort Farm, deep in rural Ireland, with a monosyllabic husband, two children, and her mother. The only bright spot in her day in the American television soap she’s addicted to. Then she discovers that her long-lost sister Gloria is living in Hollywood. No sooner has Gloria invited her than Maddy’s on the plane. But what she envisages as a short break ends up changing her life. For when she arrives at Gloria’s hopelessly luxurious Bel Air home she falls helplessly in lust with her sister’s gorgeous and gentle actor boyfriend, Carlos, none other than the star of her favourite soap. It’s not going to endear her to her sister, but Maddy can’t bring herself to contemplate going home

The Draughtsman and the Unicorn: Stories by Anthony Glavin
Set variously in Donegal, Dublin, Boston, Nicaragua and Majorca, the stories in this collection chart the bittersweet and comic misadventures of his protagonists as they encounter such mysteries as love, betrayal, and mortality. A policeman on holidays suddenly confronted with the name of his trade; a mother haunted by a childhood hoax; a milkman realising too late the deadliness of a practical joke; a young woman in the stunningly atmospheric title story who fancies herself as the last unicorn. Ambient and enchanting, this collection offers a series of slowly revealed, unexpected and often devastating insights into the nuances and vagaries of the human condition.

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A Compact History of Ireland by Sarah Healy
This book provides in succinct, accessible form, a thematic rather than strictly chronological account of Irish history. The story of Ireland has been told many times but never quite in this form. The author’s book begins with a comprehensive historical portrait which presents the whole fabric of three thousand years of Irish life. For subsequent chapters she has selected for development the significant threads of the historical web, the themes of invasion, rebellion, the Black North, and aspects of the culture, especially literary theory, that make the whole of Ireland the cultural jewel of the Western World.

The Story of Irish Emigration by Frank D’Arcy
The small island of Ireland provides a striking example of exile and opportunity, of exodus and disaster, of new communities and faithful memories, from the idealistic monks of the 6th century to the ambitious professionals of the late 20th. Emigration to the ‘New World’ as we know it began in the 18th century. During the famines of the 1840s, the flood became an exodus and literally millions crossed the Atlantic. Later in the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution flourished in Britain, huge numbers of Irish made the shorter journey to work there in the mines and mills, to build roads and bridges and enlist in armies. This movement of population continued apace until the 1960s. In a distant corner of the British Empire, the Irish too made their mark. So many Irish were deported or simply emigrated to Australia that a substantial minority of the population can claim Irish descent. The Irish had a strong influence on the communities where they settled, becoming a substantial political and religious force, particularly in the United States. This book gives a fascinating account of the Irish in exile in the four corners of the glob e.

The 1916 Rising by Edward Purdon
The Easter Rising, which lasted for five days at the end of April 1916 and made Pearse, Connolly and MacDermott household names, is probably the single most important event in the history of modern Ireland. Attitudes to it have ranged from acclamation to execration. It seemed to end in abject failure with its participants jeered and spat upon by their compatriots, yet within weeks it was realised that its purpose had been attained: a spirit of revolution had been kindled in a quiescent country. The effects of that gesture for good or ill are with us still and this account of its context, course and consequences is required reading for those who would understand the history of this island ever since that triumphant failure.

The Story of the Claddagh Ring by Sean McMahon ‘Let love and friendship reign!’ is the motto of the famous Irish Claddagh ring. This lovely token of fealty a ring in gold or silver comprising two hands surrounding a heart and surmounted by a crown takes its name from the Claddagh, an ancient fishing village now part of Galway city. The earliest surviving examples are from about 1700 but it is known that the rings were popular much earlier. Tradition has it that in the Claddagh these rings were handed down from mother to daughter. Now the Claddagh ring is a sought-after piece of jewellery and a symbol of romance the world over.

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A Book of Irish Insults by Sean McMahon
Insults may be defined at their simplest as remarks or descriptions not intended as complimentary. Ireland can number among its sons and daughters some of the wittiest insulters ever Swift, Behan and Myles na Gopaleen are just three who come to mind. This book is filled with insults and witticisms.

Irish Saints by Peg Coghlan
The island of Saints and Scholars was aptly named and produced hundreds of true saints from the 5th to the 9th century, although there are officially only three canonised saints: Laurence O’Toole, Malachy and Oliver Plunkett. This book provides biographies of a representative selection of the women and men whose sanctity, austerity, humanity and scholarship are the glory of Irish history, the remarkable people who lit a light that shone in the darkness and was never quenched.

The Blarney Stone by Peg Coghlan
The ‘blarney’ or gift of the gab is one endowment all Irish people are said to possess. The reasons for the existence of this power over words are complicated but the hospitable Irish, generous as ever, have provided even strangers with the means of achieving it. All they have to do is kiss the Blarney Stone in the MacCarthy castle in the village of Blarney. This book tells the story of the Blarney Stone. It also explains why thousands of people each year climb an exhausting circular stairway in a village near Cork to achieve the envied Hibernian fluency

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A Haunted Heart by John MacKenna
‘So, when I’ve settled here, in my new and temporary home, when I’ve begun the process of patching up my own mortality, I’ll do my best to put those missing parts of their lives together again. There’s a chance that they’ll resent my interference, that what was lost or buried is best left that way, but I do this for the three of them Lydia, Myfanwy and Abigail. Maybe, most of all, for Abigail. If there’s any part of her soul in theirs, and surely there must be, then they’ll want to hear what I have to tell.’ In 1959, sixty years after leaving her native Ireland, Catherine Hallshead returns to live in Athy very near where she grew up. Her mission is to go through the sixty-nine journals of her life and then write a separate account of what happened when a stranger entered the Quaker Meeting House at Ballitore in January 1899. Joshua Jacob was a charismatic driven man, a preacher for his times, who was determined to set up a splinter group of worshippers called White Friends. Abigail, then married, fell head over heals in love with him. Their love for each other took their lives in directions they never foresaw or forgave. In a painstakingly and yet loving recreation of what happened in the last years of the Victorian era, Catherine sets out a memorial to her dead friend for the children who never knew their mother. She also depicts life in a small town in the late fifties in Ireland, and shows how the curiosity of the townsfolk gradually turns to help and offers of friendship. Once again John MacKenna has crafted a beautiful and unforgettable love story from the quiet unspoken truths of life. In its own way this is a tribute both to forgotten times and to the dangerous turbulence of religious extremism and unqualified love.

The Last Fine Summer by John MacKenna
A forceful and haunting novel, set in County Kildare, about contemporary love and death.

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The Irish Republic by Dorothy Macardle
This book was the first complete history of the struggle that started with the proclamation of the Republic and ended, or seemed to end, with the Republican defeat and ceasefire order of 24 May 1923. ‘This is not a narrative of battles and ambushes,’ writes the author; ‘it is with the political rather than the military aspect that this book deals.’ Her detailed chronicle covers the seven years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the end of the Civil War. Introductory chapters review earlier phases of the Irish resistance to conquest, the efforts to secure Home Rule and the beginning of Sinn FE9in. After May 1923, the story is carried forward, as a brief survey, to the further implementation of the Treaty by the signing of the Partition Agreement in London in December 1925. First published in 1937, this book has long held a place of honour in many Irish households. Eamon de ValE9ra said on its original publication: “The Irish Republic is the only book that I know of which gives a connected authoritative account of the period 1916 to 1923, and no one who wishes to understand this period of Irish history, or whose work brings them to deal with it in any detail, should be without a copy.’ The Irish Times of the day was equally effusive: “This exposition, or narrative, of events in Ireland during the seven momentous years from 1916 to 1923 may be regarded as an outstanding contribution to the materials of history, and it is certain to remain for many years the best standard reference for that period We know of no better description of events than is to be found in this volume.’ Dorothy Macardle was born in Dundalk. After graduating from UCD she taught at Alexandra College in Dundalk until she was taken into custody for Republican activities. She was an active Republican throughout the turbulent years between 1916 and 1923 and therefore this book is partially a first-hand account of the struggle from the viewpoint of one who was active throughout the turbulent years of the inception of the fledgling state. She later became the representative at the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations. The Irish Republic is without question a major and important work!

Death in Summer by William Trevor
In this novel, William Trevor tells the story of the sudden death of Thaddeus Davenant’s wife which leaves Thaddeus with the problem of childcare for baby Georgina. When none of the nannies interviewed is deemed suitable, Mrs. Iveson, Thaddeus’s mother-in-law, fulfils the position herself. But in rejecting one of the applicants, they have overlooked the beginning of a fixed and unnatural obsession. Trevor’s body of work makes him one of the greatest contemporary novelists and his novel stands among his best work.

The Whitest Flower by Brendan Graham
This novel is a remarkable and emotional odyssey which uses the subject of the Great Irish Famine and the subsequent diaspora as the subject matter for a story of immense potency.

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Great Irish Stories of Childhood edited by Peter Haining
A haunting collection of stories by eminent Irish authors: Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Neil Jordan and many others. Vivid, evocative and often deeply moving, this is a collection to reawaken nostalgia and provide hours of unadulterated pleasure.

Great Irish Stories of Murder and Mystery edited by Peter Haining
Powerful short stories of murder, mystery and mayhem have long been a speciality of Irish writers, and this gripping collection brings together some of the best of them, including stories from Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Jennifer Johnston, Neil Jordan, Patrick McCabe and William Trevor among many others. Moving from dark, sinister streets to desolate marshes, from deceptively peaceful village pubs to secret lodging houses, this feast of crime and mystery will transport the reader into a world where nothing is certain and complacency can prove fatal.

Oxford Book of Ireland edited by Patricia Craig
This book is a fascinating anthology charting Ireland’s cultural and social development through the world of poets, novelists, historians, and commentators: the Troubles, the great Famine, emigration, the decline of the language, the beauty of the landscape, the great cities, and the loquacious inhabitants are all brought together to capture the character of Ireland.

A Most Delightful Station: The British Army on the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland, 1855-1922 by Con Costello
This is the first fully-documented account of the British Empire’s most important training camp. Welcome in the homes of Kildare’s gentry, the military of the Curragh became and essential part of the economic, social and sporting life of Kildare. Edward VII, Captain Oates of Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition, and Oswald Mosley received training at the Curragh. Its daily routines were later recalled by many writers including Maud Gonne and Sean O’Faolain. It is a revealing portrait of the changing profile and role of a colonial army officers, men and their families, it is based on original research and features much previously unpublished material.

Seamus Heaney by Helen Vendler
This book explores the relationship of the life of Seamus Heaney to his poetry.

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