I love this time of year. It is when a slew of good history reads are released, time for the Christmas market. This week saw the national and local press begin reviewing the first of them.

Des Kenny's Biblio column in the Galway Advertiser hits on one of my favourite topics by discussing G&M's new book on the Spanish Armada: The Downfall of the Spanish Armada in Ireland by Ken Douglas. It is a fascinating topic and one that clearly piqued his interest:

this book is well worth reading, not only because it debunks the mythology that surrounds the Spanish Armada and gives an intriguing insight into the life of 16th century Ireland, but also because it underlines the tragedy and sordid futility of war, no matter when, why, or how it is waged.

There is a decent review for The lost revolution: The story of the official ira and the workers' party brian Hanley & Scott Millar in the Saturday Independent:

The Sunday Indepent covers Liberties:My Father, The General by Risteard Mulcahy. Reviewing it, Charles Lysaght writes:

The historic value of this book, based largely on those memories, is the insight it gives into the bitter personal conflicts within the republican movement prior to independence and afterwards, in the Cumann na nGael government. The brusque Michael Collins and the abrasive Kevin O'Higgins may have inspired devotion in some but they antagonised many others and so created divisions.

While not strictly a book, well not at all in fact. John Paul McCarthy's essay also in the Sunday Independent on the recent RTÉ drama (CSÍ: Cork's Bloody Secret) about ethnic murder in South Cork is well worth reading:

A pale and handsome young man once stood up in the British House of Commons to talk about these incorrigible sectarian tensions.

 

He dismissed the notion that Irish Catholics treated their Protestant neighbours with natural courtesy, and said "there is an old hereditary feud of blood -- there has been a transfer of property founded upon conquest -- and again, upon violent punishment for sanguinary rebellions, which is still unforgotten, and which lies at the root of the existing discord. Could you remove the immediate cause of debate, you would not thereby get rid of this fundamental difficulty."

The speaker was a young William Ewart Gladstone in 1836, channelling the mindset and the self-pity of the rural Irish Catholic class -- the very mindset that, by their own admission, animated the IRA in Cork in 1922.

A real crop of material to be getting on with!

Eoin