GH: Tell us about your background. JL: I was born in Tralee, County Kerry, in 1942. I spent my first nine years in the tranquil environment of Castlegregory, a village sixteen miles west of Tralee on the north side of the Dingle peninsula, where my father was a guard. We then moved to Ballinasloe, and … Read more
When I was scarcely eighteen years of age, Into the army I did engage, I left my house with full intent To join the forty-second [sic] regiment; To Fulwood barracks I then did go To do some duty in that old depot, But out of trouble I never was free, For my captain took a … Read more
Of the challenges they faced they found prison reform to be among the greatest. There was the popular view that people in jail were there because they were wicked and, therefore, deserved the punishment they received. To argue that no prisoner deserved that much punishment was an argument that too often fell flat in the … Read more
(3:1) Reviewed by Tony Canavan In the wake of the revisionist/anti-revisionist debate in Irish history, one approaches any book with a title like The Cause of Ireland with a certain trepidation, especially when the author’s previous works include Ireland: the Propaganda War. What one is afraid of is a romanticised unreconstructed nationalist narrative of the … Read more
Reviewed by Michael Farrell ‘You had opponents willing to co-operate… We were willing to help…[but] you went on the old political lines, fostering hatreds, keeping one third of the population as if they were pariahs…and relying on those religious differences and difficulties so that you could remain in office for ever’. Joe Devlin, the northern … Read more