Twentieth-century Ireland Revisited

If the volume of survey histories is anything to go by, the present period is a vibrant one for modern Irish historiography. While such books used to arrive at the leisurely pace of three or four a decade J.J. Lee's Ireland 1912-1985 and Roy Foster's Modern Ireland being the most outstanding and influential surveys of the 1980s' the last decade has seen the publication of survey histories of, or encompassing, twentieth-century Ireland by Tim Pat Coogan, Mike Cronin, David Fitzpatrick, Brian Girvin, David Harkness, Alvin Jackson, Dermot Keogh, Henry Patterson and Charles Townshend.2 To this vast output we can add the two bulky books under review which, between them, amount to almost 2000 pages. In reality, this prodigious output also reflects publishing trends (cheaper production costs, more titles, shorter shelflives), increased competition for the undergraduate market and the continuing heartening appetite for academic and popular Irish history among students and the public, as much as the current vitality of history writing in Ireland

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