Ireland's Polemical Past

In 1980, a young lecturer from St Patrick's College, Maynooth, contributed an innovative essay on mid-nineteenth-century Irish Fenianism to the Festschrift of his mentor, T.W. Moody: F.S.L. Lyons and R.A.J. Hawkins (ed.), Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension. The essay, with its emphasis on challenging national isolationism in the writing of Irish history, set the tenor of Richard Vincent Comerford's distinguished career. Over the next thirty years, R.V. Comerford combined gifts for historiographical ingenuity and energetic departmental leadership to become one of Ireland's leading historians. Now, on the occasion of his retirement, Comerford is honoured, as his mentor was, by colleagues, friends and students in one of the finest (but, sadly, declining) traditions of scholarship. Assessing a Festschrift dedicated to a widely-respected and distinguished professor is a difficult task, but the editor of Ireland's Polemical Past, Terence Dooley, in assembling a strong cast and nurturing a defining theme for the book, has made the job of the reviewer much easier. The spine of this collection of eleven essays is the concept of how history was viewed, used and abused by various components of Irish society through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The wide-ranging focus of the essays—the mentalité of Protestant clerics, popular songs, memory and politics within Irish localities, the teaching of history, women's writing, emigration, Home Rule politics, the march of nationalism, tourism, and the fate of the ‘Big House’ in Ireland—reflect many strains within Comerford's own broad scholarship. Indeed, his influence on many of the contributors is undeniable

Emigration · Foreign policy · Historiography · Honour · Irish · Isolationism · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Scholarship · Theme (computing · Classics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy