Accounts of the Great Famine in specific parts of the country have largely depended on records kept by Poor Law Guardians or in workhouses; less often by local newspapers or by scrupulous landlords and visiting relief-workers.
However, not every such area was serviced by a local newspaper or newspapers - and, if it was, those papers were often owned by Establishment figures with more sympathy towards the "better classes" than towards the suffering masses in cot and cabin.
In the case of Ennis, Co Clare, the situation was different. Its sole newspaper, the Clare Journal, was not only published in the town but was also owned and edited, during the Famine years, by a man of integrity devoted to the interests of his native county and town, John Busteed Knox. From a Protestant family closely connected to the landed gentry, Knox was reactionary to the point of zealotry, yet his criticisms of government and landlords at the height of the Famine illuminate him as a man with good intentions, even if he later defended the mass clearances by Clare landlords after 1848.
However, in Ciaran O Murchadha's authoritative study, Sable Wings Over The Land - Ennis, County Clare and its Wider Community during the Great Famine (Clasp Press, £15), the Clare Journal's selective reports are balanced by the efforts of the three Limerick-based newspapers that circulated in Co Clare, the Limerick Chronicle, the Limerick and Clare Examiner and the Limerick Reporter. In a foreword, Professor James S. Donnelly, Jr., of the University of Wisconsin, draws attention to O Murchadha's extensive use of these invaluable sources: "Among all the recent historians of the Great Famine, no one else has made more effective use of local newspapers than O Murchadha, or has shown more tellingly how much they can contribute to our understanding of this social disaster.'
This is a book which espousers of the doctrine of "shared experience" should read and re-read, particularly passages descriptive of the appalling conditions of the time, such as this: "The women and little children, crowds of whom were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields, like a flock of famishing crows, devouring the raw turnips, mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet . . . whilst their children were screaming with hunger . . ." This is a comprehensive and scholarly study of a small community battling with catastrophe.
Ennis is also the subject of The Ennis Compendium - From Royal Dun to Information Age Town, by Sean Spellissy (The Book Gallery, £15/£4.95). This is a revised and extended edition of the author's 1990 Portrait of Ennis and is an informative and well-written account of the history of Ennis and its many sites, ruins, personalities and local events. The many fine line drawings are by John Boyd, there is a good bibliography of works on Clare generally and Ennis in particular, and the whole is augmented by a "Business Directory" of advertisers whose financial assistance helped in the production of the book.
Two more Irish towns, Enniscorthy and Tralee, are featured in the Gill & Macmillan "Images of Ireland" series - Enniscorthy, compiled by Dan Walsh, and Tralee by Michael Diggin (both £8.99). Essentially, these are collections of monochrome photographs of people and places with explanatory captions chronicling the history of the towns and their inhabitants. There are some rare archival photographs from private collections and family albums, as well as images captured by contemporary cameramen of mundane subjects such as street scenes, football teams and donkeys and carts. The captions are informative if uninspired and there is the occasional error in reproducing prints, as in the Enniscorthy volume where (on page 44) members of the local FCA are shown marching with their rifles on their right shoulders. Obviously the negative is printed in reverse.
While the commemorations marking the bicentenary of the 1798 Rising wind down, publications devoted to aspects of the event continue to appear. 1798 and the Irish Bar, by Patrick M. Geoghegan (The Bar Council of Ireland, £2.50), is an attractive pamphlet setting out, in brief, the parts played by members of the Irish Bar in the Rising. "An unusually high proportion of the protagonists in the rebellion came from some kind of legal background," the author points out. "The contributions made by barristers, in particular, was highly significant. From their ranks came those who devised and participated in the rebellion, those who opposed it, and last, but just as significantly, those who betrayed it." Those barristers who took part in the Rising include not only the well-known Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers and Bagenal Harvey, but also Thomas Addis Emmet and Arthur O'Connor, all of whom were struck off the Roll. Moves are now being made by spirited lawyers to have their names restored - and not before time.
The current edition of Duiche Neill - Joural of the O'Neill Country Historical Society (Cumann Staire Dhuiche Neill, £10) is a special commemorative number for the bicentenary of the Rising of 1798, edited with his usual skill by Proinsias O Conluain. It contains two long articles, by Proinsias O Conluain himself on the situation in the Blackwater valley in the years before 1798, and by Brendan McAnallen on the local scene in Brantry, the latter drawing on the Dungannon court martial report of July 1798. Both are valuable additions to what is already known of the United Irishmen in those parts of Tyrone, Armagh and Monaghan.
With the release of political prisoners in the North going ahead, this may be an appropriate time to take up Hard Time - Armagh Gaol 1971-1986, by Raymond Murray (Mercier Press, £7.99) and learn anew about the conditions of women prisoners in that gaol. The book, based on extracts from reports by Father Murray, who was prison chaplain, to the Northern Ireland Office, records in stark detail the human rights abuses perpetrated against the prisoners, who (now in Maghaberry) continue to campaign for their rights. Another case of "shared experience", perhaps?