Welsh Journals

under a penal code, the details of which Maureen Wall brings out, though the Ascendancy itself, as seen in R. B. McDowell's contribution, made a bid for autonomy before succumbing to union with Great Britain. J. H. Whyte rightly headlines the period 1800-47 as the age of Daniel O'Connell, when union brought opportunities (unseized) and mounting land and population problems culminating in the fearsome purge of the Famine. T. W. Moody covers Fenianism, home rule and the land war when Ireland painfully emerged as the major problem in British politics. Donal McCartney traces Home Rule to its 1914 anticlimax and through republican rebellion and internal warfare to the 1922 treaty which brought the Irish Free State into existence. J. L. McCracken tells how Northern Ireland opted out in 1921 and maintained her connexion with Great Britain in a somewhat strained autonomy, while Patrick Lynch concludes with the transition from Free State to semi-republic, to republic and the foundation of a new economy in recent years in the republic of Ireland. What is remarkable is that there is so little padding (an introductory paragraph or two with a little cotton wool is all) and how much comment on significant changes accompanies the essential structure of information. There are, of course, things on which more detail was desirable than, in the circumstances, could be supplied, or more argument than could be accommodated, but in many ways the average achievement is astonishingly high and the composite effect of text and illustrations remarkably coherent and effective. The editors, no less than the contributors, have done an outstanding job of popularization. D. B. QUINN Liverpool From the Mercier Press, Cork, there also appeared in 1967 the first volume of a comprehensive Dictionary of Irish Writers, compiled by Brian Cleeve (pp. 143, paperback 8s. 6d.). This deals with writers of fiction; the other two volumes will cover, respectively, non-fiction writers in English (including historians), and writers in Gaelic. The first volume here includes entries on over 500 poets, novelists, dramatists and short story writers, and will prove an enormously helpful and informative work of reference for all concerned with the history and culture of the Irish people.