The latest offering from the Maynooth Studies in Local History, published by Four Courts Press, is another important collection of local studies bringing the reader into the worlds of nineteenth and twentieth-century counties Mayo, Westmeath, Cork and Dublin. The books are in many ways a new departure for the direction of the Maynooth series in terms of the methodologies and sources used by authors, but also in terms of some of the topics covered.
Michael Hanna's study of Denis Brenan Bullen medical career provides in great detail the controversies which shaped both education and medicine in Cork in the nineteenth century. It also provides an illuminating insight into the management and politics of Queen's College Cork (now U.C.C.) in the first decade or so of its existence. Bullen's role in teaching and administration is also discussed in this fascinating account.
The late David Byrne's study of the impact of the Great Famine on Sir William Palmer's estate in Mayo is an important addition to the growing number of local studies concerned with this topic. Providing an in-depth account of the impact of the Famine on one estate, Byrne charts the fortunes of both landlord and tenant alike, indicating how the suffering of the latter did not deter Palmer during the 1840s. Again, as with the other volumes, the myriad of sources used is impressive.
In his investigation of nineteenth-century Knock, Frank Mayes points to new ways in which to investigate the local past, using rural tensions in County Mayo as a means of doing so. Adopting new methodologies and revisiting some well-known sources, Mayes examines amongst other things literacy, language and household, suggesting that the 1901 census can be used as a source for nineteenth-century social history.
Tom Hunt's study of the ‘political maverick’, Peadar Cowan, might also be seen as a new departure taking a somewhat ‘minor political figure’ and placing him within the overall national story and indeed at the heart of many of the major events in the first few decades of Irish politics in the post-independence period. It is interesting that some of the issues that Cowan raised as a politician in the 1940s would re-emerge several decades later, including industrial schools, working conditions and the U.S. military's use of Ireland as a base. Indeed, in Hunt's book, each chapter is worthy of a stand-alone study.
In his examination of the decline of the Dublin cattle market in the mid-twentieth century, Delcan Byrne uses both oral testimony and written sources to enliven this very important and engaging account of the changing nature of rural and urban life. Byrne's valuable study not only deals with the economics of the cattle market, but the social interaction which came with it and which was also a casualty of change by the 1970s.
As they have in the past, readers will find this latest offering from the Maynooth Studies in Local History both engaging and enlightening, and no doubt these books will encourage others to examine their local space, characters and incidents.
