Book reviews in brief: Moral Formations, A Fool's Kabbalah, Motherland
Moral Formations: Discipline and Religion in the Irish Army, 1922-32 by Daniel Ayiotis (Eastwood Books, €20)
Replacing the Irish Republican Army that had fought the War of Independence with a 'National Army' that would defend the nascent Irish Free State encumbered the first government as it confronted the threat and then the reality of the Civil War. Ayiotis, who is director of the Military Archives, draws extensively from the archives, and other sources, to show how the Department of Defence and Army GHQ created a command structure and codes of discipline, while Catholic chaplains demanded chapels in every barracks for Masses, retreats and sodalities, and the Medical Corps sought to ensure sanitation and hygiene while fighting 'the twin vices of drink and venereal disease'.
Ray Burke
A Fool's Kabbalah by Steve Stern (Melville House, £16.99)
A Fool's Kabbalah unfolds as a dual narrative set against the wreckage of postwar Europe, where wit becomes not only a refuge but a form of resistance. With precision and dark lyricism, Stern crafts a meditation on survival, grief, memory, and the strange absurdity of history. Gershom Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, sets out to salvage Jewish texts destroyed by the Nazis, while Menke, a shtetl trickster, faces a very different fate. The novel moves between biting irony and aching sorrow, its language crackling with echoes of Kafka and Beckett. Stern's prose is elegant and richly imaginative, balancing pathos with philosophical insight. He doesn't offer easy solace – only a raw, unflinching reckoning with history's weight. A beautifully crafted novel of intelligence, compassion, and surprising moral grace.
Adam Wyeth
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Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity by Luke Pepera (W&N, £22)
Pepera has set himself an ambitious task in journeying through the history of a people that 'extend[s] all the way back to the beginning of our species'. 'Journey' is the appropriate word, as the author focuses on sharing the essence rather than penning a comprehensive history which, he muses, would take several lifetimes given the 'continent's vastness and the sheer immensity of varied peoples who have lived there'. In order to do so, Pepera reaches beyond the lens of colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade - which occupy a culturally important but rather brief part of the continent's history - focusing rather on topics ranging from ancestral veneration to matriarchal societies, oral storytelling and its influence on modern-day rap music, and how the dead live on in African societies. An informative, enlightening read.
Brigid O'Dea
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25 minutes ago
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Seán Moncrieff: In the not-too-distant future four of my five children may live overseas
When you're a bit older , there can be a sense that your world is shrinking. Like anyone of any age, you do the same things every day, except, with age, you have more of an acute sense of it. There's a decreasing novelty . Looking through the eyes of a child is a vomit-inducing cliche, yet when Granddaughter Number One comes to stay, that's what happens, whether we like it or not. There can be any number of revelations that she will urgently need to share: she has toes or the dog is barking or Ms Rachel is on the TV. (I find Ms Rachel creepy, but that's probably just me.) We will have to do some chasing or help with a jigsaw. We will have to be examined for ailments. (Granddaughter Number One is a qualified doctor. She has all the equipment any way). We also have to negotiate around the usual toddler sticking points on bedtimes and meals. We never win. It's all hauntingly familiar because, of course, I've done this sort of thing before. But the familiarity is more of a feeling than a specific set of memories. My recollection of her mother, her uncle and some of her aunts at that age is more of a blur: like dealing with a herd rather than a specific child. Often, they parented each other, and they still tease me about not being able to tell them apart. Well, one of them does. The blonde one, I think. This time round, it's easier to focus on Granddaughter Number One's specific foibles. She's not big on tantrums, but instead has learned to weaponise politeness: 'no thank you' is her preferred method of refusal. That's why she's a master negotiator. READ MORE And while it's energising to be sucked into her enthusiasms, it's also exhausting to consider the amount of information a two-year-old can absorb on a minute-by-minute basis. Sometimes, Daughter Number Four and I have to tap out for a few minutes. Herself never does. She has the uncanny ability to morph into the personality of a (very responsible) 14-year-old girl: one who is endlessly excited by baths and wearing pyjamas and knows all the words to every song on all the Disney films. In the not-too-distant future, we won't get to do this as much. When Daughter Number One mentioned they might move to France, I thought it was a bit of a bonkers idea, and for all the obvious reasons. But you could never accuse her of not being super-organised, and she has a detailed plan covering language and schools, tax and accommodation and other eventualities I hadn't thought of. Now they have a place to live and a date when they are leaving. Son Number One is back from Colombia for a while, but will be heading back to that part of the world soon. Daughter Number Three is loving her life in London, while Daughter Number Two and her partner are actively considering where they might live in the future: a future where four out of my five children, and a granddaughter, may live some distance away. [ An encounter near Barcelona's Sagrada Família taught me a lesson about other tourists Opens in new window ] The housing crisis is a huge factor, of course. You could blame the current Government for this, or the government of 20 years ago which failed to plan for this. Which is the same government. You'd wonder why the parents of this emigrant generation kept voting for them. Not that my children, or any of their peers, are without agency. They've made decisions about the shapes of their lives. And with every change they make, I'm forced to expand my thinking, to reshape my familial mental map and how much of the globe it covers. My world isn't shrinking. Quite the opposite. That expansion might even involve language. In a year or two, I may have a granddaughter who speaks French as easily as English. As she may well say to me one day, 'c'est la vie'.
Irish Times
12 hours ago
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Designed for Life: Architecture and Design in Cork City 1900-90 by Tom Spalding
Designed for Life: Architecture and Design in Cork City 1900-90 Author : Tom Spalding ISBN-13 : 978-1782050193 Publisher : Cork University Press Guideline Price : €40 In his novel A Land Not Theirs (1986) David Marcus writes that 'All the way up to the statue of Fr. Mathew was one immense conflagration … a gigantic furnace.' Carried out by British troops in December 1920 in a reprisal for an IRA ambush near the then Victoria (now Collins) Barracks, this burning of Cork destroyed five acres of the city's significant streets and properties. It is typical of Tom Spalding's tone of mild speculation that he dares to wonder if, perhaps, the fires were good for the city. The rebuilding and restoration which followed opened up the new science of town planning in Cork and introduces Spalding's survey, its densely packed material focused on a single century of urban development. Essentially, it explains where communities live and work and why, and sometimes why not. No stranger to aspects of Cork's built history, Spalding's chapters offer compelling evidence garnered over decades of archival research, observation and local and personal affection. They should be read as a guide to the management of any Irish city; the occasionally repetitive detail only reinforces its universality. This review must declare an interest as one of the minor anecdotal sources; Spalding's use of such interviews is admirably woven into a progress through all the controversies from brewery to shrine, municipal estates and slum clearances, the old Sunbeam-Wolsey factory and the new Opera House. It is a delight to find the little things recorded: the stained glass in an avenue of houses, an outbreak of Beaux Art or Art Deco, the retention of a snug in a popular pub, the stone embroideries of a monument. These endorse the dedicated investigation of an environment still familiar and the named architects, engineers, speculators and civic and church authorities who caused it to be made. READ MORE Throughout this book Spalding's restrained enthusiasms divert into commentary, as with the class-defining significance of the parlour (lower) rather than the sittingroom (middle to upper) while his academic detachment is punctured by the frequent ironies in his documentation of contradictory certainties. Guided by the title Designed for Life, what elevates this survey above all is Spalding's regard for the people of the city through the years of change and, still, decay. For such a weighty volume, it is somehow hard to put down.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Wild salmon are on the brink of disappearing from Irish waters
It's difficult to grasp two truths when only one is in plain sight. Take a walk down the chilled section of any supermarket and you'll spot rows upon rows of Atlantic salmon for sale. Whether it's fresh, poached, smoked over peat or skinless, canned, in pots flavoured with lemon and herbs, or ready-made sushi rolls wrapped in rice, farmed salmon might not be cheap, but it's abundant, in high demand (Irish production has risen by 51 per cent in the past few years) and everywhere. The other reality, underwater and hidden from our view, couldn't be more different. In the past five decades, wild salmon numbers in Irish waters have dropped by 90 per cent – and that's from an already low level in the 1970s. They are now on the brink of disappearing. Earlier this month, scientists from Nasco, an international body set up in 1984 to protect these iconic fish, met in Cardiff. Known for their cautious, measured tone, the boffins' latest warning is anything but: wild Atlantic salmon are in crisis , and only 'urgent and transformative' action can save them. Wild salmon are born in freshwater, travel to the sea, and then return to their birthplace to spawn, making them a clear sign of how well we're managing to coexist with other life. They need cold, clean and free-flowing waters, but right now we're offering rivers and oceans that are too warm, polluted, exploited or physically altered, making life impossible for these fish. On top of that, many rivers are blocked by man-made structures like weirs, culverts and dams, preventing salmon from completing their journey. READ MORE Nasco scientists say that salmon farming is a significant threat . Along Ireland's west coast – from Donegal to Mayo to Cork – tens of thousands of salmon are raised in circular open-net cages that float just offshore. For sea lice, the crustaceans about the length of a small button that feed on salmon, these pens are like a giant seafood banquet. The lice attach themselves to the fish using their clawed limbs, then crawl across their skin, feeding on them and eventually eating through to the muscle and fat before releasing eggs into the surrounding waters. Without treatment, an infested farmed salmon won't survive long. For young wild salmon leaving their home river for the first time, the journey to sea is full of danger. A female adult salmon lays thousands of eggs, but only a few will survive to become adults. As the young salmon swim by the salmon farms along the coast out into the Atlantic, they can pick up sea lice. These parasites can cause serious harm; scientists say it only takes a few lice to kill a young wild salmon. However, some experts sharply disagree over how much blame sea lice from fish farms deserve for the decline in young wild salmon. This debate really matters because, by law, every fish farm must have an aquaculture licence to operate. The rules are clear: if the science raises any reasonable question that sea lice from a farm could cause serious damage to wild salmon, then granting a licence becomes very difficult for the authorities to justify. 'Unless a salmon conservation programme is initiated, Ireland could be looking at a situation where we will have little or no salmon left in the wild,' according to Declan Cooke of Inland Fisheries Ireland Scientists can use a simple method to determine how sea lice affect wild salmon. They take two groups of young salmon; one group is given a special chemical treatment to protect them from lice; the other is left untreated. Both groups are then released into the same river, go to sea and face the same conditions. A year later, researchers count how many fish from each group return. If more of the treated salmon come back than the untreated ones, it shows that sea lice have a serious impact. Between 2001 and 2009, scientists from the Marine Institute carried out this 'paired release' research at eight sites in Ireland. Their conclusions, published in 2013: while sea lice cause a 'significant' number of deaths among young wild salmon, the overall impact is 'minor and irregular'. This paper has been used to support the granting of fish farm licences as evidence that sea lice from farms aren't a significant threat to wild salmon survival. [ Wild salmon are an Irish icon. Now they're almost gone Opens in new window ] Not everyone agrees. Scientists from Canada, Norway and the UK raised serious concerns about the paper and, last month, researchers from Inland Fisheries Ireland published a new study looking at 18 years' worth of data from paired released experiments. They found that, on average, an 18 per cent drop in survival among young salmon that weren't treated for lice, and the more lice on the farms, the greater the losses. Their conclusion is clear: sea lice from salmon farms pose a real threat to wild salmon. Why does this matter? Because 12 rivers along Ireland's west coast flow into legally protected areas where salmon farms operate. If scientists are now saying that these farms are killing young wild salmon due to sea lice infestations, then the law leaves little room for inaction. Authorities are obliged to act to move the farms to new locations, revoke their licences or find a way to ensure that there are no lice on the farmed salmon during the critical time when the young wild salmon are heading out to sea. There is no single solution that will save Ireland's wild salmon. If emissions remain high, our waters will continue to heat up. But not everything is hopeless – there are things in our immediate control. We can remove our barriers, free our waters from pollution and, if the science shows it will help wild stocks survive, change how or where salmon farms operate. Holding on to the reality of wild salmon in our waterways is one we should cling to – for future generations if nothing else.
