Old Ireland and New
IN 1941 Dr. Halliday Sutherland heard that his book the Laws of Life, which he had written years before and which in 1936 had received the permissu superiorum from the Archbishop of Westminster, had been banned by the Irish censors. To add injury to insult, when he came over fifteen years later to write a book about Ireland, somebody was just assuring him that the wild Irishman of tradi- tion no longer existed when a wild Irishman of tradition came into the hotel and knocked him down. Yet his Irish Journey (Bles, 15s.) is sympathetic (though occasionally critical) and often amusing (though not always inten- tionally). Dr. Sutherlatid writes naively, both in manner and in matter. He has rejected the semi-colon, and the result is often a staccato series of trivia : 'At Mallow I went to the Central Hotel. Bed and breakfast 14s. I at once inquired about transport to Doneraile. .' and so on. Better proof- reading, too, might have spared us a succes- sion of interruptions. Still, this is an enter- taining and occasionally illuminating study of Catholic Irish by an English Catholic.
The Ossianic Lore and Romantic Tales of Mediawal Ireland (Three Candles, Dublin, 2s,) represents a disturbing departure from the principle established in the earlier volumes in the Irish Cultural Relations Committee's series, which were designed to reach the general public. Gerard Murphy has filled this, the latest addition to the series, with tedious academic detail, footnotes and references: it is much more likely to scare the timid reader away than to encourage him to seek further. And this is a pity, as Professor Murphy's Early Irish Lyrics (O.U.P., 42s.) reveals. His transla- tions of Irish lyric poetry bear out his con- tention that it is 'unique in the Middle Ages in freshness of spirit and perfection of form.'
The first ten pages of Stephen Rynne's All Ireland (Batsford. 21s.) may be safely dis- regarded; they are about Dublin, and Stephen Rynne, a countryman, scarcely bothers to hide his yawns. The rest of this travel book is good, particularly where he gets into a county like Clare, where he feels thoroughly at home. He has the knack of finding the right phrase at the right time, without making it look as contrived as so many travel writers now manage to do. The photographs are very pleasant, though 1 would have been prepared to trade ten black and white pictures for one in colour—at least of the West of Ireland.
J. G. Simms's The Williatnite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690-1703 (Faber, 25s.), the seventh in the 'Studies in Irish History' series, covers a period about which surprisingly little (con- sidering its importance) was known—though this has not prevented many tendentious pro- nouncements on it. From hitherto unused MS sources the author has managed to clear up satisfactorily such vexed questions as the history of the 'missing clause' of the Treaty of Limerick; and to show how it came about that the Williamite settlement was compara- tively mild to the Catholic Irish—though this was only a respite, as they soon came under the Penal Laws' harrow. Faber's have also reissued Constantia Maxwell's entertaining Dublin under the Georges (25s.), which the author has revised and brought up to date.
IVOR BRIEN
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