LOCAL HISTORY:LIKE A LONG conversation with a favourite uncle, James Ballantyne's Lismore: The Autobiography of an Irish Town 1937-1954is both enjoyable and informative.
Anyone who grew up in small-town Ireland in the middle years of the last century will find themselves completely at home and anyone who wants to know what life was like then will find an honest and detailed account.
The book was first published privately in 1995 and later in a microfiche edition. This is its first commercial printing, funded, as the author points out in his acknowledgements, by a bequest from a friend, the newsreel cameraman and war correspondent John Turner. It has over 600 illustrations, mostly family photographs.
Structured in chapters that deal with the different facets of life as it was lived then, the book makes for easy reading for the general reader, yet anyone looking for a "what happened when" history of the town in the years 1937-54 will find that too. It is both a prodigious feat of research (undertaken over 20 years), and obviously a labour of love. The years in the title were those from Ballantyne's birth until his departure as a boy of 17 for the wider world.
It is striking to realise that only 60 years ago Ireland was a relatively deprived society where it was commonplace for children to go without shoes or underwear. If it was deprived, it was also a lot more innocent than it is today: the crimes prosecuted by Ballantyne's Garda sergeant father included publicans having customers on their premises after hours; domestic squabbles, larceny of trees, rent arrears; trespass of cows and other livestock; untaxed motor vehicles; or fighting with hurleys at matches. A far cry from the murders, gangland killings, drugs seizures and shootings that make up today's headlines. Local libraries, cinemas and dancehalls, sports grounds and beauty spots were the focus of the precious leisure hours of the townspeople. Despite the complexities of life after the Civil War, even politics was a simpler affair - Ballantyne describes the excitement of a visit by De Valera to the town around the time of the 1948 general election, and how he got the great man's autograph by dint of crawling through the crowd and elbowing where he could.
The chapter in which, at the age of 17, the writer leaves Lismore for the life that will eventually see him settled in England, with a career as a librarian, is moving, and mirrored in the experiences of all those forced to emigrate by economic necessity.
Ballantyne's book is evocative and inspiring and a welcome addition to the social history memoir genre. Ordnance Survey Letters Offalycontinues the series publishing the letters of the Ordnance surveyor and scholar John O'Donovan and his colleagues from the field to head office in Dublin as they mapped and researched the origins and structures of townlands and parishes, along with their historical contexts and antiquities, in the pre-Famine years of the last century.
O'Donovan is a lively and often entertaining writer, especially when he becomes flummoxed by faulty or inaccurate information. "I am wearied with conjectures," he says at one point in his research surrounding the churches on the ancient site of Clonmacnoise. He could be ironic as well: "It is heresy in me to attempt to impugn the veracity of this narration which has gained so much honour and profit for the burial ground of St. Kieran and I therefore do not attempt to pronounce it a pure fabrication" he says of a saint's vision which implied that no one who was buried at Clonmacnoise would be damned.
The book, like all the other Ordnance Survey Letters, makes for fascinating reading.
The international Journal of Historical Geography for January 2008is aimed at historical geographers and environmental historians. This issue, edited by Felix Driver, University of London, and Graeme Wynn, University of British Colombia, contains a number of scholarly articles and book reviews plus a roundtable review of a book by William J Smyth of the Department of Geography at University College Cork: Mapmaking, Landscapes and Memory: a Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530-1750. To judge from the five reviews the book is fascinating and the riposte by the author is well-balanced and generous.
There is just space for a taste of two journals - those of the Co Longford Historical Society and the Clonmany, Co Donegal-based McGlinchey Summer School. Both the Longford Teathbha40th anniversary edition, and the Donegal It's Us They're Talking About Issue No 10contain much interesting and useful local lore.
The Longford journal marks the four decades of the society and contains amongst others an intriguing essay on the Longford Wild Geese in the Hotel des Invalides in Paris by Eoghan Ó hAnnrachaín and background to the saga of the restoration of Longford Courthouse. James McNerney's succinct article deals with the building's history from the early 1790s and later when both Michael Collins and Thomas Ashe were tried there for making "inflammatory" speeches. The Donegal journal includes papers from last year's Flight of the Earls Summer School. Among these is Brian O'Doherty's vivid and well researched account of the 35-year exile of Lady Rosa O'Dogherty. (Further information from www.ladyrosa.net.) What a film it would make!
• Noeleen Dowling is a local historian and freelance journalist.
Lismore: The Autobiography of an Irish Town 1937-1954 By James Ballantyne The Heap, 582pp. £25 (available from www.lismoreautobiography.co.uk )
Ordnance Survey Letters Offaly Edited by Michael Herity, MRIA Four Masters Press, 215pp. €60 hb
The International Journal of Historical Geography Elsevier, 190pp. (Subscriptions available at www.elsevier.com )
Longford Teathbha 40th Anniversary Edition 111pp. €20 from Eason and Baxters in Longford and other local bookshops
Donegal It's Us They're Talking About Issue No 10, 100pp. €10 (from shops on the Inishowen peninsula or www.mcglinchey.ie )