While this blog has been created to promote my memoir Against the Wind, it is also a site to allow me to publicise and comment on books and writing with similar themes. News has it that the first book to be banned in Ireland (1929) by the new “independent” Free State government, Liam O’Flaherty’s, The House of Gold has been published for the first time in 80 years. In a new introduction, writer and journalist, Tomas Mac Siomoin, comments that the emerging Free State was run by an ” oppressive native gombeen ascendancy , buttressed by the Catholic church”.
Another book; Deported: The Story of Jimmy Gralton, by Des Guckian, tells of the victimisation and the first and only ‘official’ deportation by the state (1933) of an Irish dissident and activist. In August, renowned film director, Ken Loach, began filming Gralton’s story in County Leitrim. A cousin Paul Gralton said the story is relevant to the Ireland of today and “is a story that needs to be told”.
Being Bookish 