LOCAL HISTORY: PHOTOGRAPHS, particularly historical photographs, are invaluable to the historian, not only because they are decorative and help to break up the inches of text marching along a page, but because in and of themselves they have a contribution of information to make. Liam Kelly's invaluable book, Photographs and Photography in Irish Local History, (Maynooth Research Guides for Irish Local History, Four Courts Press, €39.95 hbk, €19.95 pbk), tells how to find the right picture, where to find it, what it might tell you, and even how to take care of it. It also incorporates a history of Irish photography since 1839.
In his foreword, David Davison reminds the reader that photographs can be a means of record, but who selects the content of that record? It is therefore always wise to ask when and why the photographer made the image before interpreting its content. But he adds that photographs represent an immensely rich and as yet largely untapped resource for historians who have tended to overlook photographs for purposes other than prettification.
One of the important uses of photography is on page 105, a view of the grand staircase at Rockingham House, Co Roscommon, in 1948. The house was destroyed by fire some nine years later, and the photographs are now our only reminder of its serenely beautiful interior.
Another beautiful building features in Georgian Dublin,edited by Gillian O'Brien and Finola O'Kane (Four Courts, €50), a collection of articles that originated at a conference, Bare Bones of a Fanlight, in 2006. It has a varied and colourful content, and bibliophiles will enjoy particularly the representations of Dublin in the fiction of the time in essays by Aileen Douglas and Sharon Murphy, while others will be taken with WJ McCormack's article on some commercial and other sources for the Edward Worth Library (in Dr. Steevens' Hospital). My own personal favourite, though, is Colum Kenny's erudite description of how the King's Inns came to move to Constitution Hill and the many problems that arose from the move, not least the resignation of the architect, the famous James Gandon, before the building was finished.
Before that there were enlivening rows about the title on which the new building was to stand, there were allegations of sharp practice, and the benchers themselves seemed not to be very keen on the new site, which took them away from proximity to the courts on the quays. It's a splendid essay and makes much of a rather unpromising subject.
As always with the Maynooth Studies in Local History publications, there are many plums in this year's crop. The series editor is Raymond Gillespie and the titles are published by Four Courts at €8.95 each.
There is the current Dean of St Patrick's, Dr RB MacCarthy, writing about the diocese of Lismore in The Diocese of Lismore1801-69, which contains fascinating detail about the administration of a rural diocese in the last days of the Establishment of the Church of Ireland. There's also Jennifer Kelly's well-thought-out The Downfall of Hagan - Sligo Ribbonism in 1842and Bernadette Lally's fascinating account of the history of reading and opportunities for reading in Loughrea, Co Galway, Print Culture in Loughrea 1850 - 1900. This begins with Lady Gregory, or Augusta Persse as she was then, standing as a child on tiptoe to buy books in a local shop in Loughrea, and 60 years later, in 1929, she is serving on the Galway Co Council Carnegie Library Committee, when she was critical of the "mass of rubbishy fiction" on the shelves, preferring instead that more biographies, history and travel should be purchased for the local readers. In between those two events we get glimpses of what was being read and when by the local townspeople, and through a diary kept by Thomas Kelly, a local bookseller, we see how they were supplied with reading material.
All the political turmoil, ecclesiastical sectarianism, and poignancy of the Famine years are in Padraig Vesey's account of the murder of one well-intentioned, naïve but ill-advised landlord in Co Roscommon in 1847 in The Murder of Major Mahon, Strokestown, Co. Roscommon 1847. The events leading up to the assassination are examined, and there is an excellent chapter on the aftermath of the murder and what it meant to the locality. Both Sean Bagnall and Jim Rees have written very local books which examine in one case how Tallaght ( Tallaght 1835-50 - A Rural Place, by Bagnall) evolved into a community outside the urban area of Dublin and in the other ( The Fishery of Arklow 1800-1950by Rees) how a local community became identified with their town-within-a-town, the Fishery of Arklow. Both have a good deal to say about how communities evolve.
My Lagan Love - A Portrait of the River Lagan, by Ian Hill, with paintings by Gillian Lutton, (Cottage Publications, £19.95, www.cottage-publications.com), recounts and describes the river's course from source to sea and is illustrated with exquisitely detailed watercolours, while Inishmurray: Monks and Pilgrims in an Atlantic Landscape, by Tomás Ó Carragáin and Jerry O'Sullivan, (Collins Press, €49.95) has the most superb photographs which illustrate everything Liam Kelly's book has to say about the use of photography by historians. Inishmurray is part of a projected four-part series on the island - one for archaeologists more than historians perhaps, but for anyone with an interest in monastic settlements and offshore islands as well.
• Noeleen Dowling is a freelance journalist and local historian