The Maynooth Studies in Local History series continues to produce intriguing microhistories that explore the relationships between people and place in the Irish past. The strength of the series lies not just in its diverse subject matter but the balance these short books strike between a full-length study and a short article. Typically composed of three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, the template encourages both detailed reconstruction and sustained analysis. All of these authors rose to the challenge of distilling larger projects into these short but worthwhile books. Apart from one book, the selection under review focuses on the nineteenth century, providing a local perspective on the employment strategies of the poor, land improvement schemes, poor relief and gentry lifestyles.

Catherine Flanagan's The Great Famine in Kinsale is a valuable study that explores how the Famine affected specific localities. Although Kinsale did not achieve the notoriety of Skibbereen, this book suggests that no aspect of life was untouched by the Famine. Flanagan cleverly distinguishes between Kinsale town, the barony of Kinsale and the Poor Law Union that contained both of those areas. Her choice to make that distinction allows her to contrast the relief schemes in the town with the rural hinterland, where philanthropic efforts did not penetrate. The account of Kinsale's corn depots, relief works and relief committee in 1845 is a well-judged, balanced narrative that includes national and local perspectives. It includes insights into important occupational niches that are now extinct. For example, Kinsale's 160 sandboat men worked forty boats between the harbour and nearby Innishannon, selling sand to farmers for fertiliser. As farming contracted, the sandboat men lost their livelihood. Flanagan dedicates one chapter to the workhouse alone. This well-structured chapter describes clearly the choices made by the board of guardians and how those decisions affected mortality rates, diet and living conditions. Flanagan never fails to point out that the interaction between national policies and local conditions determined workhouse administration. This book is a sensitive and judicious account of Kinsale town and its hinterland during the most severe food crisis of the nineteenth century.

Terence Dooley may claim that his study of Castle Hyde: the changing fortunes of an Irish country house is not ambitious but charting the history of a big house from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries is no mean feat. This capsule history is gracefully written and amply illustrated with maps, photographs and paintings featuring Castle Hyde. The Hydes sold the estate after the Famine, as debt devastated landowners. Deception and self-destruction followed when the estate was purchased by notorious swindler John Sadlier, a tale told with relish by Dooley. As well as colourful personalities, the regional context of the house emerges particularly strongly in this study. Located on the River Blackwater, Castle Hyde was part of an economy dominated by the garrison town of Fermoy and the port town of Youghal. Dooley also details how the global elite have also played a role in the house's history. The first rich American owner was fishing-enthusiast Henry Laughlin from Pittsburgh, while the house was lavishly restored by its present owner, the multi-millionaire dancer, Michael Flatley. This short study covers an immense span of historical time but an effortless writing style belies the serious scholarship underpinning the narrative.

Women, too often omitted from standard Irish histories, are worthy subjects of Susan Marie Martin's work The shawlies, which describes the marginal economy of Cork's twentieth-century street traders. Women who earned their living selling vegetables or old clothes on city streets were ruthlessly targeted by city administrators after the foundation of the state. However, as Martin points out, legislation prohibiting street trading was initially not enforced because an unofficial solution of containing traders was adopted. The preference of police and administrators for ad hoc solutions based on a fictive legal threat points to how the new nation often worked. Martin ties the new state's hostility to the poor, and poor women in particular, to local efforts to force women traders off Cork's streets. The information from the census on street traders is a valuable aspect of this book, portraying the official problem as one of women with family responsibilities. This book is an intriguing microstudy but more and better-quality maps for those unfamiliar with Cork city's streetscape would have improved it.

The fate of children confined to institutions has been debated in Ireland for the last twenty years. Martin McCarthy's microhistory The committal of two Mallow children to an industrial school in 1893 points to the role of family and neighbours in placing children in institutions. The author, who is a relative of the McCarthy girls sent to an industrial school run by the Mercy sisters in Kinsale, is more interested in the local history of Mallow than exploring the decisions taken by the McCarthy family. The longest chapter in the book details the social geography of Mallow, which is interesting, but it doesn't help us to understand what drove the separation of the McCarthy family. The transcribed letters between Mrs Tuckey of Mallow and the convent in Kinsale are the most important part of this study. Mrs Tuckey, on behalf of the children's father, arranged a place in the school before the courts were involved. Without these letters, this study could not go beyond a simple court report of the committal. The strategies used by the respectable poor and their wealthy intermediaries to appeal to nuns running the school will inform future scholarship in this crucial area of study.

The effects of the forgotten famine (1879–81) on Connemara inspired Quaker James Hack Tuke personally to organise an assisted emigration scheme, as documented by Gerard Moran in Fleeing from famine in Connemara. The assisted emigration programme administered by Tuke and his wife, Georgina, between 1882 and 1884 helped 4,945 people leave Connemara for Canada and the United States. The organisational effort was immense, as Tuke worked with local boards of guardians, Catholic priests and central government to select emigrants and fund their passage. The resistance of local elites to the project is particularly interesting. Many Catholic priests objected but nonetheless petitioned on behalf of individuals while shopkeepers, who were also poor law guardians, intervened directly to prevent some indebted families emigrating to abandon their debts both to the union and businesses. In Moran's discerning narrative, the poor of Connemara were not pathetically grateful recipients of benevolent philanthropy but active agents who worked to achieve their own aims. Tuke hoped to send most emigrants to Canada, where government assistance was available, but the people were determined to travel to friends and acquaintances in the United States. How the English-speaking Tuke interviewed Irish-speaking applicants for emigration would be a fascinating extension of this microstudy. That those most in need were the least likely to be chosen for the scheme points to the ideological biases of even the most forward-thinking of philanthropists.

Thomas Bermingham was an improver, one of many such men determined to ameliorate the economic problems of early nineteenth-century Ireland. As Cathal Smith's biographical study shows, Bermingham had an interesting career as land agent, pamphlet writer, lobbyist and broker to the Encumbered Estates Court. The Clonbrock estate that Bermingham managed has been studied before, but Smith builds on that work to draw a rounded picture of its land agent. Bermingham and his employer, Baron Clonbrock, introduced new agricultural techniques such as crop rotation to the estate while expending much time and money on draining bogs. Although the agent was eternally optimistic about drainage, others were ambivalent about its utility. His pet project, the movement of tenants from Iskerbane to Castlesampson, attempted to consolidate farm size without wholesale evictions. The tenants refused attractive offers of paid emigration, preferring to relocate to hilly land on which Bermingham built roads and cottages, proving that the obstreperous poor were not without influence. Smith describes how Bermingham was a public figure during his employment by Clonbrock but also how his political campaigning was restricted by his position as a landlord's agent. His unquiet retirement included more pamphlets and amassing land from sales of encumbered estates. This is a concise biography of a locally significant public figure that focuses on his ideas about improvement rather than expanding on his role as an almoner or dispenser of charity.

These six studies show the value of the Maynooth series, where concise does not imply superficial. All these authors admirably distilled their voluminous reading and research into sixty pages. Drawing these little books together with a unifying theme would compromise the integrity of each study and defeat the purpose of the series. The range and depth of the work reviewed here highlights how short, focused local studies can make important contributions to regional and national histories.