Personal Politics in the Postwar World: Western Diplomacy Behind the Scenes

Abstract

more remote or at odds with the image of Ireland he thought he recognised. Across the book, O’Malley effectively demonstrates that O’Neill’s purist approach to cataloguing traditional Irish music was always vulnerable, if not deeply flawed – something the Chief seems to have understood himself by the end of his life, if the coincidence of Douglas Hyde with the Harlem Hellfighters in that late scrapbook are taken as evidence. In a similar vein, O’Malley successfully and quite brilliantly argues, through O’Neill’s story, for an approach to Irish studies that is led by the kind of assurance and connective thinking which places national and diasporic cultures in dialogue with the rest of the world. In doing so, he advocates for the potential and continuing relevance of the discipline.