Content area
Full Text
Caitriona Foley. The Last Irish Plague: The Great Flu Epidemic in Ireland 1918-19. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. xiii + 224 pp. $74.95 (978-0-7165-3115-9).
A few years ago I drew a blank looking for any research on the impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 in Ireland. Then in the space of a few months three Ph.D. dissertations appeared on the subject. The first was Caitriona Foley's (Cork), to be followed by Patricia Marsh's "The effects of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic in Ulster" (Queen's, 2010), and Ida Milne's thesis on the pandemic in Leinster (Trinity College, Dublin, 2011). In addition there have been other papers, journal and newspaper articles, and a documentary film on the pandemic screened on RTE and BBC Northern Ireland. The tide has turned and there is now abundant reason and evidence for not ignoring the pandemic, which in the space of eleven months killed well over twenty thousand men, women, and children, leaving in its wake a long trail of further deaths and much distress.
Foley's study is the first published attempt to analyze the course and consequences of the flu pandemic. The reason for the earlier scholarly neglect of the topic is addressed in this...