Life
1927- ; b. Cork; journalist; Director of Government Information Bureau;
later civil service posts; The Civil War in Ireland, 1922-3 (Cork
Mercier 1966; rep. 1989); novels include Life Has No Price (1960);
plays include The Face of Treason (radio and tv.); also vols. on
folklore such as Irish Book of Saints (1967); First Book of
Irish Myths and Legends (Mercier n.d.); a life of Michael Collins
(1968); Birth of a Republic (1998) was published under the Prestige
imprint from his home address. DIW
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Works
The Civil War in Ireland, 1922-23 (Cork Mercier 1966, 1969; Dublin:
Poolbeg 1989), 352pp.; The Book of Irish Saints (Cork, [1967]),
238pp.; The Life and Death of Michael Collins (Cork, [1968]), 163pp.;
The First Book of Irish Myths and Legends (Cork: Mercier Press
[1965]), 126pp.; A History of Irish Forestry (Dublin: Lilliput
Press 1991), 398pp.; Aspects of Parallelism in Japanese and Irish Character
and Culture [Hosei Daigaku, Inst. of Comp. Econ. Studies; No. 29:
Ireland-Japan papers, No. 8] (Tokyo: Hosei UP 1992), 60pp.; Deirdre
and Other Great stories from Celtic Mythology (Mainstream 1998), 287pp.;
Birth of a Republic (Dublin: Prestige 1998), vii, 427pp.
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Notes
Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal (Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan 1977): ‘One recent historian of the Civil War, Eoin Neeson,
gives a conservative account of these “communists” [who established
the ‘soviet’ in Limerick by taking over the running of a the
Cleeve creamery factory at knocklong, Co. Limerick] as being “mostly
irresponsible and disaffected individuals, as great a danger to themselves
as to the community”.’ (Costello, p.190).
Objectionability: Neeson writes to The
Irish Times (8 March 2003), styling ‘Fintan O’Toole’s
dancing on the new grave of Tom O’Higgins’ (Opinion, 4 March)
as ‘one of the most objectionable pieces of writing I have ever seen
in this newspaper’, adding that ‘the political traditions of
Tom O’Higgins and my own family were different’. Note that a
Ciaran McCourt, writing to the same column, defends Justice O’Higgins
judgement that David Norris’s case for liberalisation of laws against
homosexuality in Ireland failed in the light of the preamble and ethos
of the Constitution.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)