In recent decades, Joe Queally has earned distinction for his approach to the writing of locally based historical narrative. Concentrating on particular events and episodes from different rural communities in County Clare, in works such as Echoes From A Civil War, he holds up the mirror to the interaction of people with each other, as individuals and neighbours, and with family and community. Characteristically Irish and Clare as they are, Queally’s stories partake fully – and often heartbreakingly – of universal human experience also. As we are guided through them by the author, we find ourselves pondering their significance as he does, both for those originally caught up in them, and those who remembered them, or inherited them through the narration of others much later on.

By through, careful use of sources ranging from academic studies, archival material and newspaper coverage, Joe Queally has made this kind of narrative his own, hallmarking it above all by his sensitive use of material gathered from the reminiscences of elderly people, in succeeding generations. Through it all, his sympathy with a now-vanished rural lifestyle shines through, as does his affection for its ways and its values. There are few local historians who have been able to take the pulse of Irish community life in this manner, or to record its function and its dysfunction with such understanding.

Dr Ciaran O Murchadha