This new book by Paddy Bushe was launched during the O’Connell Summer School on the 30th August 2024. Paddy Bushe examines various aspects of the history and mythology of the Iveragh peninsula in Kerry, a landscape that he walked and explored for the last forty years. The text is complemented by illustrations and maps by sculptor Holger Lonze. The book is published in linen-bound hardback with dust jacket; 397pp. Available online here at Kenny’s Bookshop (€30, postage free).

The Amergin Step is named after the famous poem that Leabhar Gabhála Éireann tells us was recited by the poet and lawmaker of the Gaelic Milesian people, as he stepped ashore in Kerry after their voyage from Galicia.

Contemporary and historical literature, folklore, myth, archaeology and placenames are explored by the author at the same time as he explores the mountains, sea and islands of the tip of the Iveragh peninsula to uncover the stories that have animated them from earliest to present times. The Milesians, Skellig Michael other early Christian sites, as well as the literary voice of the Derrynane O’Connells are among the stories discovered in this spectacular landscape.

The Amergin Step is also a call for an imaginative step into the places we inhabit so that, like Amergin’s poem, we can try to identify with our places rather than own them. Our survival, the book argues, depends on taking this step.

No stone is left unturned – literary, mythological, historical and geographical – in this magnificent anatomy of a place, its terrain and its people. No more valuable and compelling book will be published in Ireland this year. Bernard O’Donoghue