Sir,—In the article ‘Ireland and Empire’ (HI 34.3, May/June 2026) the caption for Jack B. Yeats’s Grief painting (p. 15) refers to O’Connell Bridge being once known as White Horse Bridge. My amateurish research into this reference has been unable to find any record of this name. Could you please extrapolate on the statement?—Yours etc.,
CORMAC SOMERVILLE
Mr Somerville will find a fuller discussion of this in Elizabeth Ansel’s ‘“Let there be no more war”: Jack B. Yeats’s Grief in context’, in Ann Murray (ed.), Constructing the memory of war in visual culture since 1914: the eye on war (Routledge, 2018). She says that an image of a white horse appears in Yeats’s 1936 novel Amaranther, and that the main character, James, remembers that O’Connell Bridge was once colloquially called White Horse Bridge and imagines white horses crossing it.—Eoin Dillon
