Nick Maxwell by A.T.Q. Stewart Professor J.C. Beckett, who died in a Belfast nursing home on 12 February, was one of Ireland’s most eminent historians. He belonged to that distinguished pleiad of ‘30s graduates who helped to change the character of Irish historical study, lifting it above the maelstrom of Irish … Read more
Memory is our key both to the past and to our identity, and we are usually fairly certain about the overall architecture of the edifice known as ‘our story’. Turning to Patrick—a crucial figure in Irish memory since the seventh century—memory’s headlines run like this: a young British boy from a well-off clerical family was … Read more
Donal Ó Drisceoil The average Dubliner’, according to an anonymous letter-writer to the Irish Times, commenting on the revelations about the Nazi Holocaust at the end of the Second World War, ‘would not be persuaded even though all the hosts of Hitler’s victims were to rise from the dead; he would only pour himself … Read more
A factory of grievances? Fr Alec Reid’s recent remarks, comparing the treatment of Catholics under Stormont to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, have been widely, and rightly, condemned. While critics have been generous in their acknowledgement of Fr Reid’s role in the Peace Process, they have made the more general observation that his remarks (and … Read more
TC: When did you become involved with the Dictionary of Irish Biography? JMcG: I became involved with the DIB in the early 1990s when I was approached by the then president of the Royal Irish Academy, Aidan Clarke. I was asked to be one of the executive editors, the others being Aidan Clarke himself and … Read more