Nick Maxwell VC: Did your background contribute to your interest in history? MPM: Yes. My father had a deep interest in the history of Ireland and my family had been involved in one way or another in the country’s history since the seventeenth century. We had a very good library and there were historic books all over … Read more
For many years I have had an interest in my father’s large collection of papers. After his retirement from politics in 1961, Prof. Kevin B. Nowlan and I assisted him in putting his large collection of War of Independence, truce, civil war and later personal and political papers in order, and having them transferred to … Read more
Julius Pokorny was a German Celtic scholar who supported Irish nationalism and the Gaelic League. He corresponded with Douglas Hyde, met Éamon de Valera and is mentioned by name in Ulysses. And he was a German nationalist who lost his chair in Berlin because of Jewish ancestry, after which an Irish visa saved his life. … Read more
Early in the twentieth century Sir Hugh Lane indicated that Ireland needed a school of painters prepared to commit themselves to the expression of Irish art, in order to convey a growing sense of national consciousness. This search for a new identity, not solely confined to artists, occurred about the time of the 1916 Easter … Read more
At the top of Dublin’s Grafton Street, at the corner of Stephen’s Green, stands a handsome triumphal arch—still referred to by some locals as ‘traitors’ gate’—which commemorates the ‘officers, non-commissioned officers and men’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who fell in the second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902). One will search Ireland in vain to find a … Read more