Nick Maxwell David Officer Historians of Ireland regularly harp on about the often blunt and crude forms in which the past is mobilised by contemporary interests. However, historians themselves pay scant attention to the forms, methods and media through which the transmission of a historical consciousness is effected. It is inadaquate to describe such complex processes as … Read more
John S. Powell It was a sure sign that the Huguenot plantation of Portarlington in County Laois was dead when a historian turned it into an article (Sir Erasmus Borrowes in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1855). Previously the town had seemed a curiosity of the Irish midlands, a hangover from seventeenth-century religious wars. … Read more
We live in an age of media gurus, spin doctors and soundbites, when advertising agencies have been invested with almost divine powers to sell policies, transform images and win elections. The now familiar relationship between the mass media and politics first made an impact in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe in the closing … Read more
A tower house is a fortified medieval residence of stone, usually four or more stories in height. Like most of the surviving monuments of our medieval past, the majority of Irish tower houses are in poor condition, with collapsed walls and ivy shrouded exteriors reflecting centuries of neglect. Yet these ruins, the remnants of a … Read more
Anthony P. Quinn A credit union is a mutual society, owned and run by the members on a democratic co-operative basis to provide a savings and loan service. Co-operation, a basic human process, was expressed in the traditional Irish meitheal by which neighbours helped one another with the harvest. The origins of modern formal co-operation … Read more