Nick Maxwell The Irish national anthem is a source of some tension and confusion. At frequent intervals over the past seventy-five years, its text has been attacked as inappropriate. The same objections have been repeated: that its militaristic subject matter and sentiments are irrelevant for a modern, independent, neutral state, or that the text perpetuates attitudes which … Read more
‘A real Irish historian’ (3:1) Seán Duffy talks to James Lydon who last year retired as Lecky Professor of Modern History in Trinity College, Dublin. SD: Tell me about your family background and early years. JL: I was born in Galway. My mother was from an Irish-speaking family not far from the city. My father … Read more
A variety of source material survives from which the history of Gaelic society in the early modern period can be reconstructed. Rather than focusing too narrowly on bardic poetry as a means of interpreting the native Irish response to colonisation, the full range of extant sources should be utilised, in conjunction with the available English … Read more
Jane Ohlmeyer At the height of the ‘general crisis’ which gripped Europe during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, one preacher in 1643 informed the English House of Commons that ‘These are days of shaking and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germania, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England’. He could have added Scotland and … Read more
One of the most argued over events in the career of Hugh O’Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, is his departure from Ireland with Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, on 14 September 1607. English contemporaries claimed that he fled in anticipation of the discovery of a plot of his against the government. Later apologists for O’Neill … Read more