Nick Maxwell

Sir,—I’ve spent much of my career studying the forces that caused people to emigrate from Ireland to North America. From the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Irish people from mostly poor rural backgrounds, especially in the West of Ireland, found themselves pitched into the world’s most advanced (and, some said, ruthless) industrial economy, where often they … Read more

Sir,—In his excellent ‘On This Day’ round-up in HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025 issue, Aodhán Crealey recalls the opening of Ireland’s first railway, running between Westland Row and Kingstown, on 17 November 1834. He refers to the contractor as ‘the celebrated Carlow-born William Dargan’. If Dargan was a Carlow native, why then did Irish Rail unveil … Read more

Sir,—Seán Patrick Donlan is wrong about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (‘Quiet people? Ireland’s early eighties on screen’, HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025), when he writes that the novel is—in relation to the institutional abuse of women and children in the Catholic Church’s laundries—‘its own kind of handwashing’ and absolves ‘the wider state and society … Read more

Sir,—Fresh research correcting entrenched constructs of Irish nationalism, especially re famous widows who had limited public agency and were not financially independent, is so welcome, as in Marie Stamp’s ‘Reputations’ piece (HI 34.1, Jan./Feb. 2026) on the last extant letter by Pamela Fitzgerald, now in the National Library. I had originally been commissioned by Éamonn … Read more