Nick Maxwell By Michael Quinn In 1961 Desmond Greaves (1913–88), the London-based leading light in the Connolly Association (CA) and editor of its monthly newspaper, the Irish Democrat, published his seminal biography The life and times of James Connolly. The book was greeted in Ireland and Britain as a landmark publication in the canon of labour movement … Read more
By Saskia Vermeulen A successful advert doesn’t solely sell a product. It can, decades later, transport us back in time and reveal cultural and historical nuances about the past. The Guinness Archive has partnered with the IFI Irish Film Archive to release the largest publicly available collection of brand advertising in Ireland and the UK. … Read more
By Angus Mitchell ‘Where does Irish history begin?’ was the title of an essay published by Eoin MacNeill in 1904. This was an easy question to ask but harder to answer, and one that he spent much of his academic career elucidating. One acknowledged beginning might be traced through the temporal and spatial dreamtime of … Read more
By Daniel Mulhall In the opening episode of Ulysses at the Martello tower in Sandycove, we tap into Stephen Dedalus’s exchange with the Hibernophile Englishman Haines, in which Stephen describes himself as a subject of two masters, ‘the imperial British state’ and ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’. And, he adds sourly, ‘a third … Read more
By Damian Murphy Birr Castle is superficially a nineteenth-century creation in the Gothic Revival style and, as home to the Parsons family since 1620, it is one of the very few large country houses in Ireland still occupied by direct descendants of its original builder. It can, however, trace its origins back to the thirteenth … Read more