Nick Maxwell Sir,—Eoin Gill’s ‘Platform’ piece on science and Irish history (HI 24.5, Sept./Oct. 2016) raises very interesting questions. I agree with him that writers such as Swift, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett are better known than scientists such as Boyle, Tyndall, Hamilton, Boole and so on. In the case of George Boole, however, the many commemorations, … Read more
Sir,—I am looking for good-quality photographs of the victims of revolutionary violence in County Cork between 1916 and 1923. My forthcoming book (Mercier Press) has identified more than 700 victims during this period. Each victim has been identified and a short description of what happened to them is included. While I have gathered more than … Read more
Sir,—Michael Moroney’s otherwise interesting piece on the last pre-Famine census (‘The 1841 census—do the numbers add up?’, HI 23.3, May/June 2015) unwittingly perpetuates a couple of common misunderstandings of key contemporary passages. The author is of course not the first to question the accuracy of the 1841 return. The census commissioners were themselves struck by … Read more
1937 Charlie Donnelly (27), poet and left-wing activist, was killed fighting on the Republican side on the final day of the Battle of Jarama.
IN THIS BUSY DECADE OF COMMEMORATIONS, LITTLE OR NO ATTENTION HAS BEEN PAID TO ONE SIGNIFICANT AREA OF IRISH ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL LIFE By Dermot O’Doherty In the hope-filled days of the mid-1960s, the Irish government—in cooperation with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, a key partner in many seminal policy reports and … Read more