Nick Maxwell By Gerry Finnegan Membership of the League of Nations was the first major foreign policy objective of the new Irish Free State, achieved 100 years ago on 10 September 1923. With it came membership of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). An important yet unheralded figure in this achievement was Waterford-born Edward Joseph Phelan (1888–1967), head … Read more
QF 12-POUNDER COASTAL DEFENCE GUNS By Lar Joye Under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, Britain turned over almost all military facilities in southern Ireland to the Irish Defence Forces, but the Royal Navy retained the use of three deep-water ports at Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swill (the so-called ‘Treaty Ports’) and British soldiers remained in Ireland … Read more
By Daniel Mulhall When the Swedish Academy announced its 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, it opted for a writer who had produced what it described as ‘always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. The poet’s name was William Butler Yeats and his nation had … Read more
By Charles Lysaght The Kildare Street Club was well described by nationalist leader John Dillon as ‘the sacred ark of the covenant of Toryism; of the most benighted Toryism in Ireland’. Its members were drawn from the landed aristocracy and gentry, as well as from judges and leading figures in the pre-independence administration. Although the … Read more
By Donnacha Ó Beacháin For centuries neither Ireland nor Ukraine was on the world map but rather they were provinces or sub-units within the imperial structures that had conquered their peoples militarily. Britain and Russia feared that Ireland and Ukraine respectively would be used as a base for foreign attack, and this provided one of … Read more