Nick Maxwell By Michael Kennedy In December 1922 the Irish Free State came into being. Within months it had applied to join the League of Nations, the multilateral organisation created by the post-war Paris peace conference in April 1919 to oversee international security and disarmament. The idea of the League of Nations arose from US and British … Read more
By Lar Joye When Fianna Fáil came to power in March 1932 the Irish Defence Forces consisted of 5,793 officers and soldiers. Three months later, this small army played a large role in the 31st International Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Dublin from 22 to 26 June and had been planned under the previous … Read more
CULLENSTOWN, CO. WEXFORD By Damian Murphy Vernacular houses are a familiar but increasingly endangered hallmark of the Irish landscape. They are informal in character, designed and built by their original owners without professional input, instead using planning formulae and traditional techniques often with distinct regional characteristics passed down through generations. They make extensive use of … Read more
By Colum Kenny There is an ironic twist to the circumstances of the birth of Éamon de Valera, then named ‘George de Valero’, in a Protestant charitable institution. Given that he is the politician who dominated the evolution of the Irish nation state in the twentieth century—with its paraphernalia of Magdalene laundries, mother-and-baby homes and … Read more
The maps used by the British Army from 1969. By Arnold Horner When the Northern Ireland Troubles erupted in the late 1960s, modern methods of identifying location using GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and of electronic surveillance from drones were still largely glints in the eyes of senior superpower intelligence personnel. Much less sophisticated, and less … Read more