Nick Maxwell Sir,—‘The morality of neutrality is in fact not the question’, Michael Kennedy asserts (HI 21.5, Sept./Oct. 2013, ‘Neutrality: “The very essence of Irish independence”?’). On the contrary, the German Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has described the Allied campaign to topple the Nazi regime as ‘perhaps the clearest example in all history of a just war’. … Read more
I am delighted to take this opportunity to reassure your readers about the place of history as a subject in the new Junior Certificate after 2017. History is one of the most popular subjects chosen by pupils studying for the Junior Cert. It will always be taught in second-level schools to students at junior and … Read more
In this ‘decade of centenaries’ Niamh Crowley marks the half-centenary of an organisation that has fostered an up-to-date approach to the teaching of history and which continues to campaign today for its retention as a core subject on the Junior Cert. The exact circumstances in which the first gathering of history teachers took place with … Read more
Seán Murphy reports on a recent Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland symposium. Some 50 interested individuals gathered in Dublin’s City Hall in Dame Street on the evening of Wednesday 25 September to remember a figure who has hitherto been somewhat historically neglected. This is Charles Lucas, the County Clare-born apothecary, author, municipal reformer, radical … Read more
n Is Ireland becoming too secular? Is it really the noise that people object to, or the reminder that they’re still lying in bed when they should be in church? Complaints from neighbours have silenced the 130-year-old bells of St Bartholomew’s Church, Ballsbridge. It has a clock and a carillon, a multiple bell arrangement, which … Read more