Nick Maxwell Sir,—In his excellent ‘On This Day’ round-up in HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025 issue, Aodhán Crealey recalls the opening of Ireland’s first railway, running between Westland Row and Kingstown, on 17 November 1834. He refers to the contractor as ‘the celebrated Carlow-born William Dargan’. If Dargan was a Carlow native, why then did Irish Rail unveil … Read more
Sir,—Seán Patrick Donlan is wrong about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (‘Quiet people? Ireland’s early eighties on screen’, HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025), when he writes that the novel is—in relation to the institutional abuse of women and children in the Catholic Church’s laundries—‘its own kind of handwashing’ and absolves ‘the wider state and society … Read more
Sir,—Fresh research correcting entrenched constructs of Irish nationalism, especially re famous widows who had limited public agency and were not financially independent, is so welcome, as in Marie Stamp’s ‘Reputations’ piece (HI 34.1, Jan./Feb. 2026) on the last extant letter by Pamela Fitzgerald, now in the National Library. I had originally been commissioned by Éamonn … Read more
BY DONAL FALLON WEXFORD ORAL HISTORIES GO ONLINE The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) continues to provide an important online home for Irish primary source materials, and great credit is due to Wexford Library and Archives for uploading four collections of oral history recordings, which are now freely available to researchers internationally. The collections include … Read more
BY AODHÁN CREALEY MARCH 24/1968 Aer Lingus Flight 712, en route from Cork to Heathrow with a capacity load of 61 passengers and crew on board, crashed into the sea near the Tuskar Rock lighthouse, Co. Wexford. There were no survivors and only fourteen bodies were recovered. Thirty-three of the victims were Irish, the remainder … Read more