Nick Maxwell Examples of monetary union include those between the city states of ancient Greece, the attempts to coordinate the currencies of nineteenth-century German states and the Latin Monetary Union that existed in continental Europe between 1866 and 1927. The United Kingdom, at that time including Ireland, decided to remain aloof from the Latin Monetary Union. The British maintained … Read more
There is always particular interest in this country in an American president who has an Irish ancestral connection, although frankly the Anglo element is usually predominant in presidential pedigrees. Yet the rise of the Irish as a successful ethnic group can be charted in the number of US presidents possessing Irish ancestors: before John Fitzgerald … Read more
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, was founded c. 1030 by Sitriuc, king of the Dublin Danes, when Dunán was bishop. In the following century, when the occupant of the see of Dublin had been elevated to the rank of archbishop, Lorcán Ua Tuathail (a.k.a. St Laurence O’Toole) established a priory of Augustinian canons there. After the … Read more
The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. But as John Gibney explains, Irish Catholics had their own views on what had happened in 1641. When agents of the Irish … Read more
The first constitution of the new Irish state was innovative: it asserted the sovereignty of the people; it included a bill of rights, a guarantee of free elementary education, trial by jury and direct democracy (on the say-so of 75,000 electors). And it contained a provision allowing judicial review of legislation, which broke with the … Read more