Nick Maxwell The Rothe collection—on show in last year’s exhibition at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, ‘Portraits and People: Art in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’—contains five significant interrelated artefacts. It has intriguing portraits of David Rothe and his nephew, Thomas, painted by some unknown, possibly Continental, artist who was in Kilkenny at the time of the Catholic Confederation. Their … Read more
Founded 150 years ago, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was a secret, oath-bound, revolutionary organisation dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish republic by force. The Fenians (as they were known generically) were an international phenomenon with a presence on all six continents. Not only did the organisation engage in military operations across the … Read more
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