Nick Maxwell Virtually no Irish or even Ulster history was taught at the school I attended on Belfast’s Shankill Road. Thus when I left school at the age of fourteen I was completely unprepared for what was to come. I grew up in a devoutly evangelical Protestant home, where I was told stories of our suffering and … Read more
Today, the sole copy of the 1743 poster, poorly printed on cheap paper and about the size of a modern A3 page, survives in Marsh’s Library in Dublin. There is an unmistakable element of showmanship to the ‘curious Experiments’, and one can easily imagine Boyle Godfrey, or one of his associates, uttering the immortal lines ‘Roll … Read more
In the early 1960s I began to attend Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, which seemed obsessed with ‘Romanism’ and Romish conspiracies. It was claimed that the Catholic Church wanted an Ireland Romanised from end to end as a springboard from which to take possession of England. The Irish state elevated the Catholic Church to a … Read more
Today, almost 270 years after Boyle Godfrey staged these experiments, they have been brought to life by a group of six students from the Grashof Gymnasium in Essen, Germany. In their final year at school, the students were set the task of researching what these experiments might have consisted of and how they might have … Read more
‘Do you kick with the left foot or the right?’ is a sure way of telling Catholic from Protestant in the North (so some people say), but a new twist has been given to it by historian Raymond O’Regan, who says that it extends to hands—the Red Hand of Ulster, that is. Using as proof … Read more