Nick Maxwell By Barry Sheppard The year 1949 marked a watershed in post-war America. According to theologian Richard Gribble, in the years immediately following the Second World War Americans lived through an unprecedented period of prosperity and fear. A united push behind the war effort had been able, at least temporarily, to smooth over some of the … Read more
By Fintan Lane At an art auction in Skibbereen last year I acquired a small watercolour painting (14cm x 12cm) that is a useful visual source for the working lives of fishing communities in nineteenth-century coastal West Cork. Inscribed underneath is the title: ‘Mackerel industry, Castletownshend, Co. Cork, Ireland, salting fish’. The painting probably dates … Read more
By Jack Traynor Widely regarded as Ireland’s foremost fascist leader, public awareness of Eoin O’Duffy’s career generally hinges on his leadership of the Blueshirts (1933–5) and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War as head of the Irish Brigade (1936–7). His activities during the Emergency (1939–45) have largely been overlooked, with the exception of a … Read more
By Tim Carey One of the best-known images of Dublin’s mid-twentieth-century cultural life is a cartoon called Dublin Culture. In it are nearly 40 people—all men—in the back room of the Palace Bar on Dublin’s Fleet Street. Among the tables and drinks there is a unique generation of journalists, writers and artists: Flann O’Brien is … Read more
By Madeline O’Neill In 1900 in Pienaarspoort, some fifteen miles east of Pretoria in the South African Transvaal Republic, an Irish Catholic major in the Connaught Rangers, Maurice George Moore, considered the orders forbidding him to provide supplies for a group of Boer women and children who had been removed from their farms. Insufficiently supplied … Read more