Nick Maxwell Jubilees just aren’t what they used to be. In June 1897 Maud Gonne organised a counter-campaign of defiance to the official celebrations, a magic lantern projection from the National Club in Dublin. Which Ireland was on show that evening, in a capital illuminated with giant ‘VR’ monograms? Beamed across what is now Parnell Square were … Read more
Handball is known to have been played in Ireland from at least the mid-1500s. Its origins are likely shared with the contemporaneous games of real or royal tennis, palla, pelota and Eton fives. While royal tennis was played in purpose-built courts from the early 1500s, handball, like pelota (Basque region) and palla (Tuscany), was predominantly … Read more
The first edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (1997) was immediately hailed as a classic. For its time it was a ground-breaking publication, featuring a previously unsurpassed array of maps, aerial photographs and detailed explanatory text combining broad overviews of Irish rural settlement with detailed treatments of individual regions. Perhaps unavoidably, the … Read more
Bookworm’s eye was caught recently by a stunningly beautiful book—Rural Ireland: the inside story, edited by Vera Kreilkamp (University of Chicago Press, $45, 204pp, ISBN 9781892850188). It is based on an exhibition of the same name hosted at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art, and consists of a catalogue of over 60 paintings of Irish … Read more
Traditionally, newspapers were owned by businessmen who were keen to protect their own interests. During the early years of independence the two daily nationals, the Irish Independent (which incorporated the Freeman’s Journal after 1924) and the Irish Times, in common with most regional newspapers, were profoundly middle-class and anti-republican. Fianna Fáil published the Nation weekly … Read more