Nick Maxwell Within a year the euphoria both on and off the pitch had long since evaporated. By May 1974 the Ulster Workers’ Council strike had put paid to the Sunningdale power-sharing experiment, and Northern Ireland was to endure another quarter-century of violence. The Republic had already missed out on qualification for the 1974 World Cup before … Read more
In the summer of 1972 the Republic of Ireland soccer team was invited to play in a friendly tournament in Brazil to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that country’s independence. The Republic had been on a terrible run, which had reached its nadir the previous year with a 6–0 thrashing by Austria on Sunday 10 … Read more
There is something hallucinatory about the wealth generated by rubber, comparable in our own time to the empires built on the back of the narcotics trade. One such hallucinatory kingdom was briefly forged by Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, son of an Irish-American sea captain, whose life has been popularly mythologised by the Werner Herzog film. In … Read more
Patrick Pearse remains one of the most contested and most elusive figures of the revolutionary period, yet the Pearse Papers (MS 21,046–MS 21,097) contain a wealth of biographical information on all aspects of the Pearse family’s various political, business and artistic endeavours. Some of the most affecting manuscripts in this collection include handwritten drafts with … Read more
Shortly after the Berlin conference, an event happened in Ulster that changed the international rubber market in ways no one foresaw and, quite literally, led to the reinvention of the wheel. In October 1887 a Scottish-born resident of Belfast, John Boyd Dunlop, with a small veterinary practice in Gloucester Street, took heed of his nine-year-old … Read more