Nick Maxwell The existence of the canonical ‘32 counties of Ireland’ (26 in the Republic and six in the North) is taken for granted by most of us and would appear to be easily verified by glancing at a map. Likewise, despite modernisation, globalisation and large-scale immigration, counties continue to command passionate loyalties and on both sides … Read more
In Dublin there were six liberties, all of which were originally under ecclesiastical control (and the first three of which give their name to the modern district in the city’s south side). St Sepulchre, ruled by the archbishops of Dublin, was created before 1199 and consisted of three parishes in the city and extensive lands … Read more
It is unlikely that the Buckingham Palace conference of July 1914 would feature prominently on a list of momentous events punctuating the discourse of Ireland’s partition. Indeed, its brevity and predictable collapse were another manifestation of an ever-tightening deadlock concerning the third Irish Home Rule bill, and it elicits merely cursory references in the general … Read more
Kate Connolly, the Irish immigrant narrator in a semi-fictional novel, saw an Afro-Argentine peach-seller in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and remarked upon the ‘tall black woman with a woolly head’, commenting that she had seen a peach before but never an African person. The majority of forced African immigrants arrived on the shores of the River … Read more
Irish people emigrated to Buenos Aires with an identity as oppressed indigenous people, only to subsequently find themselves cooperating in the dispossession of indigenous Argentines. The settlement of European farmers was central to the consolidation of political power in Argentina. Irish and other immigrants retained their language and customs, acting as a buffer zone between … Read more