Nick Maxwell ‘MARRIED WOMAN GETS DEGREE’ was the immortal headline in a Mayo newspaper in 1955 when local woman Sheila Mulloy (née O’Malley) was awarded a Ph.D for her research on correspondence between France and Ireland during the Williamite War. Over the following years she raised eight children yet still found time to edit … Read more
If you are a first-time visitor to the Old Library in Trinity College, then a ticket for €9 is good value as it includes the Book of Kells exhibition as well as the Long Room, where ‘Ireland in Turmoil’ is located. This marks the transfer to a website of all the 1641 depositions with ‘translations’ … Read more
The outstanding figure from the early years of Irish women’s athletics was Ellie Mary ‘Babe’ Leahy from Charleville, Co. Limerick, a sister of Olympians Con, Patrick and Tim. Ellie, a tall, athletic woman, regularly took part in high jump exhibitions and her brother Con thought her the best jumper in the family. In a diary, … Read more
Ever since James Joyce’s pioneering biographer Richard Ellmann pronounced that the character of the ‘Citizen’ in Joyce’s novel Ulysses was modelled on the Gaelic Athletic Association’s founder Michael Cusack, the label ‘anti-Semite’ has tarnished Cusack’s reputation. Two screen depictions of the ‘Citizen’ have been noteworthy—a particularly powerful performance by Geoffrey Golden in Joseph Strick’s 1967 … Read more
The past decade has seen a considerable rise in interest in the work of Hugh Douglas Hamilton, best known as a portrait painter. Fintan Cullen’s work on Hamilton has provoked a major reassessment of Hamilton’s importance in the history of Irish art, and Cullen’s analysis of the portrait of Richard Mansergh St George posing beside … Read more