Nick Maxwell At the 1924 games, the only Olympic honours accredited to ‘Irlande’ in Paris were in what was known as the ‘Concourse d’Art’. Poet Oliver St John Gogarty won a joint third place for a work entitled ‘Ode to the Tailteann Games’, and the 53-year-old Jack B. Yeats, already of world renown, won silver in the … Read more
Following the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the UK government interned ‘all Germans, Hungarians and Austrians of military age’ throughout Britain and Ireland, and 300 civilians were briefly interned at Richmond. When the first batch of 400 military prisoners arrived on 10 September 1914, the civilian internees were moved to camps at … Read more
Sir, —I was disappointed that your review of Car Bomber (‘TV Eye’, HI 16.5, Sept./Oct. 2008), while well informed, missed out on the fact that an actual car bomb was used in Ireland in the 1920s, and so the scene in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins was not so far-fetched. During the Civil War, on 18 … Read more
The Paris Olympics of 1924 represented the official debut of Ireland on the Olympic stage. Although Irish representatives competed in some of the artistic events that preceded the games proper (see Jack B. Yeats’s Liffey Swim, pp 26–7), the first sporting competitors for the new nation were sixteen footballers, culled from four clubs playing in … Read more
For Irish people the archetype of a fortified religious building is best encapsulated by the spectacular Augustinian priory at Kells, Co. Kilkenny (Pl. 1), the more ruinous but equally emotive remains of the Augustinian house at Athassel, Co. Tipperary, with its impressive defended gatehouse, or the dramatic fortified ruins of Lindisfarne priory on the Northumbrian … Read more