Nick Maxwell Sir,—Jeffrey Dudgeon’s reply to John M. Regan (HI 20.2, Jan./Feb. 2012, Letters) raises the possibility that Frank Busteed was an IRA officer partly responsible for killing ten loyalist Protestants from 26 to 29 April 1922. While evidence is tenuous, Peter Hart’s withholding of this and other (more crucial) evidence indicating a non-sectarian explanation in The … Read more
The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763–1798, Volume III: France, the Rhine, Lough Swilly and death of Tone, January 1797 to November 1798 T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (eds) (Clarendon Press, £125) ISBN 9780198208808The recent publication of the final volume of his Writings seems an appropriate moment to consider the … Read more
Is nothing sacred? Apparantly the Blarney Stone kissed at considerable risk to life and limb by over 300,000 visitors every year is not the stone. Most of the legends refer to a stone ‘high up in the tower’, a reference to a date-stone that was once visible on the north-east angle of Blarney Castle, with … Read more
Sir,—Do most academic historians of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Ireland conform to a ‘constitutional narrative’, driven by a moral imperative to subvert republican interpretations of Irish history? Has their shared political agenda led to widespread and deliberate distortion, suppression, ‘elision’ and even falsification of the evidential record? Have they repeatedly abused their academic positions by indulging … Read more
‘The GAA is really our stamp, it’s the rural man’s stamp. It says who he is, what you stand for, where your spirit comes from, ’tis your freedom, you know.’ These are the words of Micheál Mac an tSaoir, a Limerick hurling fan, who has told his story to the GAA Oral History Project. It … Read more