Nick Maxwell Our understanding of the Cromwellian period from 1649 to 1660 has been sorely hampered by the fact that the records of the period were lost in the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922. The fact that the documentary evidence for this most controversial of historical periods is almost non-existent has meant that apocryphal stories, … Read more
It was a book that was ‘certain to have reverberations in the field of Anglo-Irish history’. Thus Hugh Kearney praised Laurence Stone’s epic exploration of the English nobility, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558–1641 (1965), in a review published by Irish Historical Studies in 1966. With Stone’s opus to serve as a model and stimulus, … Read more
In late April 1922, thirteen Protestants were murdered or disappeared over three horrific nights in West Cork. In The IRA and its enemies (1998) Peter Hart described this as a massacre motivated primarily by sectarian hatred. Others said that the killing had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with spying against the … Read more
Wasted by a sojourn in the Park? Uachtaráin TG4, April–May 2007 Dearg Films by John Gibney The presidency of Ireland is often seen as at best a figurehead and at worst a retirement home, a largely meaningless office to be respected more for its democratic and republican symbolism than for its actual value. There is … Read more
O’KELLY, Countess Mary de Galway (1905–99), Belgian resistance operative, was born on 24 April 1905 in Dublin, one of ten children of Thomas Patrick Cummins, a plumber, of Waterfall Cottage, Richmond Road, Dublin, and his wife, Ellen Black. Mary attended Fairview National School before moving to the Dominican College in Eccles Street. Showing a remarkable … Read more