Nick Maxwell The Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) is a superb achievement. The editors, James McGuire and James Quinn, conceive of the DIB as ‘a resource for the nation’ and it measures up to that exacting mark. It contains eight million words in 9,014 entries covering 9,700 lives (the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB] has 3,500 … Read more
Ireland in the 1950s witnessed an often animated debate about television and how a native service should be structured and introduced to the nation. From the outset, looking to Britain and the United States, the state saw two models from which to choose. The first was a state-owned and state-financed public service, modelled on the … Read more
When I was growing up in the 1980s, my dad would bring me to the National Museum of Ireland every Easter to see the 1916 Exhibition, and we would then walk around Dublin to look at the various areas where the fighting took place. In particular I remember being told of the shelling of Dublin … Read more
The Irish War of Independence was a war of many firsts: it was the first time that government forces used large numbers of motor vehicles against insurgents; in turn, it was the first time that insurgents conducted an ambush campaign against motor vehicles; finally, it was the first time that government forces ‘up-armoured’ (to use … Read more
The ‘quiet and insidious’ methods of political influence and control used by the Catholic clergy in Meath ‘leave life not worth living in small country towns and villages’, Navan’s town clerk, James Lawlor, complained despondently to the Irish Independent in February 1893, after the Parnellite former MP Pierce Mahony had again been defeated in a … Read more