Nick Maxwell A cartoon that accompanied TV Eye’s review of RTÉ1’s ‘The Abbey Theatre: the first hundred years’ (HI 12.1, Spring 2004) was captioned: ‘Yeats addressing the audience . . . during the Playboy disturbances, 1907’. Similar (erroneous) captions have been reproduced in several books on the period. In fact, the cartoon shows Yeats giving a lecture … Read more
On 7 October 1843 the lord lieutenant of Ireland issued a proclamation banning the ‘monster meeting’ scheduled for the following day at Clontarf, in the northern suburbs of Dublin. Some 2,500 troops, nearly 1,000 constabulary and four field guns were deployed to enforce the order. With only hours to spare, the organisers of the demonstration, … Read more
WHALEY, Thomas (‘Buck’) (1766–1800), politician and rake, was born on 15 December 1766, son of Richard Chapel Whaley, a wealthy landowner and notorious priest-hunter of Whaley Abbey, Co. Wicklow, and his second wife Anne, daughter of Revd Bernard Ward. On his father’s death in 1769 Thomas—the second, but eldest surviving, son—succeeded to his father’s estates, … Read more
The term galloglass (gallóglach) is usually translated as ‘foreign warrior’ but is in fact a short-hand for ‘warrior from Innse Gall (the Hebrides)’. They first entered military service in Ireland in the middle of the thirteenth century. What sort of military technology did they have at their disposal and how effective was it? Ships The … Read more
No one anticipated the Irish revolution and the upheavals that accompanied it. By the outbreak of the First World War the Land Acts had transferred the ownership of most of the land of Ireland from a largely Protestant aristocracy or gentry to (mainly) Catholic tenant farmers. The Irish social revolution was effectively over before the … Read more