Nick Maxwell ‘I am a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed’, Dorothy Macardle, author of The Irish Republic, announced in June 1939. Many readers familiar with her classic history of the Irish revolution, commissioned by her political hero Éamon de Valera, might be only too ready to concur with Macardle’s candid self-assessment. In this instance, however, she was speaking … Read more
In 1842 Richard Robert Madden published the first volume of what would prove to be one of the most influential sympathetic accounts of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. The United Irishmen: their lives and times (7 vols, 1842–6) had an immediate impact on nationalist opinion. When the Young Ireland weekly The Nation was founded later … Read more
In 1842 Richard Robert Madden published the first volume of what would prove to be one of the most influential sympathetic accounts of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. The United Irishmen: their lives and times (7 vols, 1842–6) had an immediate impact on nationalist opinion. When the Young Ireland weekly The Nation was founded later … Read more
If every new political movement in Ireland puts the issue of the split as the first item on the agenda at its first meeting, then it can sometimes seem as though all historical debates on this island (at least, all debates about the history of this island) begin with an attempt to establish ‘who started … Read more
In the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman marriage market, the teenage Isabel de Clare was a very desirable prize. Under Anglo-Norman feudal law, the marriage of her parents, Strongbow and Aoife, and the related succession agreement between Strongbow and Isabel’s maternal grandfather, Diarmait Mac Murchada, united the holdings of the two families. But when Strongbow died in 1176 there … Read more