Nick Maxwell Bob Collis was the son of William, a lawyer who had been born without property, despite coming from a line of landed Anglo-Irish gentry and medical professionals, but who by stern economy had made enough money to purchase a sizeable portion of Killiney Hill, just south of Dublin. William Collis was a staunch exponent of … Read more
Forty years ago Gerald Simms penned a detailed word-portrait of the city of Dublin as it was on the death of Charles II in 1685. Taking as his starting-point the maps of the city prepared by Bernard de Gomme in 1673 and Thomas Phillips in 1685, and drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, … Read more
Few have shown such lack of enthusiasm for appointment as a librarian as Thomas Russell! He was with Wolfe Tone in Dublin when he heard the news on 17 January 1794: ‘Find I am ele[c]ted to the librarianship at Belfast, which [Wolfe Tone] and [Whitley] Stokes have put me out of conceit of’. Russell’s radical … Read more
The sky did not fall. Following more than five years of planning and two years of teaching, the new Leaving Certificate history syllabus faced its first practical test in the examining session of summer 2006. And, despite the grumblings of indifferent sceptics and the dire warnings of its open opponents, nothing calamitous happened. There had … Read more
The rising of 1803 bore as much resemblance to what had been planned by its chief military strategist, Robert Emmet, as the rebellion of 1798 did to Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s original plans. In both instances United Irish offensive activities had been envisaged as secondary to those of a sizeable French expeditionary force. Contingencies devised by … Read more