Nick Maxwell ‘Itinerants first went on the road due to extreme poverty in Ireland. Unlike British or European gypsies the itinerants are the product not of an ancient, highly cultured race with its own folklore and culture but of the immiseration of a section of the ordinary, illiterate peasantry in Ireland . . . Itinerants went and … Read more
In 1956 John Redmond’s political opponent Eamon de Valera paid a generous tribute to him as ‘a great Wexfordman . . . who worked unselfishly for the welfare of this country’. On the same occasion (the centenary of Redmond’s birth) the then taoiseach, John A. Costello, spoke of him as ‘a leader of the Movement … Read more
William O’Brien (1852–1928), from Mallow, was one of Parnell’s chief lieutenants in the 1880s. Originally a journalist with the Freeman’s Journal, O’Brien was recruited to run Parnell’s weekly United Ireland. This was the model for his own later journalistic enterprises, and his embodiment of a type of journalism that focused on the newspaper as political … Read more
First the good news: Germany has finally managed to repay all the reparations owing from the First World War, just over 90 years after it ended. The defeated nation was handed a bill of 132 billion gold marks (about €300 billion in today’s money) by the Allies to compensate for damage caused during the war. … Read more
Bloody Sunday began with the attacks of Michael Collins’s ‘squad’ upon the British intelligence network in Dublin, and specifically the so-called ‘Cairo Gang’. These were the ‘particular ones’ whom Collins felt were bringing British intelligence closer and closer to the heart of the republican movement. By the end of the day, news of the deaths … Read more