Theatre Eye

Catalpa Performed and directed by Donal O’Kelly Music by Trevor Knight Axis Theatre, Ballymun, 18 September 2008 Running Beast Performed and directed by Donal O’Kelly Music by Michael Holohan National Concert Hall, Dublin, 11 May 2008 Donal O’Kelly’s highly individual approach to the theatre involves adramatic reworking of key themes and events in Irish history. … Read more

The forgotten ‘Fishery’ of Arklow

References to fishing grounds off Arklow can be found in Patrician legends and medieval documents. Over the centuries the activity and the area became synonymous, so that by the 1800s the ‘Arklow Fishery’ denoted both the practice and the place. The entry for Arklow in Lewis’s Topographical dictionary (1837) begins: ‘This place . . . … Read more

From the files of the DIB…Originator of the ‘New Departure’

O’KELLY, James Joseph (1845–1916), Fenian, journalist and MP, was born near Westland Row, Dublin, eldest among five children of John O’Kelly, petty landlord, dray-maker and blacksmith, and his wife (née Lawlor). His three brothers were artists, including the distinguished painter Aloysius O’Kelly, for whom he acted occasionally as agent. James attended school in Dublin and … Read more

‘Hottentot Venus’: the exhibition of Sara Baartman in Dublin in 1812

In a recent issue (HI 19.2, March/April 2011) Stephanie Rains wrote about the ‘native’ village exhibitions that Ireland both played host to and provided subject-matter for from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Those exhibitions were an enlarged form of a practice that has a long history: the commercial display of living people as exotic … Read more

Difficulties and opportunities: making sense of the Fenians

Founded 150 years ago, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was a secret, oath-bound, revolutionary organisation dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish republic by force. The Fenians (as they were known generically) were an international phenomenon with a presence on all six continents. Not only did the organisation engage in military operations across the … Read more