Was cricket in late nineteenth-century Ireland really an élitist activity limited to the middle and upper classes? Tom Hunt assesses the evidence for County Westmeath. In July 1893 members of the Ringtown Cricket Club, Co. Westmeath, assembled on the shores of Lough Derravaragh to make the journey across the lake to play a match against … Read more
Land is gold: Kenmare and the Lansdowne estate RTÉ ONE, Tuesday 8 November, 10.15pm Hidden Histories Directed by Seán Ó Mordha by Eamon O’Flaherty Rapid urbanisation and massive economic change in recent years have tended to obscure the central importance of the land question in shaping modern Ireland. The majority of the population of Ireland … Read more
‘At Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window, which was made by an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master.’ With this parable the budding English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay illustrated the central argument of his 1828 debut essay ‘History’, which advocated that historical scholarship could benefit … Read more
In 1978 David Seth Jones completed his PhD, ‘Agrarian capitalism and rural social development in Ireland’, at Queen’s University, Belfast. Since then every serious scholar of modern Ireland has been in his debt. At times a slightly dry work—partly because so much of the evidence is drawn from official enquiries and reports—Jones’ thesis, nonetheless, stated … Read more
Old World colony: Cork and South Munster 1630–1830 David Dickson Cork University Press, E49 h/b, E29.95p/b ISBN 1859183557 Historians of eighteenth-century Ireland have waited a long time for the appearance of this book, a revised and expanded version of a pioneering and much-cited PhD thesis passed by its examiners nearly 30 years ago. Though prolonged, … Read more