There is a history of over 200 years of public health service in Ireland, and by the early nineteenth century county infirmaries, fever hospitals and public dispensaries had become the most important providers of health services. As can be imagined, the public health service, then as now, was highly political. The dispensaries in particular, and … Read more
Tipperary in the eighteenth century was a county where a larger than average portion of the countryside remained in Catholic hands and where, consequently, tensions between the Protestant establishment and leading Catholic families remained high. The single greatest reason for this was the failure of the colonial administration to convert sufficient branches of the Butler … Read more
The Registry of Deeds, located in the King’s Inns building in the north-west quarter of Dublin city, is one of Ireland’s most remarkable archives, described by one commentator as ‘a most valuable storehouse of history’. The Registry is at once a still-functioning public office for registering property transactions and a repository of centuries-old records of … Read more
On Sunday 13 July 2003 the people of Dublin were treated to an impressive parade of hundreds of marching pikemen and women who were commemorating both Bastille Day (albeit a day early) and the 1803 Robert Emmet Rising. The last Bastille Day celebration in Dublin was in 1803, when the United Irishmen gathered in Smock … Read more
The ghostliness of Robert Emmet is not just about the way he haunts the Irish historical imagination; it is sometimes suggested by the very evidence for his physical existence. It was Emmet himself who set the haunting note, insisting in his famous speech from the dock on a form of memorial absence—that his tombstone remain … Read more