From the files of the DIB…The man with thirty lives?

PIM, Herbert Moore (1883–1950), writer and political activist, was born 6 June 1883 in Belfast, son of Robert Barclay Pim and Caroline Pim (née Moore). The Pims were a leading Quaker business and professional dynasty; his father was secretary of the Friends Provident Insurance Company. Pim was educated at Friends School, Lisburn, and public schools … Read more

‘The strange thing I am’: his father’s son?

‘For the present I have said enough to indicate that when my father and mother married there came together two very widely remote traditions—English and Puritan and mechanic on the one hand, Gaelic and Catholic and peasant on the other: freedom loving both, and neither without its strain of poetry and its experience of spiritual … Read more

Edmund Rice (1762-1844); apostle of modernisation

The forthcoming beatification of Edmund Rice will inevitably focus attention on his life and deeds. Yet, the absence of a diary, memoirs or a contemporary biographer restrict our image of the man’s personality to mere glimpses. Above all, his modesty and reticence make him an elusive subject for a biographer. His contemporaries, for instance, appear … Read more

The Scullabogue Massacre 1798

Few events in modern Irish history, especially in the history of revolutionary nationalism, haunt the imagination like the massacre that took place in the townland of Scullabogue in southern County Wexford on 5 June 1798. The killing of well over a hundred government supporters by rebels has been immortalised in the illustration that George Cruickshank … Read more