Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill The 1889 Light Railway (Ireland) Act was the first to provide government grants for the construction of railways, which had previously been the domain of private enterprise. This and subsequent acts of 1890 and 1896 brought the railway to remote, thinly populated districts which were considered commercially non-viable by the railway … Read more
Christine Kinealy 1995 marks the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of a new and deadly strain of potato blight in Ireland; a blight that reappeared in varying degrees over the next six years. As a consequence of the resultant food shortage and the more general disruption to economic … Read more
by Robert Mahony When Jonathan Swift died 250 years ago, his publisher George Faulkner eulogised him as ‘a great and eminent Patriot’, whose ‘Genius, Works, Learning and Charity’ evoked universal admiration (Dublin Journal 19-22 October 1745). The sequence of Faulkner’s phrasing deserves notice, since even as Swift’s ‘Genius, Works [and] Learning’, represented by … Read more
Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Vol.1 (West Cork), Vol.2 (East and South Cork) Denis Power (comp.) (Stationary Office, £20 each) Guide to the Archives of the Office of Public Works Rena Lohan (Stationary Office) Irish Archives Journal (Spring 1995) (Irish Society of Archives, £4.95) Reviewed by Kevin Whelan In recent years, there has been a … Read more
Reviewed by Sean Connolly Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland 1660-1714, Phil Kilroy (Cork University Press, £27.50) Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society 1740-1890, David Hempton and Myrtle Hill (Routledge, £40) Catholicism in Ulster 1603-1983: An Interpretative History, Oliver P. Rafferty (Gill and Macmillan, £12.99) Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien … Read more