by Seamus Heaney Its former green is blue and thin, And its once firm legs sink in and in; Soon it will break down unaware, Soon it will break down unaware. At night when reddest flowers are black Those who once sat thereon come back; Quite a row of them sitting there, Quite a row … Read more
On a cold April morning in 1719 a carriage containing an Irish lady and her maid, escorted by her husband and four companions, left the fortress city of Strasbourg to cross the Rhine. As they departed the governor of the city spoke to them, ‘Adieu mes enfants, you are not crossing the Rhine for nothing, … Read more
At noon on Saturday 13 October 1888 a locomotive decked with flags steamed into Belfast’s Great Victoria Street terminus. As a hundred men of the Gordon Highlanders presented arms and the band of the Black Watch played ‘God Save the Queen,’ Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, sixth Marquess of Londonderry and lord lieutenant of Ireland, stepped out of … Read more
by Brigitte Anton The Nation was the most popular journal in Ireland in the 1840s. Run by a group closely connected with the Repeal movement who became known as the Young Irelanders, it preached an European-style romantic Irish nationalism. The names of the leaders are familiar: Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, John Blake Dillon, William … Read more
by Ann C. Kavanaugh Few men in the eighteenth-century political world rose more rapidly or spectacularly than John Fitzgibbon. The son of a wealthy convert lawyer, he was barely thirty when he entered Parliament in 1778. Within five years he was appointed Attorney General. In 1789 he attained the highest legal office in Ireland, Lord … Read more