Rennie was no stranger to Dublin, or indeed to Ireland. A small notebook in the National Library of Scotland records his 1801 impressions of the Dublin harbour area. Three years later, the army commander, Lord Cathcart, showed him the sites that had been selected for Martello towers in the Dunleary area. His Irish projects included … Read more
Sir,—It appears that we are to be bombarded with anniversaries: 1913 and the Lockout; 1914 and the Great War; 1916 and the Rising, Verdun and the Somme. But we may have missed the first significant anniversary. Surely the First Balkan War in the autumn of 1912 was the first violent convulsion of a disastrous century. … Read more
Sir,—I welcome the call, from the historians at the 16 May History Ireland ‘Hedge School’, for critical analysis of the ‘decade of centenaries’ events from 1912–22. I have been reflecting on this for some time, having been reminded of some unanswered questions when editing the 1998 UCD Press re-publication of my father Joe Johnston’s 1913 … Read more
Sir,—Ernest Kavanagh’s cartoon ‘Dublin Labour War’, which appeared on p. 34 of your recent special issue on the 1913 Lockout (HI 21.4, July/August 2013), did not actually appear in the Irish Worker newspaper, as stated in the caption. To the best of my knowledge it had never been published prior to its welcome appearance in … Read more
‘It rarely pays to get between a dog and a lamp-post’, remarked United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull on the virtues of neutrality. For Dante, ‘the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality’. Was Ireland right to stay neutral in the Second World … Read more