Jubilees just aren’t what they used to be. In June 1897 Maud Gonne organised a counter-campaign of defiance to the official celebrations, a magic lantern projection from the National Club in Dublin. Which Ireland was on show that evening, in a capital illuminated with giant ‘VR’ monograms? Beamed across what is now Parnell Square were … Read more
The first edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (1997) was immediately hailed as a classic. For its time it was a ground-breaking publication, featuring a previously unsurpassed array of maps, aerial photographs and detailed explanatory text combining broad overviews of Irish rural settlement with detailed treatments of individual regions. Perhaps unavoidably, the … Read more
Earlier in the summer the newly refurbished Smock Alley Theatre celebrated its reopening with a lively performance of Oliver Goldsmith’s She stoops to conquer, directed by Kristian Marken, the artistic director of the Smock Alley Players, although plays have been performed in the theatre for several years since it was reopened by Patrick Sutton, one … Read more
Joseph and Bridget Moore may not be household names but they were real people, Irish immigrants who lived in 1869 at 97 Orchard Street, in New York’s Lower East Side. Now they and their family have been immortalised in the latest addition to the city’s Tenement Museum, located today at the same address. The recreated … Read more
There is something hallucinatory about the wealth generated by rubber, comparable in our own time to the empires built on the back of the narcotics trade. One such hallucinatory kingdom was briefly forged by Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, son of an Irish-American sea captain, whose life has been popularly mythologised by the Werner Herzog film. In … Read more