Shortly after the Berlin conference, an event happened in Ulster that changed the international rubber market in ways no one foresaw and, quite literally, led to the reinvention of the wheel. In October 1887 a Scottish-born resident of Belfast, John Boyd Dunlop, with a small veterinary practice in Gloucester Street, took heed of his nine-year-old … Read more
Ireland’s connection to rubber is not at first obvious. In the popular imagination of recent decades it is bound up with somewhat negative readings to do with the ban imposed by the Catholic Church on the sale of rubber prophylactics. More sinister was the deployment by the British army of rubber bullets during the troubles … Read more
Sir Peter Tait was born in Scotland in 1828 but moved to Limerick at a young age. At the age of sixteen he became a shop assistant in the Cumine and Mitchell department store but lost his job when trade slackened, forcing him to display the first signs of his entrepreneurial ability. He purchased a … Read more
Every year, on the eve of 12 July, volcano-like pyres of car, truck and tractor tyres, wooden palettes and other combustible materials are ignited in neighbourhoods across Northern Ireland. For those who gather beside these infernos the symbolism of burning tyres is obscure. As the thick acrid smoke swirls into the summer night, stories are … Read more
It is unlikely that the Buckingham Palace conference of July 1914 would feature prominently on a list of momentous events punctuating the discourse of Ireland’s partition. Indeed, its brevity and predictable collapse were another manifestation of an ever-tightening deadlock concerning the third Irish Home Rule bill, and it elicits merely cursory references in the general … Read more