The recent article on Dorothy Macardle (HI 15.3, May/June 2007) mentions other accomplished Irish female historians of the Free State period, including Mary Hayden. She is one whose long and active life deserves to be better known. Like Macardle, she wrote one history book. A short history of the Irish people, published in November 1921 … Read more
The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to many thousands of portraits, photographs and sculptures of the great and the good, as well as those who travelled on the darker side of history. Earlier this year it hosted a small exhibition in the Porter Gallery called Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700–1850. The exhibition … Read more
After the Phoenix Park murders in May 1882, Gladstone introduced a stringent crimes act and created at Dublin Castle what was intended to be a permanent secret service department: the Crime Special Branch, led by an ‘Assistant Under-Secretary for Police and Crime’. From July 1882 until January 1887 this position was occupied by Edward George … Read more
From about 1730 Ireland experienced a series of communications developments that pro-foundly altered the opportunities to move around the island. Road, canal and, later, rail initiatives meant that by about 1860 a communications revolution had occurred. A wide-ranging ‘time–space compression’, as it is termed by some geographers, radically reduced the time, and to some extent … Read more
Sir, —I read with interest D. R. O’Connor Lysaght’s letter in the lastissue on the different strands of Irish nationalist thought dealt within the previous (March/April 2007) issue. I think he misinterpreted thetheme of my short piece on John O’Leary, however, which was concernedsolely with analysing why Yeats came to associate O’Leary with apoetical idea … Read more