Handball is known to have been played in Ireland from at least the mid-1500s. Its origins are likely shared with the contemporaneous games of real or royal tennis, palla, pelota and Eton fives. While royal tennis was played in purpose-built courts from the early 1500s, handball, like pelota (Basque region) and palla (Tuscany), was predominantly … 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
Traditionally, newspapers were owned by businessmen who were keen to protect their own interests. During the early years of independence the two daily nationals, the Irish Independent (which incorporated the Freeman’s Journal after 1924) and the Irish Times, in common with most regional newspapers, were profoundly middle-class and anti-republican. Fianna Fáil published the Nation weekly … Read more
The Whitechurch Carnegie Free Library first opened its doors on St Patrick’s Day 1911. It was designed by Thomas Joseph Byrne (1876–1939), then council clerk and architect to the South Dublin Rural District Council. Byrne was born in Kingston-on-Thames and commenced his study of architecture at the age of fifteen, articled to Edward Carter ARIBA … Read more
In 1944 the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) in Dublin pioneered the use of the symphysiotomy operation (see sidebar) as the procedure of choice in certain cases where the woman’s pelvis was deemed too small to permit a normal birth (termed ‘disproportion’). The NMH was Ireland’s leading Catholic-identified maternity hospital. NMH doctors were motivated by the perceived need … Read more