St Ultan’s Hospital was established in 1919 by Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen in response to socio-medical conditions in Dublin. It was not unusual for women to establish hospitals. This had happened in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century to facilitate women’s access to the medical profession. Women on missionary … Read more
Radical politics in modern Ireland: the Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896–1904 David Lynch (Irish Academic Press, €39.50) ISBN 0716533561Written by a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), this book belongs to a sub-genre of labour history that sees history-writing as instrumental and is at pains to draw lessons regarding present-day socialist politics and … Read more
Mary Raftery’s exposé of industrial schools in her acclaimed RTÉ documentary States of fear (1999) drew particular attention to criticism of the system by Boys’ Town’s Fr Edward Flanagan—Dáire Keogh re-examines the evidence. In the recent debate about institutional abuse in Ireland, commentators have drawn on a cache of letters amongst the papers of Father … Read more
Sir, —Sinéad ní Shuinéar’s article ‘Apocrypha to canon: inventing Irish Traveller history’ (HI 12.4, Winter 2004) held a particular resonance for me. I am currently researching Irish Travellers and the criminal justice systems on the island of Ireland, north and south. Recently, in consideration of a theoretical framework with which to guide my Ph.D, I … Read more
Refiguring Ireland: essays in honour of L.M. Cullen David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds) (Lilliput Press, €60) ISBN 1901866 84X It is said that you can judge a man by the company he keeps. It certainly applies in the case of this volume of essays published to honour the work of Louis Cullen, one … Read more