Ireland’s Nazis RTÉ 1, Tuesday 9 & 16 January 10.15pm Hidden Histories Presented by Cathal O’Shannon for Tile Films by Eamon O’Flaherty The Second World War and the Holocaust are very much alive, even 60 years after the end of the war. Cathal O’Shannon joined the RAF as a teenager towards the end of the … Read more
A cartoon that accompanied TV Eye’s review of RTÉ1’s ‘The Abbey Theatre: the first hundred years’ (HI 12.1, Spring 2004) was captioned: ‘Yeats addressing the audience . . . during the Playboy disturbances, 1907’. Similar (erroneous) captions have been reproduced in several books on the period. In fact, the cartoon shows Yeats giving a lecture … Read more
No one anticipated the Irish revolution and the upheavals that accompanied it. By the outbreak of the First World War the Land Acts had transferred the ownership of most of the land of Ireland from a largely Protestant aristocracy or gentry to (mainly) Catholic tenant farmers. The Irish social revolution was effectively over before the … Read more
The most dangerous man in Britain’ or a paranoid crank? ‘The greatest fighter of the Scottish working class’ or a middle-class intellectual out of touch with working-class opinion? A Marxist ‘first, last, and always’ or a Communist Party heretic? A Scottish patriot on a par with William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace or a minor footnote to history? … Read more
This year, 2007, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernie O’Malley, and it is almost 110 years since his birth in Ellison Street, Castlebar. He spent only eight years there, where his father, Luke, an official with the Congested Districts Board, was a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the typical Irish Catholic … Read more