As we move through the ‘decade of commemorations’, the problems in ‘remembering’ the Irish Civil War become apparent. Civil conflicts pose challenges to communal remembering of the past owing to their inherently divisive nature and thus are often considered best forgotten. This is ably illustrated in one of the troubling legacies of the Irish Civil … Read more
A garrulous, lightning-witted, talent-squandering, hard-drinking ‘character’, Brendan Behan embodied a certain Anglo-American stereotype of an ‘Irish writer’ to the hilt. Dead at the age of 41, his drinking was, as his one-time friend Anthony Cronin would say, no laughing matter, and yet it is sometimes hard not to laugh. From 1956 onwards, when Joan Littlewood’s … Read more
The first decade of the twentieth century saw the establishment of women’s suffrage societies in nearly every major town and city in the British Isles. These organisations shared the same objective but utilised vastly different means to achieve it. The movement was split between two broad camps: militant and non-militant. The London-based National Union of … Read more
On 14 November 1901 Elvina T. appeared before the Dublin City sessions charged with child neglect and with being a habitual drunkard. The previous month, a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) inspector had visited her family home at Kevin Street to find the children ‘miserably clad’. Some weeks later he found … Read more
In September 1949 Dr Wenceslao Oliveros arrived in Ireland on a scientific mission to visit UCD and its president, Michael Tierney. Richard Mulcahy, minister for education in the first interparty government, had been in correspondence with his Spanish colleague, José Ibáñez Martín, and had approved the trip, despite Oliveros’s acquired reputation. Dublin welcomed the arrival … Read more