The centenaries of the third Home Rule bill and the outbreak of the First World War have sparked debate on how Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond was allegedly wiped from the historical memory of independent Ireland. In fact, the early 1920s saw major national tributes paid to Redmond, with thousands of old supporters in … Read more
The Quit Rent Office holds records relating to some of the Crown’s former land revenues, natural assets and franchises in Ireland between the 1660s and the 1930s. In 1923 the records were transferred to the Irish Free State. After 1943 the historic Quit Rent Office records were transferred to the Public Records Office (now the … Read more
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