Eire—It was a beautiful day in Dublin. Floating down the Liffey, neat little barges with red-topped funnels, loaded with brown barrels of Guinness stout, symbolised pre-war living and good appetites. Along the riverside the sunshine accentuated, rainbow-wise, the soft greens, blues, reds and yellows with which Dublin’s tall Georgian houses are painted. It was low … Read more
BB: Tell us something about your background and about the people who influenced you most in your formative years. TPC: I grew up in impoverished middle-class surroundings in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. My father was a Sinn Féin activist with W.T. Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins and Michael Collins, setting up the local government and court system that … Read more
Kevin Haddick Flynn outlines the background to and the course of an incident that sharply divided public opinion. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the only anti-Jewish pogrom to take place on Irish soil—that which occurred in Limerick in the early months of 1904. The outrage divided public opinion, but only two people of … Read more
Interest in Ernest Shackleton has been renewed recently, thanks in partto a successful exhibition held last year at the National Museum,Collins Barracks. South (80 mins) is a record of Shackleton’s attemptto cross Antarctica via the South Pole in 1914. Filmed by expeditionmember Frank Hurley, the film was originally released in 1914 andchronicles what happened to … Read more
The Somme offensive was initially conceived as a joint Anglo-French advance which would break the German lines and open the road to Berlin. The area was not chosen for any great strategic reasons: the German line was not particularly weak there nor was the fate of any strategically important city or railway junction at stake. … Read more