The neat, frail figure of Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington was the centre of attention at a meeting on 20 April to celebrate the life of her mother-in-law, the feminist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. The event, held at University College Dublin, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Hanna’s death. It was organised by the Women’s Education Research and Research Centre (WERRC), … Read more
The practice of history can be seen as a tapestry being constantly re-woven as patterns change, fade, deteriorate, go out of fashion, being replaced in their turn by new shapes, new colourings, expressions of new approaches. Tom O’Neill appeared in these pictures often, over the last forty years, his appearances more lasting than many. But … Read more
Professor J.C. Beckett, who died in a Belfast nursing home on 12 February, was one of Ireland’s most eminent historians. He belonged to that distinguished pleiad of ‘30s graduates who helped to change the character of Irish historical study, lifting it above the maelstrom of Irish politics, and setting it on a plateau of objective … Read more
The average Dubliner’, according to an anonymous letter-writer to the Irish Times, commenting on the revelations about the Nazi Holocaust at the end of the Second World War, ‘would not be persuaded even though all the hosts of Hitler’s victims were to rise from the dead; he would only pour himself another drink muttering “British … Read more
The story of the ill-fated Boundary Commission has often been told: how it was established under Article XII of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty to determine the extent of the North/South border ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’; how it was imposed upon … Read more