Mary Raftery’s exposé of industrial schools in her acclaimed RTÉ documentary States of fear (1999) drew particular attention to criticism of the system by Boys’ Town’s Fr Edward Flanagan—Dáire Keogh re-examines the evidence. In the recent debate about institutional abuse in Ireland, commentators have drawn on a cache of letters amongst the papers of Father … Read more
A new society dedicated to the study of sports history was launched at a highly successful conference in Dublin in February. The sports history conference, which was hosted by the Humanities Institute of Ireland at University College, Dublin, on 18 and 19 February 2005, was the first such venture to be held in the Republic … Read more
Eamon de Valera came to power in 1932 as the head of a minority Fianna Fáil government. The writing of a new constitution and its subsequent endorsement by the Irish people on 1 July 1937, albeit by a narrow majority—685,105 for, 526,945 against—helped him to achieve many of his major policy goals. Paradoxically, his strategy … Read more
‘Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler, Who made the Britons squeal, Sure before the fight is ended They will dance an Irish reel.’ (War News, 21 November 1940) Seán Russell, the IRA chief of staff, spent the summer of 1940 in a ‘very large’ villa in the leafy Grunewald, near Berlin, surrounded by extensive grounds and … Read more
As in other parts of the British Isles, ball games were a popular form of recreation in Ireland long before the modern versions of the games that became soccer and rugby were refined by English public schools during the nineteenth century and had their rules of play standardised by the Football Association (in 1863) and … Read more