Lone crusader: David Thornley and the intellectuals Edward Thornley (Ashfield Press, €21.50) ISBN 9789068798 The premature death of David Thornley in June 1978 deprived Ireland of a significant intellectual best known for his current affairs work on RTÉ’s Seven Days programme and as a Labour TD for Dublin North-West from 1969 to 1977. Unseated … Read more
The men will talk to me: Kerry interviews by Ernie O’Malley Cormac K.H. O’Malley and Tim Horgan (eds) (Mercier Press, €19.99) ISBN 9781856359528 The title of this collection conveys the point that, as a highly respected IRA veteran, Ernie O’Malley had unique access to his former comrades when in the late 1940s and early … Read more
While on the subject of re-enactments, we might as well mention one with a particular relevance to our current special issue on the 1913 Lockout, in which Tony Canavan wrote a preliminary account of the Dublin Tenement Experience: Living the Lockout (you can read his review, taken from the current issue, elsewhere on the website). … Read more
The republican trade unionist and ITGWU organiser P.T. Daly alleged that the low wages paid to the female employees at Jacob’s factory were ‘the cause of driving many of them onto the streets as prostitutes’. The Dublin Metropolitan Police estimated in 1901 that while female prostitution was decreasing there were still an estimated 1,677 women … Read more
The weekly wages of a DMP or RIC constable during his first years of service were by no means high, slightly more than the wages of a labourer during a full week of summer employment, or just over a pound (20–22 shillings). The report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Royal Irish Constabulary and … Read more