20th-century / Contemporary History – Page 251

The Last Secretary General Sean Lester and the League of Nations, Douglas Gageby. (Townhouse, £19.99) ISBN 1860591086

Sean Lester, Protestant nationalist, Irish diplomat, League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig (Gdansk) and the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, is a fascinating subject for a biography. Douglas Gageby’s account of Lester’s life and times presents a vivid picture of Lester’s metamorphosis from nationalist to internationalist and from Irish diplomat to … Read more

Bunreacht na hÉireann: a study of the Irish text, Micheál Ó Cearúil. (Coiste Uile-Pháirtí an Oireachtais ar an mBunreacht/The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, £15). ISBN 0707664004

On 20 August 1936, Éamon de Valera received ‘A Plan for a basic constitutional law and an Initial Version of a Draft’ from a legal adviser in the Department of External Affairs, John Hearne. That document marked the genesis of Bunreacht na hÉireann. By October 1936 the ‘plan’ had grown to seventy-eight articles and other … Read more

The Act of Union: 200 years on

There could be no more suitable venue for a seminar on the Act of Union than the Irish House of Lords chamber rendered redundant by the votes of its members in 1800. Preserved intact when the Bank of Ireland bought the parliament building in 1802 (and proceeded to gut the Commons), the Lords chamber is … Read more

The Tommy Gun–the Irish connection

The Thompson submachine gun or ‘Tommy gun’ as it became known, started life on the drawing board of retired US Army Lt. Col. Marcellus Thompson sometime during 1916. He was an enthusiastic gun designer with a lot of ideas of his own. He wanted to develop an automatic rifle from his personal specifications. His designs … Read more

The George Gavan Duffy Papers

Family background George Gavan Duffy, the eldest of the four children of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s third marriage was born in October 1882 at his mother’s home in Cheshire. His father had left Australia and settled in Nice. Louise Hall, whom he married in 1881, was his second wife’s niece and forty years his junior; … Read more