The Freeman’s Journal published some 300 Shemus cartoons between 1920 and 1924. These were remarkably hard-hitting comments on the events of this period, reflecting the paper’s editorial stance. Up to the truce of July 1921, which led on to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December, the main thrust of the cartoons was against the increasingly brutal … Read more
A bizarre theft has taken place off the Donegal coast. A two-tonne Mass rock has been stolen from the uninhabited island of Inishtrahull. The island was home to many families until it was evacuated in 1929 and has symbolic significance as it was the last part of Ireland passed by nineteenth-century emigrant ships sailing from … Read more
‘The decision which the Irish people will make on 10 May will be recorded either as an unprecedented opportunity which we chose to grasp with incalculable gain, or which we chose to throw away with irreparable loss’ —Taoiseach Jack Lynch, April 1972 The campaign for EEC membership didn’t really begin until November 1970, when … Read more
In 1960 newly elected President John F. Kennedy was worried about an imaginary US–USSR nuclear ‘missile gap’. In Dublin Miss Elizabeth Synnott’s employment agency was worried by a ‘Protestant gap’. In early January 1960 in the Irish Times she advertised that ‘Protestant shorthand typists’ were ‘urgently wanted’. Later that month, ‘a Protestant shorthand typist (senior)’ … Read more
If anyone in Ireland is asked which side the country favoured in World War II, ‘The Allies, of course!’ will be the almost invariable reply. Ireland, after all, was Britain’s nearest neighbour. Tens of thousands served in the British armed forces; an even larger number earned their living in Britain’s war industries. The Irish government … Read more