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
Flora Sandes (1876–1956) fought with the Serbian army during the Great War, and was awarded the country’s highest military honour. To the soldiers of Serbia she was nashi Engleskinja—‘our Englishwoman’. Flora was indeed born in Poppleton, Yorkshire, but her family background was whollyIrish. How had she ended up fighting in the Serbian Army? Escape from … Read more