Drawing on the revered heritage of the Irish Volunteers, the Fianna Fáil government created the Volunteer Force on 6 April 1934. This part-time militia was intended to appeal to the party’s republican supporters, and to offer them an alternative to membership of the IRA. Recruiting posters stressed the specifically Irish nature of the new force, … Read more
DD: How important was family background and schooling in the development of your historical interests? RBMcD: I was born in the middle of the middle classes, so from the very earliest days I was aware of how the business world thought and lived. I also grew up in the Protestant world of the North of … Read more
Established in 1947 by the Irish government in collaboration with a committee of professional historians and former Irish Volunteers, the purpose of the Bureau of Military History was ‘to assemble and coordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers … Read more
The County Roscommon district courthouse was crowded in January 1935 when sisters Elizabeth (23) and Rose E. (18) were tried for the murder of the elder sister’s infant daughter. Like most of the mothers who stood trial for infanticide in post-independence Ireland, Elizabeth was unmarried. Irish society was deeply intolerant of unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children … Read more
There was no separate category of infanticide in southern Ireland until the passing of the Infanticide Act in 1949 and thus the murder of infants under the age of one year was until then a capital offence. Most single women who stood trial for the murder of their illegitimate infants at the Central Criminal Court … Read more