The Rothe collection—on show in last year’s exhibition at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, ‘Portraits and People: Art in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’—contains five significant interrelated artefacts. It has intriguing portraits of David Rothe and his nephew, Thomas, painted by some unknown, possibly Continental, artist who was in Kilkenny at the time of the Catholic Confederation. Their … Read more
The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. But as John Gibney explains, Irish Catholics had their own views on what had happened in 1641. When agents of the Irish … Read more
The Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary holds probably the most significant grouping of ecclesiastical buildings surviving from the medieval period in Ireland. Its largest building, the cathedral, was abandoned in the 1750s and the medieval parish church at the opposite end of the town was upgraded to cathedral status, being itself replaced by the … Read more
The Revenue Museum recently featured in a book about the government’s waste of taxpayers’ money but this seems an unfair criticism of an interesting and well-presented exhibition. Sited in the atmospheric crypt of Dublin Castle’s chapel, it occupies a small chamber that makes the best use of its space. As soon as you go through … Read more
The story of Ireland arrived on British and Irish television screens with considerable fanfare, the first comprehensive TV history of Ireland since Robert Kee’s Ireland: a history in 1981. Now, 30 years later, comes a multimillion-euro co-production between the BBC and RTÉ, filmed across the world and fronted by former BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane … Read more