One of the forgotten consequences of the partition of Ireland in 1920 is that a significant strand of nationalism was left isolated and ignored. In the South the official version of the national story underplayed the Northern Protestant involvement, and to be a Northern Protestant woman meant being ignored altogether. That is why this exhibition … Read more
In the course of a review of Douglas Hyde’s The Story of Early Gaelic Literature (1895), Frederick York Powell drew attention to the dearth of published texts in the Irish language: Is it too much to hope for the establishment of an Irish Text Society? It should publish in handy, clear-printed form the unpublished texts … Read more
If Yeats had many talents, then one was certainly his foresight, or as Roy Foster describes it, ‘that faculty, which always amazed his wife, of knowing how things would look to people afterwards’. But frequently this went further than prophecy: when it came to the question of how he himself might look in retrospect, Yeats … Read more
The rationale behind the Tudor attempt to ‘reform’ the Irish polity and the Gaelic section of its population was provided by humanists variously inspired by classical ideas of government, civility and imperialism. The idea of patria or fatherland is one revived classical concept which has been touched upon in the debate about the ideological background … Read more
A tower house is a fortified medieval residence of stone, usually four or more stories in height. Like most of the surviving monuments of our medieval past, the majority of Irish tower houses are in poor condition, with collapsed walls and ivy shrouded exteriors reflecting centuries of neglect. Yet these ruins, the remnants of a … Read more