By Anna Rose Garvey The role of an archivist can be varied and multidisciplinary. At times, a collection may provide new insights into old problems, if an archivist is ready to make the connection. In 2023 a member of the IFI Irish Film Archive team made a unique discovery: excerpts from an MGM film believed … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons The courts of petty sessions were the lowest courts in the land. They developed independently of manor courts, which they eventually replaced. Petty sessions evolved from the exercise of summary jurisdiction by justices outside the quarter sessions. They heard criminal and civil matters, gave summary verdicts on lesser cases and referred more … Read more
By Damian Murphy The Mallow-born John ‘Johnny’ Roche (c. 1804–84) is remembered as a ‘character of Cork’ not only for his devil-may-care attitude to life but also on the strength of the eccentric architectural legacy that he left in his wake. The young Roche displayed an aptitude for carpentry, ironmongery and stonemasonry on the family … Read more
By John Stocks Powell How many people in Cork in 1677 would have known the story of the Boscobel oak tree in Shropshire and how Charles II hid from his enemies high in its branches after the defeat of Royalist forces by the Parliamentarians after the Battle of Worcester in September 1651? Yet this image … Read more
By James W. Houlihan In the early summer of AD 697 the Law of the Innocents—Lex Innocentium in the annals, also known as Cáin Adomnáin—was proclaimed at Birr, Co. Offaly. (See HI 23.1, Jan./Feb. 2015, pp 14–17.) It was a law for the protection of innocents, what we call today non-combatants, primarily—though not exclusively—in times … Read more