Dublin Nazi No. 1: the life of Adolf Mahr Gerry Mullins (Liberties Press, €25 hb, €16.99 pb) ISBN 9781905483198 In 1927 the Austrian Adolph Mahr became Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum in Kildare Street, Dublin, one of a diverse group of European professionals recruited by the fledgling Irish Free State. Made director … Read more
In his review of T. Ryle Dwyer’s Behind the Green Curtain (HI 18.2,March/April 2010), Eoin Dillon states that the book ‘allows present-dayneutrality to be presented as contingent, a pragmatic response ratherthan a fixed principle of Southern foreign policy’. In 1939 the FiannaFáil government quoted the Hague Convention of 1907 to support Irishneutrality. It defines in … Read more
Interactives are an important part of modern museum exhibitions and there are 35 in the ‘Soldiers & Chiefs’ exhibition. Those dealing with the Irish Defence Forces are focused on films of the army in action lent to the museum by Military Archives and the Irish Film Archive. The first is a 1939 recruiting film, Step … Read more
Behind the Green Curtain: Ireland’s phoney neutrality during World War II T. Ryle Dwyer (Gill and Macmillan, €25) ISBN 9780717146383 The reasons for Irish neutrality during the Second World War are widely accepted: that any attempt to take an overtly pro-British line might have resulted in a replay of the Civil War; that Southern … Read more
I was a boy in Belsen Praxis Pictures 18 January 2009/27 January 2010, RTÉ2 by John Gibney Tomas Reichental was born in Slovakia and is now an Irish citizen. He arrived in Ireland to help establish a zip factory in 1959, got married and stayed put. In his retirement, he chose to break a … Read more