As Europe fell to the advancing German armies in the early months of World War II, the United Kingdom became more and more isolated and increasingly dependent on the Atlantic trade route for industrial raw materials and food. Although some air cover was already provided, a gap existed in mid-Atlantic, a section which could not … Read more
On Friday 28 April 1916, with the GPO in flames and British forces closing in, Patrick Pearse, a badly wounded James Connolly and other leaders of the republican uprising in Dublin decided to break out of the Post Office and make for Parnell Place, where they hoped to renew their fight to better advantage. Under … Read more
CK: What is the nature of this collection? VL: The Bureau of Military History was established by the government in 1947 with the remit of gathering material relating to the period 1913 to 1921. So they set about establishing who was alive and interviewing those people. CK: What kind of people were they looking for? … Read more
The events of Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, are generally regarded as having marked a decisive turning-point in the military struggle between the British forces and the IRA, the military wing of the underground Dáil government. Three separate but connected events occurred on Bloody Sunday. First came the killings by Michael Collins’s ‘squad’ of twelve … Read more
For many people the works of Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry and their contemporaries are evocative of a simple, uncomplicated lifestyle associated with the west of Ireland. While Yeats developed as the major artist of the early twentieth century, Henry emerged as Ireland’s leading landscape painter. It was largely Henry’s vision of the west that … Read more