Features

Devilish devices or farmyard friends?

Ewan Morris recounts the heated debate provoked by the introduction of Percy Metcalfe’s coinage designs in 1928. The introduction of the euro has finally seen the disappearance of Percy Metcalfe’s animal designs from the coinage of the Republic of Ireland, almost 75 years after they first appeared on the Free State’s coins. Although decimalisation had … Read more

‘There’s no such thing as a bad boy’

Mary Raftery’s exposé of industrial schools in her acclaimed RTÉ documentary States of fear (1999) drew particular attention to criticism of the system by Boys’ Town’s Fr Edward Flanagan—Dáire Keogh re-examines the evidence. In the recent debate about institutional abuse in Ireland, commentators have drawn on a cache of letters amongst the papers of Father … Read more