Eire—It was a beautiful day in Dublin. Floating down the Liffey, neat little barges with red-topped funnels, loaded with brown barrels of Guinness stout, symbolised pre-war living and good appetites. Along the riverside the sunshine accentuated, rainbow-wise, the soft greens, blues, reds and yellows with which Dublin’s tall Georgian houses are painted. It was low … Read more
Niav Gallagher outlines how the Franciscans arrived in Ireland c. 1231 and enjoyed over a century of expansion and consolidation despite racial tensions. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler Thomas Eccleston, the first Franciscan friars to arrive in the British Isles landed at Dover on 10 September 1224. Within a few years houses of the order … Read more
BB: Tell us something about your background and about the people who influenced you most in your formative years. TPC: I grew up in impoverished middle-class surroundings in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. My father was a Sinn Féin activist with W.T. Cosgrave, Kevin O’Higgins and Michael Collins, setting up the local government and court system that … Read more
Kevin Haddick Flynn outlines the background to and the course of an incident that sharply divided public opinion. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the only anti-Jewish pogrom to take place on Irish soil—that which occurred in Limerick in the early months of 1904. The outrage divided public opinion, but only two people of … Read more
Daniel Mulhall delves into Joyce’s classic novel and finds it teeming with figures from Irish history History and literature are often intertwined. With the passage of time, all contemporary writing eventually becomes part of the historical record, although it must be read with care if it is to provide a helpful window on the … Read more