A cartoon that accompanied TV Eye’s review of RTÉ1’s ‘The Abbey Theatre: the first hundred years’ (HI 12.1, Spring 2004) was captioned: ‘Yeats addressing the audience . . . during the Playboy disturbances, 1907’. Similar (erroneous) captions have been reproduced in several books on the period. In fact, the cartoon shows Yeats giving a lecture … Read more
On 7 October 1843 the lord lieutenant of Ireland issued a proclamation banning the ‘monster meeting’ scheduled for the following day at Clontarf, in the northern suburbs of Dublin. Some 2,500 troops, nearly 1,000 constabulary and four field guns were deployed to enforce the order. With only hours to spare, the organisers of the demonstration, … Read more
No one anticipated the Irish revolution and the upheavals that accompanied it. By the outbreak of the First World War the Land Acts had transferred the ownership of most of the land of Ireland from a largely Protestant aristocracy or gentry to (mainly) Catholic tenant farmers. The Irish social revolution was effectively over before the … Read more
In 1793–4 Anthologia Hibernica published a series of letters by ‘Mentor’ on the philosophy of nature, covering a wide range of mathematical and scientific topics. Letter eighteen in October 1794 dealt with the nature and properties of magnetism. This was followed in November by one on electricity in which ‘Mentor’ described what he called a … Read more
In April 1920 Eamon de Valera stepped off the train at Birmingham, Alabama. Only days before the city had officially ‘unwelcomed’ him. A small party of merely curious onlookers were joined by a police squadron that had been mobilised to prevent disorder or to prohibit any type of parade given in honour of the ‘so-called … Read more