Sir, —Your January/February 2005 issue provided food for thought. ‘Shotat Dawn’ by Peter Mulvany established that, when it came to militarydiscipline in the Great War, there were ‘different spanks for differentranks’. The ‘Londonderry Herr’ by Neil Fleming recalled the NaziRibbentrop’s frolics at Mountstewart with the marquess of Londonderry,ex-British air minister, ex-Stormont education minister, ex-Carsonite‘rebel’. In … Read more
Sir, —W.J. Lowe’s ‘Who were the Black-and-Tans?’ (HI 12.3, Autumn 2004) is—like all his work on Irish police history—solid, salutary and illuminating. His findings on the substantial Irish element among men who joined the RIC from the beginning of 1920 are particularly valuable. The ‘folk memory’ that assumed the Black-and-Tans and Auxiliaries (ADRIC) ‘to be … Read more
Sir, —Sinéad ní Shuinéar’s article ‘Apocrypha to canon: inventing Irish Traveller history’ (HI 12.4, Winter 2004) held a particular resonance for me. I am currently researching Irish Travellers and the criminal justice systems on the island of Ireland, north and south. Recently, in consideration of a theoretical framework with which to guide my Ph.D, I … Read more
Ireland and Auschwitz This period marks the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps. Here it has been marked by a particularly Irish form of commemoration—the vandalisation of a public monument, in this case the decapitation of the statue of IRA leader Seán Russell in Dublin’s Fairview Park. In the … Read more
Sir, —Thank you for publishing the article by David Franklin about Eamon de Valera’s 1920 visit to Birmingham, Alabama, in the last issue (Winter 2004). He makes reference to the murder of Father James Edwin Coyle. A native of Drum, Athlone, Co. Roscommon, Father Coyle spent his priestly life in Alabama from 1896 to 1921. … Read more