The ceramic designer Frederick Vodrey (1845–97) had a small pottery behind his warehouse in Moore Street and in 1880 opened a retail outlet in Mary Street. The shop is described in The industries of Dublin: ‘The pottery establishment of Mr Vodrey is the only representative firm in this line in Dublin that has upheld the … Read more
Last year’s Athens Olympics and Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union have naturally drawn our attention to the eastern Mediterranean. While travel to mainland Greece, Turkey and the Mediterranean islands is now commonplace, the situation was very different in the mid-eighteenth century, when one of the pioneers of modern Mediterranean travel visited the area … Read more
Vilified by her English adversaries as ‘a woman who hath imprudently passed the part of womanhood’, Grace O’Malley was ignored by contemporary chroniclers in Ireland, yet her memory survived in native folklore. Nationalists later lionised her as Gráinne Mhaol, a warrior who would come over the sea with Irish soldiers to rout the English. She … 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