The least you could expect from a city council is that it would get its own address right, but not so Dublin City Council. For the last twenty years the Irish-language version of the street signs outside the Civic Offices have read Cé na Coille (the Forest Quay), rather than Cé an Adhmaid (the Wood … Read more
MC: Tell me about your family connections with Ireland. PM: My mother’s family are Roches from County Cork, who have lived there since the middle of the thirteenth century. They are an Anglo-Irish family who always resided there—they weren’t absentees. I was brought up with a fairly ‘green’ understanding of the relationships between the people … Read more
The original Dictionary of National Biography (henceforth referred to as the DNB), edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, appeared between 1885 and 1900, and was followed by a series of supplements. The current edition (henceforth ODNB) retains the DNB’s 36,807 lives: it lists the original contributors where they remain as signatories of revised entries. … Read more
Eamon de Valera came to power in 1932 as the head of a minority Fianna Fáil government. The writing of a new constitution and its subsequent endorsement by the Irish people on 1 July 1937, albeit by a narrow majority—685,105 for, 526,945 against—helped him to achieve many of his major policy goals. Paradoxically, his strategy … Read more
‘Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler, Who made the Britons squeal, Sure before the fight is ended They will dance an Irish reel.’ (War News, 21 November 1940) Seán Russell, the IRA chief of staff, spent the summer of 1940 in a ‘very large’ villa in the leafy Grunewald, near Berlin, surrounded by extensive grounds and … Read more