Historically there are many reasons for the forgery or falsification of a document. A major incentive for such a practice occurs when a powerful nation invades a weaker one without obvious justification. A classic example in our times was the document released by the British government in February 2003, Iraq—its infrastructure of concealment, deception and … Read more
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
Richard Whately was possibly the strangest archbishop Ireland has ever known. An eccentric Oxford professor of political economy, he was appointed Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin in 1831 and remained in office until 1863. A new biography by Bryan MacMahon, Eccentric archbishop: Richard Whately of Redesdale, has just been published by the Kilmacud–Stillorgan Local … Read more
Mollie Gill, often known as Maire, was born on 24 March 1891, one of four girls in a family of seven. Her father was a shoemaker and the family lived in a cottage in Murphystown, Co. Dublin, but from the age of 11 Mollie had been exposed to a different world when her older sister … Read more
Different spanks for different ranks Lions led by donkeys The last words of James Templeton, a 20-year-old mill apprentice from Belfast, are written neatly in his own hand. Before he was executed by his own battalion in the trenches of northern France in 1916, Templeton wrote: ‘I’m sorry for what I have done’. This was … Read more