On 19 January 2005 John O’Donoghue TD, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, launched Enneclan’s CD-Rom publication of Ireland’s Memorial Records 1914–1918 at the National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, Dublin. The CD-Rom records the names of more than 49,000 Irishmen who died in the Great War. The rich tapestry of historical and genealogical detail … 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
PF: To what extent was a sense of Irish ethnicity a factor drawing you towards an academic interest in Irish Studies and particularly Irish migration? KM: Only in retrospect. Being born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, one primarily thought of oneself as being white as against others who were not. There was a much less … Read more
The Irish question was a constant source of concern and debate in the nineteenth-century British press, but perhaps never more so than in the mid-1880s and early 1890s, when almost every newspaper and journal offered extensive commentary on the first two Irish Home Rule bills. Comic weeklies such as Punch, Fun and Judy were no … Read more
In March 1919 Benito Mussolini, a socialist turned nationalist, founded a new movement in Milan that became known as ‘fascism’. The fasces—a bound bundle of sticks—had been a symbol of republican unity in ancient Rome. For Mussolini they signified the unity of the nation, and in particular the incorporation into Italy of all Italian-speaking territories … Read more