Shortly after the Berlin conference, an event happened in Ulster that changed the international rubber market in ways no one foresaw and, quite literally, led to the reinvention of the wheel. In October 1887 a Scottish-born resident of Belfast, John Boyd Dunlop, with a small veterinary practice in Gloucester Street, took heed of his nine-year-old … Read more
Ireland’s connection to rubber is not at first obvious. In the popular imagination of recent decades it is bound up with somewhat negative readings to do with the ban imposed by the Catholic Church on the sale of rubber prophylactics. More sinister was the deployment by the British army of rubber bullets during the troubles … Read more
Every year, on the eve of 12 July, volcano-like pyres of car, truck and tractor tyres, wooden palettes and other combustible materials are ignited in neighbourhoods across Northern Ireland. For those who gather beside these infernos the symbolism of burning tyres is obscure. As the thick acrid smoke swirls into the summer night, stories are … Read more
Kate Connolly, the Irish immigrant narrator in a semi-fictional novel, saw an Afro-Argentine peach-seller in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and remarked upon the ‘tall black woman with a woolly head’, commenting that she had seen a peach before but never an African person. The majority of forced African immigrants arrived on the shores of the River … Read more
Irish people emigrated to Buenos Aires with an identity as oppressed indigenous people, only to subsequently find themselves cooperating in the dispossession of indigenous Argentines. The settlement of European farmers was central to the consolidation of political power in Argentina. Irish and other immigrants retained their language and customs, acting as a buffer zone between … Read more