Virtually no Irish or even Ulster history was taught at the school I attended on Belfast’s Shankill Road. Thus when I left school at the age of fourteen I was completely unprepared for what was to come. I grew up in a devoutly evangelical Protestant home, where I was told stories of our suffering and … Read more
In the early 1960s I began to attend Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, which seemed obsessed with ‘Romanism’ and Romish conspiracies. It was claimed that the Catholic Church wanted an Ireland Romanised from end to end as a springboard from which to take possession of England. The Irish state elevated the Catholic Church to a … Read more
The context in which the civil rights crisis should be placed stretches beyond the islands on the edge of Europe’s Atlantic coast to take in the whole continent. Northern Ireland was not entirely a ‘place apart’; it was one variation upon a wider European pattern. The French sociologist Raymond Aron highlighted that the post-war era … Read more
Is not the pastness of the past,’ asks Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, ‘that much more profound, more complete, more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’ The stories told about the civil rights era invite a positive response to this question. Indeed, the mythologising of the movement began as the events … Read more
For Éamon de Valera the death of King George V in January 1936 was another opportunity to enlarge Ireland’s independence and to affirm her sovereignty. Soon into the reign of King Edward VIII—on 29 May 1936—de Valera cleared the final hurdles to abolish the oath of allegiance, ‘his favourite piece of legislation’, according to Tim … Read more