On 17 April 1920, a coroner’s jury investigating the shooting of Cork lord mayor (and IRA brigade commander) Tomás MacCurtain issued its famous finding of ‘wilful murder’ against Prime Minister David Lloyd George and top civil and police officials in Ireland. The verdict provoked a predictable response from, amongst others, the Irish Times, which mocked … Read more
The past decade has seen a considerable rise in interest in the work of Hugh Douglas Hamilton, best known as a portrait painter. Fintan Cullen’s work on Hamilton has provoked a major reassessment of Hamilton’s importance in the history of Irish art, and Cullen’s analysis of the portrait of Richard Mansergh St George posing beside … Read more
Referring to events in and around Trinity College early on the Tuesday of Easter 1916, in a letter to William Hugh Blake conserved in the archives of Trinity College and dated 10 May 1916, Gerard Fitzgibbon writes: ‘One thing that terrified [us] was early on Tuesday morning, just after dawn. Three of their dispatch riders … Read more
In 1891 the RSAI initiated a photographic collection, which today consists of over 20,000 photographs, negatives and lantern-slides. Perhaps the best-known images are from a relatively small collection known as the ‘Darkest Dublin’ photographs. These were submitted to Dublin Corporation’s housing inquiry of November 1913 by John Cooke, who gave evidence on behalf of the … Read more
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Clontarf, Dublin. In spite of a sickly and bedridden childhood (which probably encouraged his reading and imagination), he later excelled in athletics at Trinity College, Dublin, from where he graduated with honours in mathematics. After a period as a civil servant at Dublin Castle and as a part-time theatre … Read more