Issue 5 (Sept/Oct 2010)

High Treason: passion and politics

In recent months, coordinated public statements concerning Ireland’s looming decade of commemoration, uttered by Taoiseach Brian Cowen and British Prime Minister David Cameron, have referred to the need to acknowledge a ‘shared history’. After a century of conflict and compromise the ‘temporary’ solution of partition has become a fixture, and with it contradictory and oppositional … Read more

‘Practising history without a licence’:Peter Berresford Ellis and popular history

Before A history of the Irish working class, Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian colonisation of Ireland (1975) and The Boyne Water (1976), Peter Berresford Ellis had published books on the histories of Wales and Scotland. In more recent years his historical work has focused on the ancient Celtic peoples—ancestors of the Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, … Read more

Bloody Sunday: cock-up or conspiracy?

The most illuminating evidence that we have of high-level military decision-making in relation to Bloody Sunday is contained in a series of interviews conducted in 1983 and 1984 by Desmond Hamill for a book that he was writing about the British Army in Northern Ireland. Hamill’s interviews with the key military figures involved were conducted … Read more