During the Emergency (1939–45) the Irish Army lacked much of the essential equipment needed to defend Ireland, and naturally it was not possible to import armoured vehicles from abroad. To overcome this, Major J.V. Lawless of the Cavalry Corps designed a number of armoured cars based on various truck chassis that were then built in … Read more
The Congo—later known as Zaire, but now officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo—was colonised from 1878 at the personal behest of King Leopold of Belgium. By the early twentieth century, reports—including one by Roger Casement, then a British diplomat and later a key figure in the 1916 Rising—exposed the savage exploitation of its people … Read more
Kilmainham Gaol, now long established as a national monument, is a unique resource in the study of Irish history. Every year many thousands of visitors make their way there, most often as a result of the effusive recommendation of inhabitants of the capital city, to absorb something of Irish social, penal and political history in … Read more
One hundred years ago, on the night of Saturday 13 August 1910, three passengers travelling from New York disembarked from the White Star Line’s steamer Baltic at what was then called Queenstown, now Cobh, with a device that was revolutionising how people viewed the world: the cinematograph or cine-camera. This device had existed for fifteen … Read more
Family and early years Ysidro Francis Edgeworth’s grandfather, Richard, was a utilitarian, following the philosopher Bentham in believing that sensory pleasure and pain are everything and that morally correct actions maximise a population’s happiness, defined as aggregate pleasure minus pain. The moral code should be deduced from this maximisation principle and not from ‘truths’ … Read more