The press release for Donnacha Ó Beacháin’s pithily titled Destiny of the Soldiers: Fianna Fáil, Irish Republicanism and the IRA, 1926–1973 (Gill & Macmillan, 538pp, €29.99/£26.99, ISBN 9780717147632) claims that it ‘is the first detailed examination of the links between the natural party of Irish government and militant republicanism’. But as the electorate waits in … Read more
One of the forgotten consequences of the partition of Ireland in 1920 is that a significant strand of nationalism was left isolated and ignored. In the South the official version of the national story underplayed the Northern Protestant involvement, and to be a Northern Protestant woman meant being ignored altogether. That is why this exhibition … Read more
FK: A homecoming RTÉ1, 25 October 2010 JFK: The making of modern politics BBC2, 21 November 2010 In June 1963 John F. Kennedy became the first US president to pay an official state visit to the Republic of Ireland. Other presidents have done so since, but none to the same effect. Kennedy’s four-day visit was … Read more
On 26 July 1914 the Asgard, the yacht of Erskine Childers, then a famous writer, sailed into Howth with 900 Mauser rifles, which were quickly unloaded and distributed to waiting Volunteers and boys of Fianna Éireann. This followed the very successful landing in April by the Ulster Volunteer Force of 35,000 German, Italian and Austrian … Read more
F.S.L. Lyons argued in Ireland since the Famine (1971) that wartime neutrality led to Ireland’s ‘almost total isolation from the rest of mankind’. Philosophically, his ‘Plato’s cave’ metaphor captured a belief in Ireland’s moral failure by refusing to join a just war against Nazi Germany. Ireland, Lyons felt, instead looked inwards, absorbed by its own … Read more