First the good news: Germany has finally managed to repay all the reparations owing from the First World War, just over 90 years after it ended. The defeated nation was handed a bill of 132 billion gold marks (about €300 billion in today’s money) by the Allies to compensate for damage caused during the war. … Read more
Bloody Sunday began with the attacks of Michael Collins’s ‘squad’ upon the British intelligence network in Dublin, and specifically the so-called ‘Cairo Gang’. These were the ‘particular ones’ whom Collins felt were bringing British intelligence closer and closer to the heart of the republican movement. By the end of the day, news of the deaths … Read more
On 23 May 1877 the US State Department informed all its consular officials that former president Ulysses S. Grant had departed Philadelphia on 17 May for Liverpool. Grant, a Civil War hero, had spent two terms (1869–77) in office and presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in US history. After leaving the White … Read more
This is not the first time, argues Bill Kissane, that an economic crisis in Ireland has been seen as a crisis of the political system, nor the first time that Irish people have had to consider how democracy can be organised under conditions of global capitalism. As Ireland goes through its ‘second crisis of liberalism’, … Read more