Features

‘Spreading VD all over Connacht’: reproductive rights and wrongs in 1970s Galway

While the social climate in 1970s urban Ireland was favourable for proponents of contraception, there were obstacles, and activism in the cause might have consequences for the individuals concerned. Galway activists—members more often of feminist-influenced socialist parties than of specifically feminist groups—therefore tended to occupy positions that gave some immunity to social pressure, pressure that … Read more

The rise and fall of local democracy

The term ‘municipal revolution’ was coined by Sidney and Beatrix Webb to describe the nineteenth-century transformation of borough corporations in England and Wales, and was first applied to Ireland by the present author in 2010. The Municipal Revolution in Ireland has been overlooked for a number of reasons. One is that Irish nationalism imagined the … Read more

‘The loveliest thing ever made by an Irishman’: Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window

Harry Clarke was the leading stained glass artist of his day. Mainly working on churches, most notably UCC’s Honan Chapel, he was also well known as a book illustrator. After W.T. Cosgrave, president of the Irish government, opened an exhibition in his Studios in North Frederick Street in 1925, Clarke was approached in 1926 to … Read more

Colleens, cottages and kraals:the politics of ‘native’ village exhibitions

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fake ‘native’ villages—often African but also sometimes Far Eastern—were hugely popular attractions throughout Europe and America at great exhibitions or fairs. They typically took the form of village buildings complete with ‘villagers’ who lived on the site, and metropolitan audiences could wander around watching the ‘villagers’ go … Read more

Ireland in the ‘age of improvement’

Thomas Kearney’s 1817 map of the Levinge estate in Knockdrin, Co. Westmeath, is a particularly fine example of an early nineteenth-century survey of an improving landlord’s estate during the twilight era of landlord paternalism in Ireland. So-called ‘improving landlords’ were committed to implementing the latest scientific developments to modernise their estates in terms of animal … Read more