Sir,—It is normal for national historians, in the narration of the history of their nation, to mention or recount, in due place, the intrusion, progress and influence of a foreign ideology or world-view. Irish national historians have done this, successively, in the cases of the arrival and impact of Christianity, the Anglo-Norman invasion, Continental Catholicism, … Read more
Sir,—Twice now Prof. Murphy has used a clipped quote from a poem of Tomás Rua Ó Suilleabháin to state that the poet wished to subject the Protestant community to ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Letters, HI 20.5, Sept./Oct. 2012, and HI 21.1, Jan./Feb. 2013). Prof. Murphy quotes the second-last line of the poem as evidence—‘go nglanfar cruinn as … Read more
Sir,—Are euphemisms helpful in the writing of history? I don’t think so. I’m referring to ‘“No Worse and No Better”’: Irish Women and Backstreet Abortions’, by Clíona Rattigan, about illegal abortions in Ireland and Northern Ireland from the 1920s to the 1940s (HI 21.1, Jan./Feb. 2013). The article makes more than one reference to women … Read more
There is, indeed, a necessity to tell the history of the Irish revolution ‘as it was’. Sadly, in his call for this, Desmond Fennell sets guidelines for a narrative that does no more than rationalise the version of the revolution’s history that was accepted for decades after the Civil War, only to dissipate on deeper … Read more
March 3 1998 Two friends, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant, were shot dead when LVF gunmen opened fire in the Railway Bar, Poyntzpass, Co. Armagh. 5 1953 Josef Stalin (74), Soviet dictator, died. 8 1973 The IRA mounted its first large bomb attack on central London at the Old Bailey. Two bombs … Read more