In his painting Departure, Pádraic Reany depicts an apocalyptic human procession trudging across a blighted and bloodied potato field, the emaciated dead lying beneath the feet of the mourners, the living marching towards perpetual exile on a famine ship. The anger of the piece encapsulates the mood of the inaugural exhibition of the newly opened … Read more
In the early years of the twentieth century the common ‘marching songs’ for nationalists were T.D. Sullivan’s God Save Ireland and Thomas Davis’s A Nation Once Again, both of which were identified with the Irish Parliamentary Party. By 1907 Peadar Kearney (Peadar Ó Cearnaigh) wanted to write something more rousing and original. Along with … Read more
The French historian François Simiand once admonished historians not to ‘forecast the weather from your back garden’, warning against the tendency to seek for explanations in the local and immediate environment and the analysis of internal processes. This may be particularly true when it comes to small countries buffeted by events over which they have … Read more
Bill Kissane has long established himself as an innovative authority on modern Irish political and constitutional history. (As he points out, the two are not necessarily the same.) Nobody reading his nuanced The politics of the Irish Civil War will ever again view that conflict, pace Tom Garvin, as a Manichean struggle between small-d democrats … Read more
The Irish Bulletin was a fact-sheet published by the Dáil government between 1919 and 1921 and circulated to opinion-formers outside Ireland to publicise repressive actions of Crown forces directed by the Dublin Castle administration. It is generally acknowledged as a very professional production which greatly assisted the Dáil government’s cause. The Bulletin is unquestionably … Read more