Because Queen Victoria’s invitation to William Ewart Gladstone to form his first administration in 1868 followed a period of Fenian violence, his response to this was ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’. There are lessons for the EU authorities in how he went about it. In both cases, property rights are the crucial factor. Irish … Read more
There are a number of ironies for Ireland in this whole story, including: 1. The impact of refrigeration The foundation of the Land League and the arrival of the first cargo of refrigerated meat in England from Australia both took place in the same year, 1879. Gladstone’s initiative led to ownership of most of the … Read more
Between December 1980 and April 1981, western powers had good reason to fear that the Soviet Union was about to intervene in Poland, either in the form of a unilateral invasion or in conjunction with the Polish army, in order to suppress the social unrest that had been occasioned by the rise of the trade … Read more
On 4 December 1980 a secret message was conveyed to the CIA by Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a high-level informant within the Polish general staff, to the effect that fifteen divisions of the USSR (with support from Czechoslovak and East German units) were scheduled to invade Poland on the eighth of the month. Kukliński had been … Read more
The massive industrial unrest in Poland in August 1980, centred on the famous strike in the Gdańsk shipyard, had led to the creation of Solidarność, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Led by the charismatic Lech Wałęsa, the union had expanded rapidly, to a point where, by late 1980, it could count … Read more