Lone crusader: David Thornley and the intellectuals Edward Thornley (Ashfield Press, €21.50) ISBN 9789068798 The premature death of David Thornley in June 1978 deprived Ireland of a significant intellectual best known for his current affairs work on RTÉ’s Seven Days programme and as a Labour TD for Dublin North-West from 1969 to 1977. Unseated … Read more
The men will talk to me: Kerry interviews by Ernie O’Malley Cormac K.H. O’Malley and Tim Horgan (eds) (Mercier Press, €19.99) ISBN 9781856359528 The title of this collection conveys the point that, as a highly respected IRA veteran, Ernie O’Malley had unique access to his former comrades when in the late 1940s and early … Read more
The factory opened its Dublin operation in 1851, and by 1911 it employed approximately 3,000 workers. George Jacob, chairman from 1902 to 1931, is remembered in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as a ‘benevolent employer in the Quaker tradition’ who was ‘ahead of his time with employee-focused reforms’. Yet unlike George Cadbury or Arthur Rowntree … Read more
The centenary of the revolutionary decade will focus public attention as never before on the events that led to partition and independence. Given the current context—relative stability in the North, economic crisis and political disenchantment in the South—there is potential for a more honest engagement with this formative period than in previous major anniversaries. But … Read more
The republican trade unionist and ITGWU organiser P.T. Daly alleged that the low wages paid to the female employees at Jacob’s factory were ‘the cause of driving many of them onto the streets as prostitutes’. The Dublin Metropolitan Police estimated in 1901 that while female prostitution was decreasing there were still an estimated 1,677 women … Read more