In a recent issue (HI 19.2, March/April 2011) Stephanie Rains wrote about the ‘native’ village exhibitions that Ireland both played host to and provided subject-matter for from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Those exhibitions were an enlarged form of a practice that has a long history: the commercial display of living people as exotic … Read more
The Rothe collection—on show in last year’s exhibition at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, ‘Portraits and People: Art in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’—contains five significant interrelated artefacts. It has intriguing portraits of David Rothe and his nephew, Thomas, painted by some unknown, possibly Continental, artist who was in Kilkenny at the time of the Catholic Confederation. Their … Read more
Examples of monetary union include those between the city states of ancient Greece, the attempts to coordinate the currencies of nineteenth-century German states and the Latin Monetary Union that existed in continental Europe between 1866 and 1927. The United Kingdom, at that time including Ireland, decided to remain aloof from the Latin Monetary Union. The British maintained … Read more
The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. But as John Gibney explains, Irish Catholics had their own views on what had happened in 1641. When agents of the Irish … Read more
The first constitution of the new Irish state was innovative: it asserted the sovereignty of the people; it included a bill of rights, a guarantee of free elementary education, trial by jury and direct democracy (on the say-so of 75,000 electors). And it contained a provision allowing judicial review of legislation, which broke with the … Read more