Aspiring writers are taught that it is always good to start in a way that grabs a reader’s attention, such as: ‘The history of Northern Ireland in the last four hundred years has been the history of a divided society, where an habitual belief in the concept of violence as a first rather than a … Read more
A garrulous, lightning-witted, talent-squandering, hard-drinking ‘character’, Brendan Behan embodied a certain Anglo-American stereotype of an ‘Irish writer’ to the hilt. Dead at the age of 41, his drinking was, as his one-time friend Anthony Cronin would say, no laughing matter, and yet it is sometimes hard not to laugh. From 1956 onwards, when Joan Littlewood’s … Read more
The Starry Plough flag has been in the possession of the National Museum (NMI) since 1956 and has recently been conserved in commemoration of the centenaries of the foundation of the Labour Party (1912), the Dublin Lockout (1913) and the Easter Rising (1916). Funding was provided by individual contributions from members of the Labour Party. … Read more
Christina Jessop was born in Dublin in 1878 and lived there until 1908, when she married Jack Wilson and moved with him to Cobh (then Queenstown), Co. Cork. From 1903 to 1908 she collected c. 300 picture postcards sent to her by relatives, friends and acquaintances from places as varied as London, Paris, Alaska, Switzerland … Read more
The first decade of the twentieth century saw the establishment of women’s suffrage societies in nearly every major town and city in the British Isles. These organisations shared the same objective but utilised vastly different means to achieve it. The movement was split between two broad camps: militant and non-militant. The London-based National Union of … Read more