WHAT ARE SURELY AMONGST THE LONGEST CONTINUOUS TEXTS WRITTEN IN OLD IRISH ARE THE RELIGIOUS POEMS OF BLATHMAC, SON OF CÚ BRETTAN. BUT WERE HIS SOURCES ONLY LITERARY? By Peter Harbison The poems of Blathmac, son of Cú Brettan, were discovered in a seventeenth-century manuscript (NLI G.50) by Nessa Ní Shéaghdha in 1953, and largely … Read more
By Jason Burke In the preface of his 1922 book The history of the 36th(Ulster) Division, Cyril Falls made a noteworthy prediction: ‘A hundred years hence, men will be delving into our records of the late war. Soldiers will be studying the lessons of its battles. But yet a greater number of seekers will be … Read more
Sir,—I commence by quoting John Gibney (‘What about Island Magee? Another version of the 1641 Rebellion’, HI 21.1, Jan./Feb. 2013, pp 22–5): ‘Irish Catholics had their own views on what happened in 1641’. Can I assume that the reason Irish Catholics have their ‘own views’ about 1641 is because Irish Catholic educators who taught them … Read more
Sir,—Your article ‘The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: servants or slaves?’ (HI 24.2, March/April 2016)insiststhat there is an urgent need to refute a pervasive belief that Cromwellian-era Irish prisonersofwar and indentured servants experienced the same brutality as African slaves in the plantation societies of the British West Indies. In reality, those who advance this argument with … Read more
Sir,—This article in your March/April issue (HI 24.2, 2016) asked more questions than it answered and contradicted itself on many occasions. I understand that the term ‘indentured servitude’ relates to individuals who signed a contract and agreed to a certain number of years of servitude. This was in exchange for passage across the Atlantic, and … Read more