While many Irishmen were transported to Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen’s Land, either as ordinary criminals or as political offenders during the first half of the nineteenth century, some Irishmen have chosen to settle there. One such was Edmund Dwyer Gray Jr, who rose to be premier of the state of Tasmania for a period of … Read more
The craniology collection in Trinity College, Dublin By Miguel DeArce and René Gapert The journal Nature recently published a colour map of the human brain (opposite page), identifying 100 brain regions with their distinctive functions. This brought to our mind other, older, nineteenth-century ‘phrenological heads’ that can be sourced from antiquarians throughout Europe (opposite page). … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons After 1649 and continuing until 1853, many convicted felons from Ireland were transported overseas to serve their sentences as indentured servants. Initially transportation was to the thirteen colonies in North America, and to a lesser extent to the island colonies in the British Caribbean. By the early eighteenth century the Caribbean ‘sugar … Read more
Reviewed by Joe Cully Jackie Uí Chionna, He was Galway: Máirtín Mór McDonogh, 1860–1934 (Open Air/Four Courts Press, €19.95 pb, 304pp, ISBN 9781846826252). Mick Moloney, Across the western ocean: songs of leaving and arriving (Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, €17.95 pb including CD, 56pp, ISBN 9780997837438). Angela Bourke, Voices underfoot: memory, forgetting, and oral verbal … Read more
Sir,—Eoin Gill’s thought-provoking article (HI 24.5, Sept./Oct. 2016, Platform) asks: ‘Has science also been airbrushed out of Irish history?’. A similar concern was part of the decision by the minister for finance and the Central Bank to issue a series of silver proof coins celebrating ‘Irish Science and Invention’. Coins celebrating Ernest Walton (2016) and … Read more