BBC2, RTÉ2, 2013–17 By Brian Hanley The BBC’s drama Peaky Blinders, a fifth series of which is planned for next year, has had a major popular impact since it was first broadcast in 2013. Set in the years after the Great War, and based loosely on a nineteenth-century Birmingham gang of the same name, it … Read more
Fasnet Films, directed by Lance Daly By Emily Mark-FitzGerald The much-anticipated Black ’47 has arrived on Irish screens, and it would seem that revenge for Skibbereen has been achieved at last. A visually stunning film set in Famine-ravaged Connemara in the titular year, Black ’47 blends the mythic narrative of the Western genre with a … Read more
The ‘third man’ in the case of British agent John Wyman and Garda Sergeant Patrick Crinnion. By Margaret Urwin and Niall Meehan On 1 December 1972 at 7.58 and 8.15pm, as the Irish Times reported, ‘Two [car] bombs in Dublin city centre killed two [CIÉ workers], injured 127 other people, and dramatically changed the course … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons In 2017, Irish Travellers were recognised as a distinct ethnic community within the state. Then-taoiseach Enda Kenny said: ‘Our Traveller community is an integral part of our society for over a millennium, with their own distinct identity—a people within our people’. Kenny’s reference to a millennium of Traveller society was a nod … Read more
James W. Upton’s unpublished silver jubilee history of the Gaelic Athletic Association. By Tony Keating and Mark Reynolds On 27 April 1932, the annual congress of the GAA approved a request by the association’s central council to advertise for expressions of interest from ‘suitable’ authors to write an official history of the GAA, to mark … Read more