By Fiona Fitzsimons The Public Health (Ireland) Act, 1878, gave power to local authorities to establish mortuaries, and authorised any justice to order the removal of dead bodies to a mortuary. Where death was sudden, violent or unexplained, the body could be brought to a morgue for post-mortem examination before burial. Depending on the result, … Read more
By high summer of 1918, German forces on the Western Front had been fought to a standstill. Having expended their reserves in a series of offensives collectively known as the Kaiserschlacht (‘Kaiser’s Battle’), the high command of the German Army nervously awaited the inevitable Allied counterstrokes. By Mark Phelan The Second Battle of the Marne … Read more
In R.M. Fox’s collection of biographical essays Rebel Irishwomen (1935), included alongside Maud Gonne MacBride, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Constance Markievicz is an obscure London-born nurse, Dora Maguire. Who was she and what did she achieve during her short life? By James Curry An unlikely Irish republican and labour activist, Theodora Agnes Eleanor Maguire was born … Read more
In the peaceful setting of St Michael’s churchyard in Abergele in north Wales, just off the busy A55 road, there is a memorial to the 33 victims of a horrific railway accident who were buried in a mass grave there in August 1868. It was the worst rail disaster up to then, and the graphic … Read more
What can Muirchú’s Life of St Patrick (c. 688) tell us about the political history of late fifth-century Ulster, and in particular the hostile relationship between the Uí Néill and their allies the Airthir, a tribe of the Airgialla, and the Ulaid, mentioned at the close of Muirchú’s Life? Does it provide any clues to … Read more