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James W. Upton’s unpublished silver jubilee history of the Gaelic Athletic Association.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
By Donna Gilligan The use of the postcard as a medium of mass communication was embraced by the international women’s suffrage movement, which recognised it as a cheap and effective means of propaganda. Women’s suffrage was also a postcard theme used frequently by commercial publishers, who commonly produced designs that showed suffrage campaigners in … Read more
Coach House, Dublin Castle, www.artandthegreathunger.org Until the end of June 2018 By Tony Canavan ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger’ is the world’s largest collection of art relating to the Great Famine. Its permanent home is in Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. (Readers may remember that it featured in a previous … Read more
Women’s opposition to the 1937 Constitution. By Joyce Padbury The women’s campaign against the 1937 Constitution was a short and, in the end, unsuccessful intervention in a major political debate, though it did initially achieve amendments to some provisions of the draft document. The campaign is worth remembering as a lively articulation of feminist opinion … Read more