Thady McMahon, Eugene O’Curry and singing beggars in mid-nineteenth-century Dublin. By Ciarán McCabe In November 1852 a 60-year-old blind beggar named Thady McMahon was arrested and detained in Dublin city for ‘being a wandering vagrant’. With three or four previous convictions ‘for vagrancy’, McMahon was sentenced before the magistrates at the Capel Street Police Office … Read more
Loose Horse Productions RTÉ 1, 14 December 2018 By John Gibney On 14 December 1918 a UK-wide general election took place in Britain and Ireland, and on 14 December 2018 RTÉ covered it. The first such election since 1910 was held within weeks of the armistice that ended hostilities in the First World War and … Read more
Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, and the failure of plantation in Elizabethan Ulster, c. 1573–6. By David Heffernan Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, was a paradoxical figure. When he died in Dublin on 22 September 1576 at the age of just 37 he was surrounded by some of the leading political figures of … Read more
On the challenges of writing (yet another) biography of ‘the Chief’. By David McCullagh In 2010, shortly after the publication of my biography of John A. Costello, I was asked by an interviewer about my choice of subject. I airily replied that, while little had been written about Costello, ‘the last thing the world needs … Read more
By Siobhán Ryan In 1813 the Sligo Grand Jury appointed three commissioners to supervise the provision of a new county gaol. A site comprising almost seven acres in Abbeyquarter North, on the eastern fringes of Sligo town, was selected for a complex intended to hold up to 160 inmates. The estimated cost of the gaol … Read more