BY TONY CANAVAN Did Vikings bring leprosy to Ireland? In years past, little was known about how leprosy came to medieval Ireland, but thanks to research done by Queen’s University, Belfast, the University of Surrey and the University of Southampton we may now have an answer: Vikings. The study focused on five cases of probable … Read more
BY AODHÁN CREALEY MAY 11/1917 Belfast-born Dr David Walker (80), surgeon, naturalist and photographer on Captain F.L. McClintock’s expedition to the Arctic (1857–9) which discovered the remains of Sir John Franklin and his crew, died in Portland, Oregon. Though barely twenty years old at the time and with no nautical experience, Walker acquitted … Read more
Exhibition, 9 May–30 August 2019, RIA, Dawson Street, Dublin. Amidst the catastrophic horrors of Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–50 a few bright examples of selfless humanitarianism shine through. One of these, little remembered in Ireland, was the Polish émigré Paul Edmund Strzelecki, known to many of his contemporaries simply as ‘the Count’. Arriving in Ireland … Read more
Exhibition, Linen Hall Library, Belfast, until 31 May 2019, www.makingthefuture.eu. For most of history, Anonymous was a woman’, wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay titled A room of one’s own. A new women’s history exhibition curated by the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, and supported by the EU’s PEACE IV Programme, charts a fascinating and decisive … Read more