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
Welcome to this special issue marking the 850th anniversary of the English invasion. Yes, English, as persuasively argued (pp 16–17) by Seán Duffy, who, along with his Trinity College colleague Peter Crooks, commissioned the bulk of the copy. That’s what the invaders called themselves and all were subjects of the king of England. Of course, … Read more