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
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