While some applicants may have exaggerated their service, a system of checks and balances allowed statements to be verified and tested. BY ROBERT MCEVOY ‘Doherty: If I could get a few shillings … a pension … Referee: The only thing that might happen to you is to be prosecuted for having sent in a false … Read more
Privilege and change in the Catholic middle class. BY COLUM KENNY One was a controversial Jesuit psychologist who left the priesthood and married but later recanted. One was a surgeon who served in the British Army but then canvassed for Sinn Féin. And the third joined the new Electricity Supply Board, his son becoming architect … Read more
BY FIONA FITZSIMONS In the nineteenth century, immigration changed the demographics of the United States and saw the establishment of significant immigrant communities of Irish, Germans, Chinese, Italians and Eastern Europeans. In 1882 the US Congress passed a series of laws to regulate immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted the legal immigration of Chinese … Read more
The IRA attack on Fenit coastguard station and RIC barracks in June 1920. BY DAIRE BRUNICARDI In most of the many accounts and histories of the Irish War of Independence very little, if any, mention is made of the navy. The navy, the ‘silent service’, then, as now, was ‘out of sight, out of mind’, … Read more
The British still seem intent on burying evidence of the grim deeds done in defence of their empire. BY PÁDRAIG ÓG Ó RUAIRC Four months after the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement the Gardaí recovered the remains of an informer who had been executed by the IRA and secretly buried in a bog. … Read more